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Time Line

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In many cases, when writing fiction, a writer does not have to be concerned, particularly, about the sequence of events.  One simply has to tell the story in time order, and all will be well.  Sometimes an author will want to interrupt the sequence of events.  For example, a flash-back can be inserted later in the story, and as long as the reader understands that the events refer to an earlier point in time, and they make sense  in that context, it should be fine.  Even a flash-forward into the future is possible.  Fishing in Foreign Seas begins with a prologue which is set it the future, and in it, Elena, the purported author and the daughter of the key characters in the book explains how she came to write the story, much of which is linked to the quite recent past.  The novel ends with an epilogue in which Elena tells the reader what happened to her parents and siblings after the main story concludes.

My two thrillers which will be published soon did not present me with a time line problem.  In each case the story unfolds largely in time sequence.  In Efraim’s Eye, the scene shifts back and forth between Efraim’s activities in preparing the explosives, and the other two (good guy) characters, Paul and Naomi, who will discover his planned attack.  The two streams run parallel and converge at the end.  Efraim has two dreams which act as flash-backs and help the reader understand his character and what motivates him.

The Iranian Scorpion has a somewhat similar structure, which  focuses primarily on Robert’s experiences in Afghanistan and Iran as he learns the means by which opium is converted to heroin and how it is exported through Iran to the US.  Toward the end of the story, a parallel stream opens in which Robert’s father, a retired US Army general, is assigned as a UN weapons inspector in Iran, and becomes involved in attempt to avenge his son’s apparent execution by the Iranians.

For these two novels, it was not difficult to keep the events in a credible sequence.

Apart from the prologue and epilogue, Fishing in Foreign Seas follows a sequential time line.  There are two aspects of the story that required attention to the sequence of events.  First, there are linkages to real events: the  first Gulf War in which Jamie was injured and decorated, and the evolution of the US power generation industry at the  beginning of this century.  Secondly, there is the growth of Jamie’s and Caterina’s children during the course of the story.  One has to be careful that a child who can be no more than six is not behaving like a ten-year-old.

Sin & Contrition had some of  the same challenges at Fishing in Foreign Seas: linkages to real events, and keeping the behaviour of the various children consistent with their ages.  In terms of linkages to real events, for example, LaMarr, as a Marine recruit, fought in Vietnam, and his  subsequent experiences in war zones have to match reality.  There is also the complication in Sin & Contrition that the novel is not structured on a simple time-sequenced basis.  Each chapter deals with a particular sin, and characters move in an out of the story depending on whether or not they are involved in a  that particular sin.  In a broad sense,  however, the characters age from 13 to 62 as the novel  progresses.

The novel that I am currently working on is the (fictional) autobiography of a man who believes he hears the voices of surrogates for God and the devil.  Gradually, he develops a philosophy about life as he experiences great joy and terrible grief.  For the first time, I’ve had to write down a sequential time line as part of my ‘blue print’ for the novel.  This blue print lists key milestones so that even when an event is reported out of sequence (as it might be when one is recalling his life’s events) the events – taken in their overall context – make sense.  Keeping the ages of the characters consistent, tying in real external events, and maintaining order in what might otherwise seem chaotic is my latest challenge.

 

Best First Lines from Novels

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American Book Review has recently published the following list of 100 ‘Best First Lines from Novels’.  ABR “specializes in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and women’s presses. . . . it offers a unique model for reviewing books, one edited by writers themselves in an effort to reproduce the interest they took in their peers’ works of fiction, poetry, and criticism.”

My reaction is that this is quite an interesting list.  I don’t parfticularly like long first lines ( like numbers 19, 23, 46, 56. 70, 84, 87, 91. 95) because I feel that a first line should be punchy.  If it’s not punchy, it may leave the  reader with the impression that the novel will be long-winded and complex.

In my opinion, the first line has several vital functions.  It should set the stage for what is to follow.  It should introduce an idea, a character or a scene, and it should catch the reader’s attention, motivating her/him to read more.

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn’t. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.  —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)

58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.  —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.  —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.  —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)

97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

The first lines from my novels are:

“When my father retired as President, Ceemans America last year, he and my mother moved to Sicily.”  (Fishing in Foreign Seas)

‘”It’s hard to tell’, LaMarr thought, ‘what angle I should fire the shot.” (Sin & Contrition)

“Efraim did not consider himself to be a terrorist.” (Efraim’s Eye)

““So, I remind you of your father’s girlfriend?” Kate inquired with one eyebrow arched provocatively.”  (The Iranian Scorpion – soon to be published)

With benefit of hindsight, I think that the first line of Fishing in Foreign Seas is lacking in ‘grab the reader attention’.

What are your thoughts on any of the above first lines?

The Writer’s Voice

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On Dave Hood’s blog (http://davehood59.wordpress.com), I found an interesting piece about the narrative voice and the writer’s voice.  I quote from it as follows:

“What is the narrative voice? It is the quality of the narrative, whether the story is told in the first-person or the third-person.  It is how the writer chooses to tell the story–casually, seriously, humorously, and so forth. The narrative voice (may) belong to a character within the story, such as the protagonist.  Or when the story is told in the third-person, the narrative voice will belong to an unknown character, someone who is not a participant in the story.

The narrative voice is an extension of the writer’s voice. The writer’s voice consists of many elements, including style and tone. But the writer’s (voice) is created by many other factors, such as socioeconomic background, education, belief system, values, writing experience, and so forth.

How does the aspiring writer acquire his/her own voice? It takes time to create a voice. It begins by developing an original style. From style, the writer needs to write and gain experience. Over time, the writer’s voice emerges. It is a process.

To help develop a unique voice, the aspiring writer can do the following:

  1. Learn to write well. Learn the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. And then learn when to break these rules.
  2. Expand his/her vocabulary. The writer must use the dictionary to learn the meaning of unfamiliar words. The writer should also use a thesaurus to find similar words with different shades of meaning.
  3. Read widely and deeply. The writer ought to read fiction by the great writers. The writer also needs to read nonfiction, like biographies, and person essays. By doing this, the writer can learn how the masters constructed memorable fiction.
  4. Analyze the styles of great writers, such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell. Analysis teaches the writer how to create setting, plot, characters, and use other literary devices.
  5. Experiment with different writing styles, such as word choice and syntax. Only through practice and experience will the aspiring writer develop a unique style.
  6. Learn the element of fiction and use them. (Plot, setting, character, conflict, and so forth.)
  7. Learn the literary techniques and use them. (Imagery, symbolism, allusion, and figures of speech, such as simile, metaphor, and personification.)
  8. Make writing a lifestyle choice. The aspiring writer must write every day. Only by writing on a regular basis will the writer develop his/her unique voice.
  9. Write in a way that comes naturally. The writer needs to use words and phrases that are his/her own. Imitation is (not) acceptable.
  10. The writer also needs to place himself/herself in the background. To do this, the writer needs to write in a way that draws the reader to the sense and style of the writing, rather than to the tone and temper of the writer.
  11.  Avoid using a breezy manner. The breezy style is a work of an egocentric, the writer who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of interest and ought to be written on the page. Instead, the writer needs to make every word count, each word should move the story forward, and each word needs to have a purpose.”

I think that all of this is good advice, except for number 10, above.  I am currently writing a fictional biography (not autobiographical) in the first person.  The principal character is I, Henry Lawson.  Am I Henry Lawson?  No, but, inevitably, I the writer, will influence the character of Henry Lawson.

I very much agree with number 11, above: “make every word count, each word should move the story forward, and each word should have a purpose”.

Rules for Writers

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The Guardian newspaper (in the UK) ran a feature in which they asked ‘some of the most esteemed contemporary authors’  for the ten golden rules they bring to their writing practice.  Here are some of the rules with which I agree or disagree, the name of the author, and my reasons:

Agree:

  • “When I’m deep inside a story, ­living it as I write, I honestly don’t know what will happen. I try not to dictate it, not to play God.”  (Michael Morpurgo).  For me this works very well, and the key is to ‘live it as I write’.  The result, I believe, is a more genuine product.
  • “The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.”  (Will Self)  This is self-evidently quite true.
  • “Respect the way characters may change once they’ve got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.”  (Rose Tremain).  This is good advice.  A character may change for reasons that haven’t yet been made clear.  I think it’s important to recognise this, go back and add the clarifications.
  • “In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.”  (Rose Tremain)  When I have formed a vague plan as to the ending, I find that there is a far better one that arrives by evolution.
  • “Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.”  (Margaret Atwood)  This is  very important, and I agree that the best test is whether what I’ve written holds my own attention.
  • ” If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.”  (Margaret Atwood)  This may seem like a trivial point, but before I started doing this I would – for various reasons – lose several hour’s work.  Now, I religiously click on the ‘Save As’ button to send it to my memory stick, as well as my hard disc.
  • “Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It’s worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. ”  (Sarah Waters)  This makes a lot of sense to me.  I like to watch good films critically thinking, ‘how could this be  improved?’  Spotting ‘compelling devices’ and making use of them in one’s own work is also good advice.

Disagree:

  • “Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.”  (Zadie Smith)  This makes no sense to me.  Why would a writer want to deprive himself of a really useful tool?  I use the internet, for example, to find the names and locations of real places, to discover ethnic habits and customs, to find out how a character would get from place A to place B (if it’s important).  The reason I do this is to make my fiction as realistic as possible.  One has to be careful not to get distracted, but once I find the information I’m seeking, I return immediately to the writing.
  • “Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.  (Elmore Leonard)  For me, the repetition of the verb ‘said’ would  be  boring.  The writer has to stick her nose in; after all, it’s her story.  Use of a different verb, other than ‘said’, can characterise the feelings of the speaker.
  • “Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”.”  (Elmore Leonard)  I tend to agree that it is best not to mix ‘said’ with and adverb; it is better to select a more expressive verb.  (See the comment above.)  But I don’t agree that the use of adverbs is a mortal sin.  Adverbs are part of the English language (and every other language, as far as I know).  Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – the best available verb on its own doesn’t adequately express the situation.  Then, I’ll use an adverb.
  • “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.”  (Elmore Leonard)  I agree with the point about not bringing the flow of a story to a standstill.  But I will often begin a new scene – before any action takes place – to life with a brief, clear description.  I think it’s sometimes important to prompt the reader’s imagination. 

What does it take to be a writer?

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I don’t pretend  to have all the answers to this question, and it is a question I often think about.  But, I suppose it’s fair to say that I’m learning about what it takes, and trying to build the skills that I’m lacking.  Having said this, let me give you my current thinking about writing skills.

First of all, a writer has to be fluent in the language in which s/he is writing.  In my opinion, an extensive vocabulary and a thorough understanding of the rules of grammar and syntax are essential.  Vocabulary is important so that the writer can select the words that convey just the right nuance of what she is trying to say.  Because good writing is literature, making grammatical errors can make the author seem illiterate.  And if grammar is about the use of words and phrases, syntax, which is about the structure of sentences, is also very important.  Of course, the rules of grammar and syntax can vary from language to language.  In German, for example, the verb is often placed at the end of a sentence, after the subject and object.

It isn’t just about writing in one’s mother tongue.  For my two step daughters, their mother tongue is Italian, but from the ages of 7 and 9 they have been immersed in English: at school, with their friends, and their step-father.  Now, they are both totally fluent in English, and their mother says that their Italian vocabulary and grammar has not kept up.  So, if they ever decide to write, they will probably do so in English.

So much for the universal requirement to be a writer.  If one is  going to be a writer of fiction, several other skills become important: creativity and voice.  Creativity is about the ability to present interesting and different characters and situations.  Having a ‘fertile imagination’ would be a part of the creative skill, but, as I’ve said in other posts, the characters and situations should be interesting and different, but they should also be credible.  If they are not credible, the writer will lose the interest of her readers.  If the situations and characters are not interesting and different, they may well be just boring!  Voice is about the projection of the characters and situations onto the page.  It’s about the use of language to make them come alive.  Part of voice is the ability to project feelings, emotions, personalities and values: subtley but clearly.  Voice is also about being a good story-teller, about setting the scene so that it seems real to the reader, and about making the reader reluctant to put the book down.

As our publishers are constantly reminding us, being successful as a writer of fiction is about more than language skills and writing techniques.  It is also about marketing.  Successful writers have niches that they serve.  J K Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, specialised in imaginative books for young people.  It will be interesting to see how she does in writing adult fiction.  The relationship between the writer and his niche is essentially a marketing relationship.  The writer understands that niche market sector, and he presents a brand that the market sector comes to know and love.  The author, whenever s/he is interviewed or appears before live media, is always selling her brand to her market sector.  (So a successful writer is also a good salesman.)

Finally, there is that illusive but all-important commodity: luck.  It’s about meeting the right person at the right time.  That chance meeting (all else being equal) can make the difference between a best seller and an also-ran!

Sentences

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An article in today’s The Daily Telegraph caught my eye.  On page 5, the caption is “The genius of Shakespeare is in grammar, not the words.”  It goes on to say:

“For centuries, Shakespeare has been celebrated not just for his genius as a playwright but for creating many of the most commonly used words and phrases.
But an academic has challenged the view of Shakespeare as the father of modern language, claiming that he was no more inventive with words than his contemporaries”

Jonathan Hope, from Strathclyde University, compared Shakespeare’s work with that of Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe.  These men were, in proportion to the volumes of their work, responsible for inventing just as many new words.  But, according to Mr. Hope, Shakespeare reinvented grammar, breaking away from the conformity of traditional rules.

“Mr. Hope highlighted a passage from Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4, where Shakespeare plays with the normal rules of English that demand a sentence is structured in the order of subject, verb, object.  In the scene the queen says to her son: ‘Hamlet, thou has thy father much offended.’  Mr. Hope explained: ‘In present day English we would expect, ‘Thou hast much offended thy father, Hamlet’.

As you may know, other languages don’t follow this subject, verb, object convention.  In German, for example, the verb is often placed at the end of the sentence.  So in German, it might be, ‘Thou, Hamlet, thy father hast much offended.’  To me, this sentence seems a bit awkward, because it’s not immediately clear who is the subject and who is the object.

Nevertheless, I am very much in favour of creating different sentence structures to make it interesting for the reader.  But more importantly, different structures can convey sightly different meanings by emphasizing one part of a sentence over another.

Let  me give some examples:

  • “Handsome John passionately kissed pretty Mary and held her hand in the dining room.”  (conventional, except that the prepositional phrase at the end kind of dangles)
  • “In the dining room, pretty Mary was passionately kissed by handsome John, who held her hand.”  (in this version, Mary and the dining room assume more importance)
  • “Having passionately kissed pretty Mary in the dining room, handsome John held her hand.” (here, that passionate kiss takes centre stage.)
  • “Having held her hand in the dining room, handsome John passionately kissed pretty Mary.” (here, that hand holding seems most important.)
  • “Pretty Mary was passionately kissed by handsome John, who held her hand in the dining room.” (pretty Mary is the key character here.)
  • “John, who was handsome, passionately kissed pretty Mary and held her hand in the dining room.” (John’s looks get extra emphasis.)
  • and so on

In my opinion, it can make boring reading if one sentence after another follows the subject, verb, object format.  Much more interesting to throw in prepositional clauses, adverb clauses, adjective clauses, and participial phrases (using a verb ending in ing, for example).