The Story's Teller

 From Writer's Digest: Who Is Telling the Story?

This way of getting at fiction puts a great onus on the question: Who is telling the story? And for a lot of early writers (I see this in retrospect of my own early work and also in the work of students) if the point-of-view is not first-person, little consideration is given to who the narrator is. It goes hand in hand with this atrophied understanding of the third-person narrator I see cropping up in class sometimes. It is easy because of film and television maybe, and the penchant for beginning writers to write very script-like work is good evidence, but all of our joy as a reader is delivered to us by an entity, and accessing this entity opens up a world of possibility. Perhaps they are a narrator who is talking to an imagined reader in an imagined room, describing the story as a member of its periphery (I think of Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation as a good example); or perhaps they are very calm and distanced and practically a stenographer of the tale; or perhaps they are supernatural, omnipresent, and opinionated, constantly passing judgment on the deeds of the characters and introducing a great deal of dramatic irony to the piece.

KH and I have some discussions about more current writing; its use of the first person. He has bemoaned the decline of the third-person story. Here might be an explanation of its decline. We grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald; none of whom I can recall using the first-person.

Now, I like the first person and the close third-person because I think they are better for getting at the person's emotions and thoughts. Hemingway used third-person to keep the inner thoughts ambiguous - a pain that had to believed, not talked about. I have too much in my head, I assume everyone else is like that, and as William James taught - from ideas from actions.

Voice was a subject we talked about a lot in my prison writing classes, and the article had this to say about voice:

A strong voice is sort of an unfortunate way of describing what is actually a resounding and predictable pattern of speech. It’s the job of the writer to establish the pattern very quickly (which becomes almost like a social contract) and then stick with it to help the reader remain in the fictive dream, and nowhere in a story is this more crucial than the ending. Those of us with sentimental leanings can wax poetic with our endings, and if this doesn’t fit the established speech of the narrator, it comes off forced and insincere. There’s less danger maybe in transitioning from ornate language to simple language when ending, but this too could make many readers feel robbed. Consistency of voice is key to the very last word.

The original article did not tie voice with POV, but it seems  with me the voice does affect the POV and vice versa. I fear writing in the third-person (other than close) will result in prose that sounds like me. Several stories I have placed with the idea of the reader being a bit smarter than the characters since the idea of us acting on wrong ideas interests me. Let me  use an example from "One Dead Blonde" set in March 2008: two characters, a Democrat and a Republican, believe that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee. We know what happened, the characters are stuck in the probabilities of their time and show even intelligent, canny persons can be wrong. 

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