Narrator de Force

We are two chapters into our little short story experiment, and I am rather pleased to report that I have had an epiphany of sorts this week!

Just to provide a little background on my paradigm shift, Ben and I have been writing together for a little while now. When I say together, I don't mean that we have co-written any works (other than some technical reports and occasional improv routines back when we worked together at a telecommunications company that shall not be named), but rather that we collaborated on some of our personal writing projects. Ben and I had a routine of getting together on Friday nights to share and critique each other's novels.

During that time, I've read through several of his projects in one form or another. When I read Ben's stories, I always noticed how different his style and tone was compared to mine. I couldn't tell you how, nor could I put my finger on why, but I could always tell that what I was reading came from Ben.

When I started writing our short story, I didn't give much thought to how I would use style, tone and other mechanics in my chapter. In that regard, I'm definitely firmly entrenched in the "Gardener" camp (but I'll let Ben write a post that explains what that means!). Still, I knocked out my chapter and waited eagerly to see what Ben would do with the characters I had conjured.

When I finally got to read Ben's chapter, the differences between his writing style and mine became much clearer, thanks to the common subject matter that we shared. Pretty soon I was able to figure out what was different between the chapters: Ben and I have very different narrators!

When most people think of narrators, they imagine an old fatherly voice that provides the voice overs for fairy tales. However, all stories have narrators. They may be a character in the story, or more often, they are an abstract observer of the story. Still, the "voice" of the narrator provides a lot of the story's personality. In the case of our story, I realized that Ben's narrator has a very conversational voice, whereas mine is much more formal. This got me to thinking: where does a narrator's voice come from? Is it a reflection of how we communicate? A projection of how we see and synthesize the world?

In the end, I decided that the easiest explanation is that the voice of a writer's narrator is probably a very good facsimile of their internal monologue (I guess that means I can finally start making money by talking to myself). I also assume that most people have internal monologues, after all, if you didn't have an internal monologue, how could you replay the argument you just lost and try to figure out what you SHOULD have said? Still, I would also venture that most people that do not regularly engage in creative writing are seldom faced with an external representation of their own internal monologue. Making your internal monologue external is actually very hard to do in life. Yet, it is very easy to do as a writer (in fact, I'm doing it right now).

This begs the question for you, dear reader: Do you actually know what your internal monologue sounds like? If not, how do you think it would sound if it told a story to someone other than yourself? Is your internal monologue conversational and prosaic, like Ben's? Or is it formal and analytical, like mine? I've said in the past that we all have a responsibility to say what we mean, and that infers that we are saying it to someone else. ..

But how much thought and care do you put into how you communicate with yourself?

Feel free to post some comments with your thoughts, but beware: you may find yourself analyzing your internal monologue, with your internal monologue, albeit in an externalized form.

Yeah. That just happened. We've gone Meta!

I hope you all have a great Memorial Day Holiday!
-Lee