truepenny | Apr. 22nd, 2006

mrissa has a post of kind, sensible, lovely advice, many paragraphs of which I--and most of the writers I know--should have tattooed on the backs of our hands where we cannot avoid looking at them.

I am making progress on Chapter 3, though it's not exactly quantifiable, since some of it is new words, and some of it is reshaping old words, and a lot of it is rethinking who these people are and what they want.

I'm also trying to get the voice of Summerdown's second narrator worked out, because I think I would feel a whole lot better about my-life-as-I-know-it if I could get a solid foothold on that novel before August 1st when I turn The Mirador in come hell or high water.

Narrative voice is hard.

(If you want to imagine that in a whiny eight-year-old voice, feel free.)

And it's even harder with first-person narrators.

It doesn't matter so terribly much if all your third-person narrators sound alike. Stephen King does that, and it works just fine. Dickens does that, and it works just fine. Tolkien, for the love of little blue pencils, does that, and it works just fine, can you give me hallelujah.

Some authors even write first person narrators who sound the same (Dick Francis is the only example that springs to mind, but I'm sure there are others). But not--and here's the catch--in the same book. If you're going to be crazy enough to write a novel with multiple first-person narrators, you'd better be able to make them sound distinct, or no one is going to be impressed with you and your cleverness.

So how the hell do you do it?

It's quite obvious how I distinguished Mildmay from Felix. But that trick only works once.

What I've discovered is that I need to be able to hear a different cadence in my head. Not necessarily hear the character--some I can hear, some I can't. Felix is a male version of Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge!, for example. (That's also not a bad place to start visualizing him.) But I don't have to hear the character; I just have to be able to hear the cadence. That's how I know I'm writing Felix instead of Kyle Murchison Booth; the cadence of their sentences is different.

I can fake my way into it if I've got a rhetorical tic to use. A particular kind of imagery, for example. (That's how I got into the second narrator of The Mirador.) But what makes Mildmay easy to write is the cadence. Give me a beat, I can dance to it.

And so what I need for the second narrator of Summerdown is a cadence.