This Year You Write Your Novel

by Walter Mosley

  Not that every iota of information in the novel must come directly from that voice. Your narrator, let’s call her Sally, will meet people along the way, talk to them, overhear their conversations; she will read letters and newspaper articles; she will have dreams in which important events in her life may be revealed. You could even have Sally read parts of another novel or work of nonfiction that have a completely different narrative voice. There are dozens of ways to break up the narrative even in the first person. But everything flows through the consciousness of this narrator, so you must be true to that voice.

  When I say that you must be true to this narrator’s voice, I mean, among other things, that you can’t change her personality to fit the story. She cannot read the minds of other characters; she can know only what she has experienced or learned. And she is limited by her circumstances (e.g., her physical location at any given moment, her education, her situation in life, her emotional state, etc.).

  The first-person narrator is the doorway through which all the information of this story will pass; therefore the sense the reader has of this character must never be challenged. You can never undercut her authority. You cannot, for instance, insert a phrase such as “Sally never knew her mother because Nelda Smith had died in childbirth.” Who said that? Not Sally, of course. The writer said it. The writer’s voice has intruded into the story. This will destroy the reader’s faith in the words he or she is reading. The novel careens out of orbit and the story is lost. If you need to convey specific information, Sally must either think it, say it, read it, remember it, or hear someone else talking about it.

  This example is extreme, but the writer can make other more subtle and yet equally disastrous intrusions.

  Your main character, let’s say, is not very well educated. We know this because of her limited vocabulary, her simple sentence structures, and hints that have been dropped along the way. But somewhere someone asks her a question, to which she answers, “Indubitably, my good sir.” Say what? Who said that? The writer, not the character.

  Or perhaps your narrator all of a sudden understands something behind another person’s actions in a way that strains the credulity of the reader. For the whole story up to this point, Sally hasn’t understood anything psychological, but suddenly she thinks, “He seemed to have issues with his mother. I could tell this because he would never look women directly in the eye.” This is perfectly fine to say if the reader believes from the book so far that Sally has this kind of insight into psychological motivations. But if she has not given any indication of having this sort of sensitivity in the first two hundred pages, and then magically manifests this ability, the reader will become confused and the story will miscarry.*

  The first-person narrative is a powerful but also very difficult narrative form. It is powerful because you are intimate with the emotions and internal processes of the very real human being telling you the story; it is difficult because the rendering of that character has to be pitch-perfect for the reader to believe in her.

  There is also the difficulty of making sure that the first-person narrator is interesting enough to want to listen to for hundreds of pages.

  third-person narrative

  The third-person narrator is the voice in which we naturally tell stories about things that happened to people other than ourselves. This narrative voice is not a full person. Picture the third-person narrator as a small, emotionless, but intelligent creature sitting on the shoulder of the character who is experiencing the story. This creature perceives events from the perspective of this character and every now and then has glimmers of what this character might be feeling or thinking.

  Brent Farley entered the room, looking around for his mother.

  Instead he saw Alice Norman standing near the buffet. She noticed him and smiled before he had the opportunity to flee.

  “Hello, Alice,” Brent said, holding out his hand.

  Her fingers were cold, and so, Brent noticed, were her eyes.

  As with the first-person narrative, we are entering the story through the experiences of an individual. But in this case we aren’t so intimate with all the nuances of his character. Instead we are viewing the world through the prism of the intelligent eye perched on Brent’s shoulder, an intelligence without emotional response. It is important that the third-person narrator have a distance from the passions of the novel’s character. If you begin to give this narrative voice a personality, it can confuse the reader, giving them the feeling that they are being told how to feel about and see this world rather than spying on it from behind a one-way mirror.

  The cooler third-person narrator allows us to see the world of this novel from a certain impartial remove. This gives a kind of balance to the fiction that permits a reader to more easily suspend their disbelief.

  This, I believe, is a steadier voice than the first-person POV. You are given information by an even-tempered voice, which is good. At the same time, in this voice it can be harder to bring out the emotional depth of your characters than in the first person. You can give momentary glimpses into the mind of the shoulder you’re on, but you cannot, as a rule, get deeply into their heart.

  One benefit of this form of narrative is that the dispassionate observer can, at times, leap from the shoulder of one character onto that of another.

  Let us suppose that the meeting between Brent and Alice did not go very well. At the end of that chapter or section, Brent is left wondering if she suspects him of mishandling her affairs.

  At the beginning of the next scene, we find our narrative eye on the shoulder of Alice as she walks down the street in the long, darkening shadows of buildings her family once owned. She meets an old friend, who tells her to watch out for Brent—he’s not in any way a trustworthy man and would take the rest of her dwindling fortune if he could.

  “I just ran into him,” Alice said. “He seemed to want to get away from me as soon as possible. As a matter of fact, when I first saw him he was looking my way and I swear I thought he was about to bolt through the door.”

  Nareen Padam’s eyes got tight, giving her a contemplative air, as if Alice had posed a riddle.

  “Maybe,” dark-eyed Nareen said, “he was worried that you’d figured out one of his schemes against you and your family. Maybe he was afraid you’d make a scene.”

  After this meeting, your narrator could jump to Nareen’s shoulder, but I wouldn’t suggest it. The third-person narrator should be picky about the experiences it uses to tell the story.

  This form of narration can utilize the POVs of one, two, three, or more characters, but there has to be a reason for each narrative to exist. If your story is formed around a conflict, you should use a POV from each side of that discord. If the novel is about a corporate takeover, you might need eight or nine voices to cover all the subtle sides of the tale.

  It is possible to use only one POV to tell your story. Why, you ask, would I use the third-person narrative for only one voice? Why wouldn’t I just use the first-person narrative instead? There might be many valid reasons for this decision. For instance, your character may be a cipher to himself. He’s not a reflective type who goes about articulating what he sees and feels. Or conversely, he might be too expressive and flamboyant and in need of the cool reserve of a slightly removed POV.

  Narrative voice is a subtle thing. You have to decide what voice fits your task. But I will tell you that the third-person narrative will probably best serve your first novel—the one you are writing this year. This form is the most flexible and durable.

  One more thing you should know about this form:

  As I have said, the third-person narrator has some of the knowledge of the shoulder he’s on. So when Alice sees Nareen, the narrative voice might be aware of the fondness Alice has for this young woman and might even possess some additional specific knowledge.

  Alice ran into Nareen turning the corner at Third and Barton Streets. A feeling of familiar warmth came over her when she saw her old friend. Ali
ce observed that the dark-skinned young woman maintained only the broad facial features of her mother’s Swedish stock. Everything else was inherited from her father, whom Alice had heard was a criminal lawyer from Bombay who migrated to Michigan because his Scandinavian bride wanted him to meet her halfway.

  the omniscient narrator

  The omniscient narrator is the most powerful and most difficult narrative form. The omniscient narrator knows all. He could tell you the story about Brent and Alice and Nareen, but if he wanted to he could also tell you about what is going on at that moment in Cuba or relate the dialogue between fleas on a rat’s back beneath the street where Nareen and Alice are talking. The omniscient narrator doesn’t need any one person or some emotionless eye on the shoulder to tell the story. It is the all-seeing eye of God.

  Brent Farley walked into the room looking for his mother, but instead he found Alice Norman standing near the buffet.

  Alice noted that Brent seemed uneasy. “It’s almost as if he wants to get away from me,” she thought.

  “She’s looking at me,” Brent reflected, thinking that the red color in her dress was meant for a younger woman.

  Lawrence Smith-Jones, the club maître d’, noticed the two and remembered them as children running madly in mud-spattered jeans down near the stream behind the club.

  This voice is a potent one. Nothing that happens is beyond its reach. The omniscient narrator can cure cancer, explain what the meaning of life truly is, travel through space and time with impossible ease.

  The promise of such power is seductive, but it contains hidden dangers for the first-time novelist. The main problem is the reader: Can you convince him that you are all-knowing? Can your narrative maintain the tension between characters while at the same time speaking with such clarity and superior knowledge?

  The reader approaches the novel as a story that has to unfold in a certain unique fashion. She doesn’t know where the tale is going. She doesn’t know if Brent is really a bad man who is intent on beggaring Alice and her family.

  In the first-person narrative from Brent’s POV, Brent would know his own intentions, but he wouldn’t know the content of Alice’s heart and certainly would not be privy to the conversation between Nareen and Alice.

  The third-person narrator has no deep knowledge of any of the characters, so we have to rely on dramatic interaction to unearth the truth.

  But the omniscient narrator knows all. If he doesn’t tell us something, it is because he decides to withhold that information. If he does tell us, it is absolute truth with no gradations of gray. The omniscient narrative voice therefore runs the risk of killing the dramatic tension you are trying to create.

  This is not to say that one should never use this voice. Many, many novels (especially those written in the nineteenth century and earlier) use this voice magnificently.

  The proper omniscient narrator’s voice can be used effectively with the understanding that even the voice of God can have slight variations and rules by which it decides to impart information.

  For instance, your omniscient narrator might be so high and mighty that she doesn’t waste time wondering about the truths or complex motivations of the characters she presents.

  Captain Jack Hatter was a seafaring man who got it in mind that he was in love with a princess. He gathered a company of rough-and-ready tars who were willing to follow the handsome young officer to the ends of the earth—as long as there was plunder now and then along the way.. . .

  Princess Jasmine Alonza Trevor-MacFord was aware of Hatter’s passion, but she never let on if she would be a willing partner to his lust. When her girl-servants talked about Hatter’s promise to take her by force from her father’s lands, Jasmine would smile mysteriously and change the subject to the weather.. .

  From this POV the omniscient narrator could tell us many things about her characters but prefers not to. The storytelling is held at a certain distance to keep the reader wondering on many levels: Will Jack take the princess? Will the princess welcome his advances?

  This is just one of many possible approaches an omniscient narrative might take. This voice spends most of its time disguised as a third-person narrator but appears in its full force often enough to let us know that there is more to it. Or, the omniscient narrator may place limits upon itself by letting information come out only in a certain time sequence or by individuals giving voice to their feelings.

  There are many ways to spin the omniscient narrator so that the unfolding of the novel is still a wonder to the reader.

  The problem is that this voice of God has to learn how to limit itself, whereas the first- and third-person narrative voices have built-in limits.

  final notes on narrative voice

  First- and third-person narrative voices bring with them limitations on what the characters in the novel can say and know.

  The first-person narrative can know only what the speaker knows. This tale is limited by the mind and senses, the situation and sophistication, the gender and education, of the narrator.

  The third-person narrator benefits from different POVs but can portray only one of these at a time, and there is the further limit that this dispassionate POV cannot, most of the time, delve too deeply into any one character’s inner workings.

  These limitations may seem difficult and overly exacting, but I believe that they are the best thing for the first-time novelist. The restrictions placed on the prose by these rules are stringent, but they are also organic in the storytelling sense. That is to say, we live third- and first-person lives.

  Personally we know what it is we think and feel. We pass through this life making silent comments on events going on around us. Sometimes we interact with people with conspicuous honesty; other times, not so much. We feel love and hate and fear, and so does everyone else in the world. The fact that everyone knows life primarily through personal experience means that, if a first-person narrative is executed scrupulously, the reader will naturally identify with the voice.

  Similarly we all have some experience with the third-person narrative. We have jobs in which people are continually talking: talking to each other, talking behind each other’s back, seducing, expounding, bragging, lying. We are often silent witnesses to encounters on the bus, on the street, or maybe even through apartment walls. We all know what it is to be a silent observer, so when presented with the experience of cool remove that the third-person narrator perfects, we feel that we can understand the story—or at least we are given an opportunity to understand.

  The omniscient narrator is a little larger than what we’re used to. This form has no limitations that are not self-imposed. This does not mean that you cannot write a novel from this voice. The problem is that you have to be a consummate storyteller with extraordinary self-control to tell a story in this way.

  Other voices are possible. Novels have been written entirely in the first-person plural, told entirely by an unspecified we. Others address the reader as “you” throughout. But these are idiosyncratic and challenging approaches to storytelling. My advice is that you use the third-person narrative to write your novel (this year). But of course you will do as your heart tells you to.

  showing and telling

  “The words came right up off the page.” This is the highest possible praise for the fiction writer. It means that when reading the book, the reader felt that they were actually experiencing the sensations and emotions, the life and atmosphere, depicted by the novelist.

  The accomplished writer achieves this level of realism by using language that is active and metaphorical, economically emotional yet also pedestrian.

  As often as possible the fiction writer shows us events and active characters, vivid images and real dialogue, rather than telling us about the inner workings of someone’s mind or the reality of a situation.

  Lance Piggott had a great bulbous face, with black pinpoints for eyes and pasty white skin. He spoke in short bursts like a semiautomatic weapon. The bloated leather
of his shoes seemed about to burst open from the pressure of his bulging feet. Monsieur Piggott was indeed an explosion about to happen. His secretary, VernaMae Warren, would lean away from him whenever he approached her desk or stomped up to her side when she was pulling files from the green metal cabinets. The skittish secretary feared she would be obliterated by the mere proximity of her juggernaut of a boss.

  This in-depth description supplants the more cogent

  Lance Piggott was a large, violent man. His secretary, Verna-Mae Warren, avoided him whenever possible.

  It is often better if you use images and physical descriptions rather than mere informative language to present people, places, things, and events in your novel. To be told that someone is violent or seems to be violent is too general; the reader is left to come up with their own notions of Piggott based upon their personal experience with violence. But to describe a man who, at every moment, is about to explode helps the reader have a specific sense of that character.

  The strong scent of pine tar and eucalyptus stung Mary’s nostrils. The woodlands were alive with the racket of life. Insects clicked and buzzed; what must have been a bird gave a strangled cry, while somewhere a creature, hidden by the dense green-and-gray forest, crunched away, causing the young woman to imagine an ogre gnawing on a tree trunk.

  All the while the sun seared her skin. Mary felt a deep satisfaction with the lancing pain and dissonant woodland sounds. It was as if, she thought, she were a wild thing set loose in an unremitting Eden.