Month: November 2010

A Good Narrator is Hard to Find*

by Ramona DeFelice Long

“An honest man is always a child.”

This quote is attributed to the Greek philosopher Socrates, who also is credited with saying, “I know that I know nothing.” We are going to conveniently ignore that second quote because a) to put it in the vernacular: He’s Socrates; if he knows nothing, dude, where does that leave the rest of us?;  and b) the first quote fits the topic of my last post: Why do readers trust a child narrator?

There’s another saying which can’t be attributed to anyone in particular, and that is that children are honest. Children tell the truth. Children don’t lie. Okay, that’s three sayings, but they claim the same thing and, pardon my French, all three are horse merde.

 

Children lie all the time, and they are not even good at it. A child will swear he did not give the dog his vegetables–while Rover is rolling a Brussels sprout across the floor. A child will open his eyes wide and promise he did not steal his sister’s Easter candy, while his mouth is smeared with the mangled remains of Little Sister’s chocolate bunny.

Children lie—except when they are the narrators of a book.

Last post, I shared a short list of books narrated by young characters. Most of them were Southern, reflecting my personal reading tastes. As you can see from the comments, non-Southern child narrators are popular, too. I’ve been Google-searching “child narrators” and reading about their appeal. The consensus is this: stories narrated by children are popular because readers relate to them, since everyone has been a child; and readers trust a child narrator, for the same reason. It’s a given that while real-life children will lie in their teeth about certain things, they are pure and innocent when telling stories.

Let’s work with that. What makes a good narrator? What qualities should a writer inject into the character given the task of telling the story?

This is a big topic, so I’m going to strip it down to some basics. I’ll even use an acronym. What does a writer need to GIVE a narrator to make him/her work?

GUIDANCE – The narrator is the guide of the story. He takes the reader by the hand, pulls them in, strings them along, pushes them forward, dangles them over the cliff, denouements them at the end. An author decides what kind of guide the narrator will be: Is this a solo gig? Or will there be several different narrator making a team effort? If so, how do they work with one another? Is this guide going to be straightforward and unbiased—the man behind the curtain who directs the action but never addresses the reader? Or, is this a personal journey that will allow the guide to address the reader more intimately? Is the guide going to jump around in time and space, starting with “I’m in this place and what follows is how I got here” as the impetus to share the story that is, in fact, already over? Deciding how the story will be told in terms of structure, who will tell it and in which point of view are primary decisions for GUIDANCE.

INTEGRITY – Narrators don’t have to tell the truth. They can tell the truth as they see it, as an unbiased witness to the events of the story. They can tell the truth as they perceive it, which means interpreting events to support a personal truth. They can also lie, to support their own personal agendas. Just because the narrator is telling the story doesn’t mean they are telling the true or whole story. It’s up to the reader to comprehend what the narrator is really saying. This is the fun of reading. All those words on the page—they say one thing, but they may mean another, or more, or less. So what does this have to do with INTEGRITY? Simply put, a narrator can purposefully lie to or deceive the reader, but they will not purposefully lie to or deceive themselves. Narrators can be deluded, or unreliable, or mistaken, but they don’t mislead themselves. Hence, a narrator is always true to the truth as they know it. For example, when Scout Finch tells us that Dill arrives in Maycomb in a blaze of glory, she’s telling the truth as she sees it. The reader perceives that Dill gets shuffled around from relative to relative, but Scout relays his train rides as a glamorous experience. Does this erode her integrity as a narrator? No. She is telling what she knows to be the truth. It’s up to the reader to see beyond her years and understand more.

VOICE – Narrative voice is more than language and sound and semantics; it is how the narrator delivers the story to the reader’s ear. It is the most esoteric part of GIVE, and so the most complicated. Not only does the narrator say what they say, how they say it says a great deal about them. A person from the South speaks differently than a person from the Midwest. A middle-age man who graduated from Princeton won’t speak the same narrative language as an elderly, unemployed woman who grew up on a chicken farm in Waco, Texas, or a young drug-addled runaway from Seattle. A narrator’s voice reflects both their past and current life situations. But that is only one aspect of VOICE. Another is tone. Is the narrator looking at the story through the lens of humor, even when the events are not necessarily funny? Is the narrator long-winded? Does s/he like to employ meandering sentences and long descriptions of scenery, or does s/he keep things spare? These are authorial decisions that are sometimes made before there is even a story. How many times do you read that an author heard the VOICE before they heard the story?  If this happens to you, consider yourself lucky–and listen to the voice.

EMPATHY – Not long ago, I read a novel narrated by a guy I hated. He whined. He lied. He was disgustingly narcissistic. He made excuses for destroying the lives around him. He was despicable in every sense of the word—and he was not even the criminal in the story!  He was also completely fascinating and, though I was appalled by it, he made me understand why he felt as he did. It didn’t make me hate him any less, but it did make me admire the writer for achieving that. EMPATHY means that the narrator makes a connection with the reader. It doesn’t mean the reader approves of or understands the narrator; it means the reader is engaged by the narrator’s story. Isn’t that the ultimate goal of a story? To connect with a reader? Creating EMPATHY is achieved by writing a narrator who is complete and full as a character, first, and then who performs his/her job of storytelling, second.

GIVE: GUIDANCE, INTEGRITY, VOICE, EMPATHY. These are the qualities I consider when I choose a narrator.

What are yours? What do you give your narrators? Tell me about it.

Ramona

*Not really, but I thought it was catchy, so thanks to Flannery O’Connor. Talk about a great narrator. *shivers*

Guest Blogging Today

by Ramona DeFelice Long

Today, I am the guest blogger for Sisters in Crime, National Chapter.

Potential Friends for Life, and a Book List

by Ramona DeFelice Long

When my children were young, I walked them to and from school every day. Our mornings were like those idyllic ones you’ve seen on television: a hearty, healthy breakfast homecooked by moi; walking the short path through the woods while observing nature; me waving cheerily as my sons ran off to their classrooms where their little minds were stimulated and challenged; no one every forgetting a book report, diorama, or &^%! field trip form on the kitchen table. (Hush. That’s how I’m choosing to remember it.)

About once a week, my older son—a social butterfly like his mother—would run out at the end of the day and happily announce, “I made a new friend today!” His standards of friendship—also like his mother’s—were low. I don’t mean this in a bad way. If the lunch lady gave him an extra scoop of spaghetti, she was his friend. A six-grader saying, “Hey, kid,” meant they were blood brothers. New classmate—potential pal.  Kid on the next swing—compadre! Some were fleeting acquaintances and others remain friends to this day. His outlook, also like mine, was to embrace each new friend as one with the potential for a long and productive relationship.

This past weekend, at the Crime Bake conference, I made a lot of new friends and hope they will all turn into long and productive relationships.

I had dinner with a delightful array of Potential Friends for Life. One PFL and I discussed books. (I know, duh, it was a mystery writer’s conference, of course we discussed books.) But this particular PFL and I talked about pleasure reading, and the non-mystery authors we both loved. At some point, she said, “Email me a reading list” which set my PFL meter pinging towards Sure Thing.

A little later, I began to talk about Iconic Child Narrators. I say “began to talk” because I ordered a Mimosa, and the band began to play, and the next thing you know, I was the second person in conga line. We never got back to discussing Iconic Child Narrators. To make up for the topic interruptus and because the subject is close to my heart, I decided to compile a short book list of my favorites and share it here. Soon—like, next week—I will devote a post to why the Iconic Child Narrator is important in literature.

That gives y’all a week to read all of these. And, yes, if you notice, they are all Southern.

Scout, from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird

Ellen Foster, from Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster

Will Tweedy, from Olive Ann Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree

Clover, from Doris Saunders’ Clover

Porter Osborne, Jr., from Ferrol Sams’  Run with the Horsemen

Frankie, from Carson McCuller’s Member of the Wedding

Jess, from Fred Chappelle’s I Am One of You Forever

Daisy Fay, from Fannie Flagg’s Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man

Buddy, from Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory

Who am I missing? I don’t mind a Yankee Iconic Child Narrator invading the list. I’ve just spent a wonderful weekend in Boston, with writers from everywhere. Good storytelling knows no boundaries.

Tell me about your favorites.

Ramona



All My Bags Are Packed….

by Ramona DeFelice Long

Tomorrow,  I will be traveling by train to Boston, for the New England Crime Bake Conference.

I will also be guest blogging at the Working Stiffs. My post topic is a secret, but a good guesser might go with traveling to a conference.

For Today, Something Different

by Ramona DeFelice Long

On my honeymoon, my new groom and I went to dinner at a quaint tavern on Cape Cod. It was a stormy night, and adding to the ambiance was the roaring fire that barely drowned out the pounding rain. Not that we noticed the fire or the rain. We were on our honeymoon. All we noticed—at first—was each other.

We started with warm brown bread, clam chowder and white wine. When our chowders arrived, we noticed the people at the next table–an older couple, good-looking, well dressed, obviously married a long while. We noticed them because, as we took the first taste of soup, they began to fight.

The woman stopped our waitress to order a fresh gin and tonic. The husband said, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” He said it quietly, but we heard it. We heard her answer, too. That was louder. “No, I don’t think I’ve had enough. Not even close.”

It was almost amusing, two old married people in a little a spat on Cape Cod, where everyone seemed so image conscious and proper and uptight. I remember smiling across the table, and my new husband raising his eyebrows.

Our amusement didn’t last long. She had a second drink and then a third. He kept asking her to slow down. His voice took on a pleading tone; her voice grew more hostile.

Finally, he said, “I don’t think that group is helping you.” I assumed by “that group” he meant AA; from the evidence before me, I thought he was right.

She answered, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He said she needed to move on; she said the group kept her going. I wondered if I was right about AA. It seemed like something else, other than a possible drinking problem, was going on.

Back and forth, forth and back, it went, past chowder and entrees to dessert. Then, just as we were about to enjoy our chocolate mousse, this attractive wife said to her handsome husband, clear and loud, “Why don’t you just stay the hell out of my life?”

Her voice was full of venom. At the time, I didn’t know what to call what his voice was full of, when he answered, “Please. It’s not my fault. I didn’t murder our daughter.”

~

This is a true story. I don’t know the people, or their daughter. I don’t know the details of her murder. I only know that, twenty-five years ago, I heard a couple of people suffering so much grief, instead of turning to each other, they were turning on each other.

This week, mixed in with election madness, was Delaware’s Grief Awareness Week. Today, the week ends with an event sponsored by the Delaware Grief  Awareness Consortium called Living With Loss. I’ll be attending this event. I’m writing this in advance; I’m not sure how coherent I’ll be when it’s done.

Because I work with mystery writers, I spend a lot of time thinking about murder, and murderers, and victims. Stripped down, mystery novels are puzzles. Something occurs—usually a death—that changes the world of the story. Characters are affected by the crime. Someone, a sleuth, is called upon to solve the crime to restore order to the world of the story. That’s how it works.

There is nothing wrong with that. That’s what readers expect. This is what a mystery novel is meant to be.

Necessarily, not much focus is devoted to a victim’s family. They appear for some required scenes; they provide background to the victim and clues to the identity of the bad guy; they are interviewed as witnesses if that is a role the author assigns. Many are handled with as much compassion as can be crammed into an <90,000 word novel. But often, particularly in series that requires a new body drop every six months or so, the deceased’s family is forgotten when the crime is solved.

Sadly, that happens in real life sometimes, too. In real life, closure doesn’t come when the bad guy is identified. Sometimes, closure never comes at all, even if the bad guy is found, convicted and jailed. Sometimes, closure comes to one person, but not to their spouse. Marriages break up. Friends fade away, because they are uncomfortable and don’t know what to say. People, well-meaning perhaps, want the bereaved to move on, soldier forward, buck up, get help, put it in the past. Good advice—except there is no sure-fire way on how to do that.

Bereavement isn’t a puzzle. Bereavement is the internal struggle to accept that a person is gone from your life. No outside action can change that, and the struggle is compounded by the fact that it’s a solitary journey that doesn’t have a clear path or timetable. This means that, for a bereaved person, there is no one way for the puzzle to be fit back together—and even if the puzzle is fit back together, there are still the lines between the pieces that show where the picture was once shattered.

That’s not to say there is no recovery. The purpose of events like Living with Loss and groups like Compassionate Friends is to help people who have lost a loved one recover some kind of new normal to their lives. It takes time. Courage. Friends. Understanding. Forgiveness. Maybe a creative outlet.

~

I have never forgotten that couple in the quaint little tavern on Cape Cod. This is the first time I have ever written about them. Earlier in this post, I wrote that I didn’t recognize the tone of the husband’s voice when he asked his wife not to blame him. I recognize it now. It was despair.

I wonder if, as using them to introduce a blog post, I am trivializing their despair? I hope not. I hope they stayed together and learned to help one another.

An Ode to Emilie

by Ramona DeFelice Long

I just went on a two-week vacation, and I did not pack a single book.

That’s not to say I didn’t read. I read every day. I didn’t need to bring any books because I borrowed ones from my two hostesses—my mother and my sister.

At my sister’s house, I read Kathryn Stockett’s very excellent Southern novel, The Help. Anyone who has not yet read this—you are missing out. Run to the store or library and pick up a copy. Now. My sister and I spent hours discussing this novel.

At my mother’s house, I read from her collection of Emilie Loring romance novels. Someday, my mother’s collection of Emilie Loring romance novels will become my collection of Emilie Loring romance novels because I called dibs on them for when she (my mother, not Emilie Loring) dies. My mother owns a copy of every single Emilie Loring romance novel, with the exception of With This Ring. Until this visit, I did not realize that she was missing With This Ring, so guess what I’ll be hunting for all over the Internet come holiday time?

Minus With This Ring, my mother owns all fifty-plus novels, even the ones written after Emilie Loring’s death. (Don’t tell my mom. She doesn’t know that Emilie herself did not write those last twenty books from beyond the grave. Anybody who reveals to her that they were ghost written, using partial manuscripts or rough drafts found after Emilie Loring passed, is going to suffer my wrath.)

Emilie Loring died a long time ago (1951, at the age of 87), but her work lives on. It lived on a lot two weeks ago because my mother and I had long discussions about the books. Each day, I held out the copy that I planned to read. The books were sometimes held together with a rubber band, the pages brittle and yellow, the sticker price of 40 cents still intact. One glimpse of the book cover, and my mother promptly told me the setting, the plot, who betrayed the hero, a description of the spunky best friend, and what the heroine wore the night she and the hero, inevitably, realized they were madly in love.

Did the spoilers stop me from reading the book? Of course not. I’ve read them all multiple times. I have not familiarized myself with the details to the degree that my mother has, but I’m still young. Someday, when the collection of Emilie Loring romance novels is mine, I will memorize which raven-haired beauty wore a gold sheath to what ball, and which broad-shouldered ex-college football player roommate is really a government agent gone bad.

The books were formulaic and predictable, which is probably why it was easy to ghost write the last twenty without even her biggest fans (my mother and me) suspecting. (Confession: I found out about ten minutes ago, when I researched the year of her death. Damn you, Wikipedia.)

While at home, I read one Emilie Loring romance novel in bed at night and one during my parents’ afternoon nap, which lasts exactly two hours and is exactly enough time to read an Emilie Loring romance novel, especially if you have already read every single one multiple times.

This time, however, I didn’t just read the novels. I studied them. Why are they as addictive as crack? What makes these novels, which are almost laughably dated, still so engaging?

I’ll tell you why. Emilie Loring mastered world building. In an Emilie Loring romance novel, she presents two major characters who are finely drawn, even though the reader knows from the get-go that neither the hero nor the heroine will ever say bad words, have premarital sex, act against the government, be rude to the help, smoke pot or kick a puppy. The men in the stories were gallant and honest; the women were brave and well-mannered. Despite the necessary misunderstandings and miscommunications, the characters always treated one another with respect. Isn’t that what real love between two real people should be like?

That glossy innocence aside, the characters lived in a real city, at a specific time, with situations that were relevant to the time and place. She was excellent at description, so each Emilie Loring romance novel reads like a mini time capsule of American history.

I didn’t recognize her talent at world building when I was a young girl reading my mother’s books. I only knew that I enjoyed the stories, that I got “lost” in it from page one onward. No matter how many times I read an Emilie Loring romance novel, I was transported to the time and place with her characters.

That’s good writing.

Here is a final tidbit about Emilie Loring and her romance novels. She didn’t start her writing career until she was fifty years old. I did not know this until about ten minutes ago. (I guess I should take back the damn you, Wikipedia.) This makes me admire and love Emilie Loring, and her romance novels, all the more.

Is there a writer who has earned your unconditional love? A book you’ve discussed with your sister for hours?  Stories that you shared with your mother that, when she goes or has gone, will always remind you of her?

Tell me about it.

Ramona