A few years ago I took an online class through the
Writer Studio that was an extraordinary learning experience. The goal was to read a small piece of a story and identify the tools the narrator used to tell the story. Exercises required us to create a similar narrator who used the same tools to tell their story as the one we had read.
I'm teaching a class on point of view at the local university's continuing education program, using a similar pattern. I thought sharing here might be helpful to you, too.
So, let's start with Australian author John Marsden's book
The Night is For Hunting.
Here's the blurb from
GoodReads to give you a feel for the book.
Amidst
a brutal war with no end in sight, Ellie and her four remaining friends
discover that their hidden refuge becomes a crowded place when they decide to
care for an uncooperative crew of orphans. Things only get worse when Ellie and
Homer learn that mysterious visitors have discovered their sanctuary. Has the
enemy found them out? Five ordinary teens brave the worst in this electrifying
continuation of their battle to stay safe and sane in a war zone that was once
their home.
Chapter One begins like this:
It was hot and dusty. The sun sat up there all day without
moving. It saw everything and it forgave nothing. Sometimes it seemed like you
were alone in the world, you and the sun, and at those times you could
understand why people in the old days feared and worshipped it.
I hated the
sun. For months on end it had no mercy. It burned everything. Everything that
wasn’t covered or hidden or fed with water, it burned.
It was
mid-December and we were forty milliliters down on the monthly average. The
dams looked like muddy pools, and the stock hung around in the drying mud, more
interested in staying cool than in eating. Three of us were working in the
yards: Dad, Quentin, and me. Quentin had been late, as usual, and that got Dad
snarling.
The tools this narrator uses:
Ellie begins with a memory. She starts with a description
of the landscape, then moves to the scene occurring within that landscape and
creates it with intricate details that make us feel like we’re right there with
her and her father and the vet as they cull the "empty" heifers, the ones not pregnant. We don’t know immediately that it is a memory,
but by the time we do, we understand what this PN has lost. She has last her parents, her friends, and life in any normal sense of the word.
Later in Chapter one:
Other people used tranquilizers or grog or drugs I suppose,
to shut out awful grey realities. I didn’t have those but I wouldn’t have taken
them anyway. I clung to my daydreams, and tried to use them. They weren’t
enough, not by a long way, but they were something. On the really depressing
days they were all I had.
Daydreams
could be dangerous though. On my school reports teachers wrote “Needs to
concentrate harder.” It didn’t bother me much back then. But in this war
concentration became a matter of life and death. You missed hearing a twig
break, you were dead. You ignored a truck parked off the side of the road, you
were caught in a trap. You blocked out your sense that something wasn’t quite
right, and the next minute you were lying on the ground with a gun pressed in
your neck.
And it
wasn’t just yourself who got wiped out. You could kill your friends by not
concentrating.
The tools:
The narrator uses “you” as a substitute for “I”. It’s a
device that includes the reader in the story, makes the reader feel as if s/he
were there beside the PN. This device also allows Ellie to distance herself
from emotions or actions she does not feel are acceptable—wanting to beat the
heifer with a shovel, the death of a friend that resulted from inattention. And
in those moments she reveals herself, the fact that she has done/felt these
things and the fact that she is not proud of them and feels guilt as a result.
The narrator's tone is poetic and conversational, but the mood behind it, the emotion the narrator wants the reader to feel is hopeless and dark.
The purpose of all this analysis is to experiment with these same tools. Try it.
Create a first person narrator who uses a conversational tone with poetic overtones. Begin with a scene that is a memory. Use "you" to include the reader and distance the narrator from a painful situation.
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