Resolution

I go to Canada at least once a year to visit my oldest child, and I always love finding new (to me) Canadian writers. This year it was Marina Endicott, whose (adult) novel Good to a Fault is now a finalist for Canada Reads, the national everybody-reads-the-same-novel thing they've got going there. Good to a Fault was not only delightful reading, it was also a marvelous study in POV. I often reread passages just to admire how the narrative moved from character to character without a hitch, like a relay baton going from runner to runner and never getting dropped.

Kathleen Duey's Skin Hunger, one of the common books for the upcoming Hamline residency, has a dual narrative structure, and it's a book I've been recommending lately for writers trying to work with multiple story threads. We're studying it for setting (I think it was your pick, Mary Logue? Thank you!) but it also provides a marvelous study in structure.

I suppose one reason I was taken with the multiple narrators in Good to a Fault and with Skin Hunger's structure is that I have always stuck to a single narrator and vantage in my novels (Well, okay, there was one a long time ago, Come in from the Cold, that was split between two kids, but the split was so broadly defined that it felt like separate stories as I was doing it). With New Year's coming up, I think it's time for some writing resolutions, and whadya say we listen to Ron and make those resolutions risky ones?

So here I go: In 2010 I will break it open and try a multiple (but a closely-woven) thread/voice story.

And you?

A Dog Blog

Hello. I'm Marsha's new puppy, Scout. I'm the only puppy in the family, but she's not the only writer. The working title of my opus is Bite the Bunny. Edgy stuff. I'm writing in first-puppy for its immediacy, but feel so limited from this point of view. Why not try omniscient while I have the opportunity to create a world and shape its inhabitants?

Here's a synopsis:

Follow the saga of one girl's struggle to Bite the Bunny--only the pink, squeaking bunny--while sorely tempted to bite a kitchen table leg, chicken leg, and pant leg. Will she overcome the trappings of instinct and survival to satisfy her ultimate yearning for family acceptance? Will she bond with the bunny? Bite only the bunny and grow to new dimensions of self-acceptance through bunny bonding?

Character and plot are no problem for me. Voice and tone are more of a challenge because I hear so many nuances. And don't get me started on setting...I'll have to chew on it.

Who's Telling

Oh those novelists, blogged down again by those looming literary choices--point of view, psychic distance, voice. Thank Gag for picture books. Having written some, she knew she made many of the same decisions, but drew an extra arrow from her quiver: form. As a form, picture books could encompass all genres--fiction, memoir, non-fiction, mystery, fantasy, fairy or folk tales; and she considered whether and how genre in the picture book influenced point of view.

She loved John Scieszka's hilarious re-telling of The Story of The Three Little Pigs from the wolf's point of view in The True Story of The 3 Little Pigs! for its crafty use of the unreliable narrator device. Fairy tales are conventionally told in third person, so what happened when point of view shifted? Scieszka's use of the first person narrator invited the reader into a a world through the perceptions of a character and not into the verisimilitude of the fairy tale world created by the original author. The reader believes A. Wolf as the long-suffering "I" in Scieszka's tale because he is the tale-teller, the narrator of his own story, not the three little pigs' story. Each point of view creates a verisimilitude fitting its form or intention. Told in the conventional third person, the reader is invited into the fairy world created for the story, not created by a character for the story. Scieszka broke form for his intention to make the reader laugh at his ironic tale.

Writing stories with autobiographical roots, she'd written in first person for the same reason: verisimilitude. As much as she was part of the story, the narrative "I" became a part of the story, the world created by narrator as character. Fiction and non-fiction could be told from either point of view in the picture book, but the questions she'd ask were fundamental: Who's narrating the story and why? The truth of the story, the author's intention, rests in that question. Who tells it truer?