Who Is Telling the Story?
Author Kenan Orhan discusses the importance of voice and perspective in fiction for both the writer and the reader.
Writing is one of the few professions, to my mind, where admitting you hear voices in your head does not elicit sideway glances. In fact, I couldn’t imagine the art without this sort of low-level hallucination. There is setting and character and plot and tension and conflict—but all of this, from the very first sentence to the last, is conveyed to the reader through a narrator, and the narrator’s voice is a filter for how and what information is revealed. It’s the written word, of course, but I hear all my narrators in my head. I am crowded with the voices of all the characters I shall ever write. For my own practice, voice is the total of the work, the font from which emerges everything.
This way of getting at fiction puts a great onus on the question: Who is telling the story? And for a lot of early writers (I see this in retrospect of my own early work and also in the work of students) if the point-of-view is not first-person, little consideration is given to who the narrator is. It goes hand in hand with this atrophied understanding of the third-person narrator I see cropping up in class sometimes. It is easy because of film and television maybe, and the penchant for beginning writers to write very script-like work is good evidence, but all of our joy as a reader is delivered to us by an entity, and accessing this entity opens up a world of possibility. Perhaps they are a narrator who is talking to an imagined reader in an imagined room, describing the story as a member of its periphery (I think of Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation as a good example); or perhaps they are very calm and distanced and practically a stenographer of the tale; or perhaps they are supernatural, omnipresent, and opinionated, constantly passing judgment on the deeds of the characters and introducing a great deal of dramatic irony to the piece.
It will be different for every writer, but the incipient ideas for my work come most commonly from a single, idiosyncratic line that seems to plop out of some nook of my mind. For example, my latest story began when, falling asleep, this sentence sort of formed in my thoughts: “I don’t know by what accident they had managed it, but instead of a new shower and bidet, the builders renovating my bathroom had installed Silivri Prison instead.” I knew at once, as is obvious with a line like that, that this voice would be a character, indeed the protagonist, of the story, and truly with this sort of a line it would be hard to imagine them very removed from the events.
But something else that came through to me was this notion that though something deeply troubling and inexplicable has happened the voice here is less upset than perhaps impressed, less disgruntled than perhaps optimistic about the magic afoot. In conceiving the next lines I knew at once they would confront the builders, but my own life-bias meant the voice was feminine (the women in my family are very good about expressing their expectations and disappointments while the men in my family are non-confrontational). So, this character became an assertive but accepting feminine voice and from there it was significantly easier to imagine what she might say or do, and the first couple of pages practically wrote themselves because I had such a strong voice to rely on.
I find though that my process ends up requiring a certain amount of jamming. I had a line swirling in my head that went like: “O dear, o me, o deary, dear, my acids, my ulcers!” Perhaps all I needed was some antacid, but it stayed with me, and it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing my narrator would say, but it seemed the perfect antithesis to her so I figured it would be a great line for her husband to deliver. So, there we have a skittish and acidic husband who—when he finds out about the magical mishap—will immediately think of how it will havoc his nerves. It must mean then he is a little conceited, and not very inquisitive if instead of asking how this has happened he thinks only of what it will change in him. It worked then that these singular voices could mesh together for different characters in the same story but that won’t always be the case, and a certain amount of finesse will be necessary for identifying when a voice doesn’t belong in the story.
Eventually other elements of the story start to crop up; setting makes itself necessary and apparent. Characters may change in our imaginings of them, becoming kinder or crueler. The language they and the narrator use starts to find its rhythm, and can be improved by reading out loud as you edit. You can find the music of their speech, the tension they can create with their access (or lack thereof) to the thoughts and emotions of others, the tricks they can play on the cast. I am convinced that when we talk of the magic of storytelling, it is the magic of keeping a reader interested, in keeping the reader in a separate time from their own, if only for an afternoon, and a strong voice is all most readers need to set disbelief aside, to consider the tale authoritative.
A strong voice is sort of an unfortunate way of describing what is actually a resounding and predictable pattern of speech. It’s the job of the writer to establish the pattern very quickly (which becomes almost like a social contract) and then stick with it to help the reader remain in the fictive dream, and nowhere in a story is this more crucial than the ending. Those of us with sentimental leanings can wax poetic with our endings, and if this doesn’t fit the established speech of the narrator, it comes off forced and insincere. There’s less danger maybe in transitioning from ornate language to simple language when ending, but this too could make many readers feel robbed. Consistency of voice is key to the very last word.
In my practice I’ve found it helps immensely to have an idea of the last paragraph, perhaps even write it out before any others (always leaving room for change) but this means I know the natural note I am trying to strike with my ending and can adjust my language in the story to more closely match it. Preventing disconcert and disjointedness in your ending allows for a very smooth transition for the reader back into reality, to the point that, like climbing out of a pool, droplets of the story remain on the skin.
Kenan Orhan is a Turkish American writer and a recipient of the O. Henry Prize. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, The Common, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. Orhan received his MFA from Emerson College and lives in Kansas City. I Am My Country is his first book.
