In closing, my freshman year in college, before an early-morning German course, a guy was telling a story that went, “…so we’re going around this long curve—skreeeeech! vrooooom!—and we pass this police car…”
A listening girl leaned close to me and whispered, “Why do men always use sound effects in stories, but women never do?”
An excellent observation. Learn from it.
Everyone should use three types of communication. Three parts description. Two parts instruction. One part onomatopoeia. Mix to taste. Textures: Mix First-, Second-, and Third-Person Points of View
Think of a good joke. “Yesterday I walked into a bar. You know how it goes. You walk into a bar, and you expect a bartender, maybe some video poker. A man needs his distractions. No guy wants to get off work and go into some bar and see a penguin mixing drinks…”
In conversation we switch between first-, second-, and third-person points of view. The constant shift controls the intimacy and authority of our story; for instance, “I walked” has the authority of first person. Second person addresses the listeners and enlists them: “You walk.” And the shift to third person controls the pace, “No guy wants,” by moving from the specific “I” to the general “guy.”
Arguably, first person carries the most authority because it gives us someone responsible for the story. As opposed to the third-person narration by some hidden, unknown godlike writer. Second person worked well in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. It can have a hypnotic effect, but it can be tricky. Unless a story is well plotted, fast paced, and short, constant second person can annoy.
The rub is that using all three POVs means the story must ultimately be told in first person. But even second and third can be mixed to create a sense of some undeclared narrator. In Bright Lights, Big City the narration is second person, but every time it depicts something other than itself the narration is effectively third person.
So much of this book will be about recognizing what good storytellers do intuitively.
If you were my student, I’d tell you to shift as needed between the three POVs. Not constantly, but as appropriate to control authority, intimacy, and pace. Textures: Big Voice versus Little Voice
You’ve seen this in a zillion stories. Every time Carrie Bradshaw hunches over her laptop to write her Sex and the City newspaper column…Every time Jane Fonda spills her guts to her psychiatrist in Klute…a story lapses into big voice.
The camera is little voice. The voice-over device is big voice.
Little voice (also called Recording Angel because it seems to hover and watch) depicts the moment-by-moment action. Big voice comments on it.
Little voice remains objective, giving us the smells, sounds, flavors, textures, and actions in a scene. Big voice muses.
Little voice gives us the facts. Big voice gives us the meaning—or at least a character’s subjective interpretation of the events.
Not many stories exist without both voices. On Star Trek it’s the captain’s log. In Flashdance it’s the confessional in the Catholic church. In the film The Social Network, the big voice expository sequences are the legal deposition scenes. At regular intervals a character is going to discuss his life with a therapist. Or she’s going to write a letter or diary entry, but she’s going to rise above the meat-and-potatoes reality of physical verbs. He’s going to ask rhetorical questions on behalf of the reader, à la Carrie Bradshaw’s “Am I the only one who’s not enjoying anal sex?” Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning will use a citizens band radio to talk to her dead mother. Margaret will ask God, “Are you there?” Or Charlize Theron in Young Adult will lapse into the coping mechanism of writing as the teen narrator of her character’s YA books.
In my own books, the device for introducing big voice is usually some nonfiction form that emerges from the character’s life. In Invisible Monsters it’s the “postcards from the future” that the characters write and discard. In Survivor it’s the cockpit flight recorder of the doomed airliner. In Choke it’s the Fourth Step, the written history of an addict in recovery. It begins the novel, but quickly shifts to a physical scene.
That said, consider that big voice might not be your strongest way to hook a reader at the beginning of a story. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald devotes much of the first chapter to a rambling description of the narrator’s broken heart. As does the opening monologue in The Glass Menagerie. Both stories have to establish that the events will take place in hindsight. They ask us to care about the narrator’s regret and lost innocence. Only then do they go into flashback and specific detail to demonstrate how that heart was broken.
Yes, the Victorians loved to “put a porch” on the front of a novel. For example, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…yada yada.” But that’s a tough sell nowadays. My apologies to Nick Carraway, but few people will be hooked by a soy boy’s mansplaining about his self-professed broken heart.
These days a good story is more likely to begin with a physical scene—people finding a dead body or being menaced by zombies. Little voice, not big voice. Blame this on movies. It mimics the opening “gripper” scenes in movies. As Thom Jones told me, “Action carries its own authority.” The audience will engage with action. An aside: Your overseas translators will adore you for using concrete verbs. Like the action in action movies, verbs in fiction play effectively in other languages. A kiss is still a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh.
Thom Jones
In the second scene or the second chapter, then you can risk big voice. Remember: First we see Indiana Jones rob a tomb and fight to escape past poisonous snakes and rotting corpses. Snakes, skeletons, and poison darts trigger our physical reaction. Once we’re flooded with adrenaline, then we see him giving a
