When writing gurus talk about voice in a story, they are
referring to the narrator’s voice, the protagonist’s voice, the person telling
the story. And many times this has a lot to do with the author voice as well.
We tend to infuse our narrators with wit, poignancy, or anything needed to tell
our stories, whether fiction or memoir.
There is so much to know about the different narrators in
story; omniscient, limited, first person, etc. For this post, I’d like to
concentrate on the voice of the narrator in memoir.
There are two kinds of narrators
in memoir and the author needs to decide where she is standing when she is
telling her story. The importance in memoir is “what
the narrator knows and when she knows it.”
the writer, the
person who lived the experience
and
the writer, the
person who is telling the experience.
In story, it is who knows what, and
when they know it. In memoir, there is the narrator at the beginning of the
story arc and narrator at end of the story arc. In most stories, the character
needs to grow and change no place more so than in memoir.
In my case, the narrator at the
end of the story arc is the Victoria after her experience of attending college
and graduating. What did she get out of it? Was it worth taking time away from
the family to obtain that diploma?
But to tell this college story, I
needed to choose:
Was I going to
tell the memoir story as a narrator standing in the present time looking back on my college experience?
Was I going to tell my college story as a narrator with the experience of having
gone through college?
Or
Was I going to
tell the story as an unknowing narrator
actually going through the college experience for the first time?
Nash explains that a narrator in
memoir who knows what she knows presently, after
her experience, looking back is a more powerful narrator for the story.
So as memoir writers, we have to
know: who in the story knows what, and when
they know it. In memoir you have:
The Narrator –
unknowing before the experience or knowing after the experience
The Character in
the memoir story
AND
The real Person
who lived the memoir story.
Three different selves the memoir
writer has to master. This is the difficult part of memoir story. If you don’t
know the roles those three different selves are playing, you’ll struggle. And
believe me; I struggled tremendously with this understanding. I still do.
As a writer of fiction, you have:
The narrator and
The character
NOT the person who lived the tale. This
doesn’t come into play in fiction. But you still need to decide who in your
story knows what information and when do they know it?
This is not an easy concept to
understand. I hope I’m making sense here for you. It's ONE narrator then in my
college memoir. I needed to choose how to tell the story; whether I was looking
at the experience at the time of attending college as an unknowing narrator
or
if I was telling
the story in the present time, after attending college with all the knowledge
and insight gained since, looking back at my experiences.
I chose to tell my college story as
a knowing narrator after my college experience looking back on my experiences. I
still have my character Victoria going through the experiences. I still have
the real person Victoria who actually lived the college experiences; how she
felt, what she did, how she coped. But my narrator is an experienced narrator
who can infuse the manuscript [story] with knowledge gained from college and
life experiences.
I’d like to thank Jennie Nash of
Author Accelerator for helping me to understand the different narrators and
character selves in memoir.
Please ask any questions about my college memoir and share
any insight you may have in the comments section of Adventures in Writing about
the voice of the narrator in your story. Thanks so much!
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