Insecure Writers want to know: How has being a writer changed your experience as a reader?

It’s true. I can no longer just read to enjoy a story. It was in reading other stories that first helped me to create some of my own.  When I read, I look to see what it takes other writers to create fully complex plot lines, fully fleshed out characters in their stories.  

I read to understand how the writer sets up the story, connects the plot lines, builds the characters, and introduces backstory.  I can see all sides of the story now that I’m a writer. I can appreciate the hard work the author did to create the story line. I learn new insight in how to draw readers into my own stories. I read between the plot lines to see if I can obtain a better understanding of how the author put the story together.

Being an avid reader, I can see the importance of small details in stories. However that being the case, I find the plot holes in storylines; find errors in logic that shoves me out of the fictitious dream as John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction.

Writers should be readers, because reading can open the mind, can offer an opportunity to learn something new. We learn about myths and traditions, other cultures and other worlds when we read. We get story ideas from reading journals or essays, other histories or other adventures.  

All writers learn from other writers through the reading of their stories. I know I do. Reading a new novel or memoir, we can understand how a story flows, how it builds momentum, how it comes full circle. Writers should be readers—especially in the genre that they are writing. Read award-winners as well as popular writers and small presses and indie writers.

Should a writer read while creating her own story? I say we should always read, if only to give our minds a rest from our own story creations. All the luck with your own stories in 2017. Thanks for stopping by Adventures and leaving a note. It’s greatly appreciated.   

This post was written for the Insecure Writer’s SupportGroup.  We post on the first Wednesday of every month.  To join us, or learn more about the group, click HERE.  

The Narrative Voice in Writing

The narrator guides readers through 

the story journey just as a trail guide 

leads hikers through the forest. 

The narrative voice is just as important in memoir as it is in fiction, for memoir is a true story. 

Writers need to think who is telling the story. 

What point of view should they use? 

First person; I, me, through the speaker’s mindset only. 

Third person; he, she, Victoria, through his or her mindset only. 

Omniscient; think God here, the narrator knows all and can think and see the action through the minds of more than one character. 

This is just a quick stroke from the point of view narrator palette.  The main point is for the writer to focus in and realize whose eyes the writer is looking through to make the story exciting for the reader. 

A good way to find the narrator of a story is to determine who changes the most in the story.

Most times, memoir is a first person account of a particular time in the writer’s life.  Remember that memoir is only a slice of life story and not the entire life of the writer.  Sometimes the writer can act as an observer of another in a third person account of the time being remembered.  For my memoir about attending college as a mother of five, I am the narrator who is experiencing each of the lessons in the story as they unfold.

Like any important character in the story, the narrator must be well-developed for readers to stay connected.  He or she needs to be the guide in the story, taking the reader along the journey of events.  The reader needs to be immersed in the scenes, feeling what happens.    

To do this, the writer must provide specific details to flesh out the scenes and make the world real to readers, details that encompass the senses—not forgetting taste and touch.  The narrator’s primary job, according to John Gardner in The Art of Fiction, is to convince the reader that the events she recounts really happened. 

                                                                                                       

Beth Kephart says, in her book Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, the narrator needs to remain vulnerable in order to learn, along with the reader, on the journey of the story.  The narrator must discover something new, something surprising—even to her.  This shows the growth and development of the narrator character throughout the manuscript.  The narrator can find the order in the disorder of story life.

This is how good authors write.  We want the readers experiencing the drama right along with the narrator. 

            Is it easy to do?  Hardly!  If it were, writers would have a seamless time of it.

            By the way…my “seams” are in tatters after all the comments made in my synopsis. 

However, instead of revising and getting yet another copy of the same manuscript with the same flaws, I decided to send my 73,099-word, 237-page memoir about attending college as a mother of five for a developmental critique by professionals.  The Author Accelerator group says it will take about a month to get back the critique.  I’ll let you know how it turns out. 

In the meantime, do you have any thoughts on the narrative voice that you’d like to share?  They would be greatly appreciated.