First-Person Narrative Some Issues

My battered copy

One of my favourite books and certainly one of the most influential on me as a writer is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I loved that book as a teenager and I still do. The narrator of the book is Jane herself and she speaks directly to me and the millions of Bronte’s fans. There is something wonderful about the way the character engages us in her story: it is as if Jane is in the room with us. She is as honest a narrator as she is a character and you are immediately on her side. That immediacy is one of the strengths of first-person narration. But there are downsides, as I discovered when I wrote my trilogy The Healer’s Shadow.

I soon discovered that not all readers are fans of first-person narration. One reviewer told me categorically that she didn’t like first-person narration because there was no suspense – she knew that the hero/heroine would survive to the end of the book. Actually that isn’t always true, but I can understand where she was coming from.

I also discovered that not everyone understands some of the devices and rules of first-person narration. One criticism my book Girl in the Glass has occasionally received is that the tense sometimes changes to the present, even though the majority of the book is written in the past tense. This happens when the central character is talking about an incident which is particularly vivid to her. This is acceptable in a first-person narrative, because the narration is reflecting what happens in real speech. When we start to relive the past, we will often start talking in the present tense. I could play safe and not shift tenses, but I feel that loses something.

I was reminded of the problems of first-person narration recently because I was reading a lovely book also written in the first person – When Rosa Came Home by Karen Wyld. The problem first-person narration gives a writer is that you can’t jump out of the head of the narrator and into someone else’s, which means that the story is filtered by what the narrator can see and know. At the macro level this means either the narrator has to see what happens or be told it by someone else who has seen it. Some readers (and reviewers) believe that a good book explains everything at the end – they want to understand the motivation of all the main characters, they want to know what happened to so-and-so who leaves the narrator’s world at the end of part one. If you are using a first-person narrator you will either disappoint them or create a narrator whose omniscience is not credible. Be honest – do you understand your own motivation, let alone anyone else’s?

Of course there is an upside to this problem and that is the games you can play with your narrator misinterpreting other characters and circumstances: an unreliable narrator as they say in the trade. It does seem to me that all narrators should be unreliable (to varying degrees) if they are human beings. My central character regularly gets things wrong and part of her character arc over the trilogy is how she comes to realize how wrong she has been.

On the micro level there are certain things that I have learned to look out for when I am going over my books. The most obvious of these are descriptions of things that are not visible to the narrator. These can be quite minor, but I find they can jolt me out of the first-person narrator’s consciousness. Another issue I try to tackle is the overuse of phrases such as “I saw”, “I heard” “I tasted” etc. In a way they are redundant in the first person – of course I saw it, I wouldn’t be describing it otherwise. There is a very real danger that you will overuse the word “I” in first-person narration, which is just as off-putting in a novel as when you are listening to someone. First-person narration’s very strength – its immediacy – can be negated by the overuse of the word.

First-person narration is a minefield for the writer. As I have outlined above, you will alienate some of readers just by using it, and others you will upset because of the limitations of the first-person narrative. There are even some agents who refuse to accept manuscripts written in the first person, but then some of the most successful books ever written recently and in the past have had a first-person narrator.

What Magic Realism Means to Me

I am running a magic realism bloghop again this year. Some twenty blogs are signed up to take part and if last year’s bloghop is anything to go by, there will be some fascinating posts.

Over on the Magic Realism Books blog I have scheduled posts about magic realist fiction available free from the web, about useful magic realism resources and a review of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which features on all the magic realism lists as one of the most important magic realist books ever written and is one of my all-time favourite books. Despite having written three posts for my other blog I want to write a more personal post here on my personal blog about what magic realism means to me.

Of course there is good and bad magic realism, magic realist books that last for ever in your mind and others that are easily forgotten. But as a general rule I find that the magic realist approach to portraying the world is one that I respond to and I recognize that it reflects my own experience. That is not to say that I have seen people ascend to heaven, been followed by crowds of butterflies when I fell in love or watched a relative turn into an item of furniture. But rather that I believe in allegory and metaphor, in imagery, in archetypes and in a heightened awareness that extends beyond “physical” reality.

For me, realism is overestimated. It excludes the profound. It does not allow my soul to soar. Nor does it take me to the depths beyond pain. I am and have always been a poet and a bit of a mystic. For a while, as a student, I neglected that side of my personality in favour of the rational and the academic. I stopped writing. It didn’t last. The subconscious has a way of hitting back and my health suffered. Unable to think straight because of the pain, my reason dropped away and I was left with only instinct and intuition to fall back on – magic one might say. The poetry came flooding back.  The result was my cycle of somewhat mystical poetry Poem for Voices. 

The Cover as Writing Aid

I find that working on the cover image of my book helps me work on the text itself. Right now I  need clarify my feelings about the book.

The book’s working name is Mud and it is set in modern Prague. At first I was playing with classic images of Prague – Charles Bridge and moody spires, but they didn’t feel right. For starters the story isn’t set in tourist Prague, but in the lovely but less well-known area of Holesovice. But I didn’t want to identify that area particularly.

One of the reasons for playing with the cover is that it helps me identify my audience and genre. For many writers that is easy, but I write magic realism which isn’t easy to slot into genres and can appeal to a range of audiences. The book is partly a psychological mystery (a main character is a Czech detective) and partly paranormal (the book touches on the Golem legend). I searched for books of these genres with a reference to Prague and got a load of books with moody spires or darkened streets. Maybe I should copy them – if it works… But I don’t want to.

I wanted a moody picture but not a conventional one. So I wrote down the key elements of the book. They were

• the extreme storms and floods of 2013
• the Golem
• Prague
• missing female
• male detective

Then I searched for photos on 123rf.com which had combinations of the above phrases. It didn’t work until I used the word “rain” and “Prague”. That generated a photo by Czech photographer, Jaromír Chalabala. I clicked on his name and there was this photo:

It was just what I was looking for.  There’s even a hint of a Golem in those reflections, don’t you think?

Now all I’ve got to do is finish writing the book!

Write What You Know

“Write what you know” is a piece of advice to new writers that can be very inhibiting. What do we know? If writers restrict themselves to writing about their experience, we would have a lot of boring books about humdrum lives. Whole genres would not exist: fantasy, science fiction, paranormal. But there is a grain of truth in the saying. We should write what is real, even if what we write is fantasy. So how do writers do that? This is a question that fascinates me.

In some cases the answer is obvious: Tolkien may have been living the quiet life of an academic in Oxford, but he was a world expert on Anglo Saxon and Norse mythology. However the Lord of the Rings is more than a rehash of old stories. The book is seen through the eyes of the hobbits. Their tale is profoundly influenced by Tolkien’s experience as a young officer in the trenches of World War I. The hobbits are the British regular soldiers, whose stoicism and good humour Tolkien so admired. As an officer Tolkien had led them over the top into the Mordor-like landscape of no-man’s land. They bring a sense of reality to the book.

Most writers do not have such rich personal sources on which to draw. But we do have the reality of our fantasies. We can take that reality and spin it into something much larger. The Bronte sisters’ novels are a good example of this.

I have three main sources of inspiration for my novels. Mother of Wolves was a historical fantasy novel, so clearly history is a massive source of material for me. History gives an almost unlimited range of themes, settings and storylines. For Mother of Wolves I drew on the history of the persecution of the romanies (gypsies) in Europe. I discovered that in the 18th century they were hunted by men with dogs and guns as if gyspies were simply vermin. Such a hunt features in my book. The central character is a woman who rises to be a gypsy queen, so I used the examples of great women leaders, such as Boudicca and Elizabeth I, to help me understand what it takes to be such a woman. As these women are extraordinary, I could never hope to meet one in person.

The second source is the landscapes, towns and peoples of the world. Travel can be a great aid to the writer, but it is also possible to use the landscapes of one’s homeland and elaborate them. In my magic-realism book Girl in the Glass I created a fictional city. The city is a large port set on several hills and on one hill stands a university which lives in an uneasy relationship with the rest of the city. I have been asked which city it is based on, as it seemed so real to the reader. The answer is that it is several cities combined: Istanbul, Oxford, Victorian London to name three. In Mother of WolvesI came closer to home and set the story along a fictional river, which was based on an enlarged River Severn and the history of the people along its banks.

The third source is my personal experience and those of people I have met. I have been blessed with a loving family and a life untroubled by war, disease or other misfortune, but for about twenty years I worked with people on the margins of society. I am able to draw from their stories of fleeing their homes and countries, of persecution, of homelessness. I’d like to think that I don’t just use them, but I am a writer and writers will find inspiration everywhere.

So should a writer follow the advice “Write what you know”? If we read, study, travel and listen, what we “know” is only limited by our capacity to understand.

Self doubt

I am currently working on the first draft of my next novel. I say “working” because that is very much how it feels: the words just aren’t flowing. Nor are the ideas. Nor is my confidence.

The new book is very different to my previous ones. My first four novels were all set in the same world, and three were narrated by the same character – someone I knew so intimately that I could just slip into her mind and voice without thinking about it. This book is set in the real world – in Prague in 2010 – 2013 in fact. There are two very different POVs in it – one a male detective, the other a young British woman – and both are totally unlike yours sincerely.

In November I took part in NaNoWriMo and hit the 50,000 word target for this book, but then I lost momentum. One reason was that I needed to do some research. This was achieved with a stay in Prague and questioning various Czech friends. But still the log jam did not shift. I came back to the UK to Christmas, an elderly father in hospital with a broken pelvis and the rest of the family collapsing with various bugs, so no work was done for several weeks.

Now I no longer have any excuse, apart from the usual ones of work and family pressures. But still I can’t settle down and start writing again. This is more than the usual problem of starting the engine post-Christmas. I just can’t work out what is stopping me. I have at least booked my flights for four weeks in my Czech writing refuge. But my plan was to spend the month rewriting, not writing from scratch.

I have a number of methods of overcoming writer’s block:

• going for a walk often works, but with floods and torrential rain that isn’t really an option,
• boarding myself up in my Czech cottage (see above),
• writing first thing in the morning, indeed working on the story even before I get up (a friend of mine swears by it),
• forcing myself to sit down and write, which so far has been unproductive,
• writing something else (such as this!).

I fear it all comes down to self-doubt. I am worried I have not the skill to finish what I have started. There is always in my experience a point in writing my books (usually at 30,000 words) where I have a dark night of the soul, where I doubt my ability to finish. I wonder whether this 50,000 crisis is worse, because the NaNoWriMo target made me press on through the 30,000 word barrier, when I should perhaps have taken a break to reflect on where I was going. I don’t know.

Will I come through this? Watch this space

The Black Dog - Magic and the Real World

As you know I am active on the Magic Realism Facebook Group as well as on the Magic Realism group on Goodreads. It is the fate of all people interested in magic realism to be endlessly discussing the definition of magic realism. One of the recurring debates is whether we “white westeners” can really write magic realism. We are so out of touch with our magical roots, that we are playing at magic realism, whereas other cultures still have magic at their centre. There is a lot to say for that point of view. And sometimes I do indeed feel a fraud.

But then I think about my childhood and I realise that in some ways I too grew up in a world infused with magic. I went to a small Church of England school, where I learned the bible stories, which were then reinforced by what I learned at Sunday School. My childhood faith was profound and I believed in a world in which angels and devils existed in equal quantities.

But there was also another magical world that was part of my childhood, one which had its roots in pre-Christian tradition. There was for example the story of the Black Dog. The dog was said to have eyes of fire and be huge in size. It was a supernatural beast, the sight of which foretold death. A hound of hell. Those of you familiar with British folktale will know that the black dog appears all over the British Isles and probably dates back to the days of Herne and the Wild Hunt. Alan Garner features the Hunt in his Brisingamen books. Our town had its own black dog, which sometimes could be seen on Sudeley Hill. Perhaps it is not by accident that hill is also the location of a prehistoric trackway. As children my sister and I believed in the black dog, so much so that on one occasion my sister became hysterical when she thought she saw it at the window. That was about fifty years ago now.

I haven’t heard talk of the black dog for many years. But that doesn’t mean that the myth has died, merely that it has morphed. What you get now in Gloucestershire and indeed in other areas where the black dog once roamed are sighting of big cats – usually described as black, presumably pumas. Take this account on the BBC – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-16760599

38 sightings of big cats were reported to the Gloucestershire police in four years, and no doubt many more went unreported. I even know someone who claims to have seen the beast. What is going on here? Is it that we are trying to apply a modern realist interpretation (escaped captive animal) to ancient magic?  Maybe you only have to scratch the surface of modern realism to find the magical hiding underneath.

Winner - EPIC Ebook awards

My poem for voices Fool’s Paradise has won the best Poetry Book category in the EPIC (The Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition) ebook awards. 

Blurb:Three travellers meet a fool and his dog on the road to a great city. This long poem for multiple voices follows the divine fool and his companions on a journey to hell itself.