Saturday May 3rd, 2008

Listen Who’s Talking (five hour workshop)

This workshop, run by Glenn Patterson, offered advice on both voice (modes of narration) and voices (dialogue). Glenn Patterson has published seven novels and a collection of his journalism, Lapsed Protestant. He lives in Belfast, and his memoir Once Upon a Hill is due for release in September. And, if you ever get the chance to take a workshop with him, jump at it. This was a fantastic day. He’s very easygoing but manages to pack an enormous amount into the hours.

Books recommended throughout the day:

• Richard Powers The Singing of Our Time
• Jane Gardam Old Filth
• Markus Zusak The Book Thief
• Alfred Alvarez The Writer’s Voice
• Philip Roth Deception
• Philip Roth Everyman
• Philip Roth American Pastoral
• Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire
• John Boyne The Boy in Striped Pajamas

A major theme of the workshop was the importance of voice in the story. Patterson said at the beginning that real literature is immune to speed reading; reading imaginative literature is listening to a voice.

Questions a writer needs to ask at the beginning of the process are: how am I going to tell this story? Who is going to tell this story? Why this person/character?

There are many possibilities. We talked about Homer’s Odyssey, “I was told all this by Calypso, who said she had heard it from the mouth of Mercury,” as an example of a first-person narrator using the technique of reporting. One of the workshop participants had written an entire novel in which one character told another the bulk of the story. The narrator is sometimes just accepted as a construct of the novel (not every book begins with an explanation of why or how the story is being told), but sometimes needs a reason to speak or someone to speak to.

Stories often move between describing particular moments and making general statements. We need to locate the narrator’s voice consistently. A writer’s job is to make readers go along with it.

Some more specific tips:

- Avoid describing thoughts by saying, “she thought” or “…brought her back from her reveries”. Move naturally between speech and thought, with actions in the narrative making it clear we are no longer inside a character’s thought.

- The less you surround dialogue with, the better. Patterson emphasized his love for the word “said” and said that tricks to avoid it (”he sputtered,” “she muttered”) are a marker of amateur writing.

- Always have a reason for mentioning a specific time of day or year.

Finally, give shape to your novel. The Latin root of the word fiction is fictiō: “the action of shaping, a feigning, that which is feigned.” Good writing shapes a story into something worth listening to.