Blog Post # 5: Ray Atkins Hears Voices

The most common narrative voice I employ in my long fiction is third-person, limited omniscient. In this narrative construction, the unnamed narrator knows a great deal about the characters in the story but does not know everything about them. This structure allows the narrator to speculate about the characters’ actions and motivations, and to occasionally comment upon the story directly to the reader. It is through this device that the narrator actually becomes a character in his own right.

I say his, incidentally, because the narrator strikes me as being a male in his mid-fifties, someone with a beard, perhaps, and with an irreverent sense of humor. In my mind’s eye he looks a lot like that guy right down there. Examples of some of the narrator’s asides to the reader can be seen in the following paragraph, which is excerpted from The Front Porch Prophet.

A thousand souls reside in the town of Sequoyah, Georgia, sixty miles southwest of Chattanooga. Located in a mountain valley surrounded by peaks, Sequoyah does not differ significantly from countless other small communities dotting the Southern landscape. It has a store and a gas station, a diner and four churches. It boasts a school, a post office, a traffic light, and a town hall. There is a doctor, a lawyer, and an Indian chief—or at least, that is what he claims. Over the years, however, the settlement has developed a character unique to itself. The whole has exceeded the sum of the parts. The individuals who resided there have left traces, pieces of the patchworks of their lives. A child's name. A house. The lay of a fencerow. A snowball bush. This is the way of towns and of those who people them. These are the relics of security, for it is not human nature to live alone.

Although third-person, limited omniscient is the point of view I most commonly employ, there are times when that voice is not fully up to the task of informing the reader. In those instances, I employ other narrative techniques as needed. For instance, in The Front Porch Prophet, each chapter begins with an excerpt from a series of letters from beyond the grave that were written by one of the main characters while he was still alive. These serve to show a side of the character that the narrator didn’t know. In my second book, Sorrow Wood, each chapter contains a reminiscence of one of the main character’s many past lives. Again, this was information that was useful to the reader that the limited omniscient narrator did not have.

Another example of a departure from the normal narrative is the prologue of my third book, Camp Redemption, which relies upon a fully-omniscient narrator to present a geographical and historical overview of the book’s setting. And finally, in the book I am working on now, Sweetwater Blues, each chapter begins with a first-person journal entry written by the main character that provides additional information that the narrator does not have. In all of these examples, the point is to present an interesting story, keep the reader’s attention, and don’t make the reader have to work too hard. This last point is critical, because these days, a large number of readers won’t. They’ll put the book down and move on.