Blog Post # 6: Agendas?! Ray Atkins Don't Need No Stinking Agendas!

The question of whether or not there is an agenda underlying my writing is an interesting one. If by agenda we mean an active attempt on my part to sway the reader to my way of thinking on one or more subjects, then no, I don’t believe so. I don’t try to coerce my readers into voting a certain way. Nor do I attempt to convince them to adhere to a particular religious belief or to subscribe to values I hold dear. I do have strongly-held beliefs on politics and religion, and on a large number of other subjects, and if I am asked for these, I will certainly share them, sometimes at length.  Otherwise, it's don't ask, don't tell.

When I read fiction, I do so to help me forget about serious issues for awhile, and I write it in the assumption that there are many other readers out there who could use a break from the bald realities of the world, as well.

I do, however, consistently write in a narrative voice that helps to convey a constant point of view. It is my firmly-held view that life is a combination of the ridiculous and the sublime, that we are players on the cosmic stage who spend our time on this world reacting to forces beyond our understanding and control. These forces can be termed random chance if the reader so chooses, or fate, or they can be examples of the good Lord moving in strange and mysterious ways.  Your belief in the nature of causality is your business.

My books are not about what this phenomenon is, but rather about how normal people behave in the presence of circumstances beyond their control. To paraphrase a famous quotation by someone whose name escapes me, we can’t win, we can’t break even, and we can’t even get out of the game. This philosophy is reflected in the narrative voice of my fiction.

In the following scene from The Front Porch Prophet, John Robert Longstreet—who lost his wife to a venomous cancer at a young age—responds to his own mother’s request that he accompany her and his young son to church. Note that he does not question religion, or God, or the politics of healthcare, or euthanasia, and that he does not interfere with his mother’s decision to take his son to church. The scene is about his reaction to that which he could not prevent or understand.

“You ought to come with us, John Robert,” she said.

“I expect I’ll wait awhile. Me and the Lord don’t see eye to eye these days. We’ll get around to talking, directly.” But they never did. The betrayal had been too great, the theft of Rose into the night too harsh. John Robert had looked deep into his heart and found no forgiveness. He knew he was a minute speck in the vastness of the cosmos, but he was the injured party and expected an accounting. But no bush on the farm burst into voice and flame to reveal why Rose’s presence had been required elsewhere. Skulled specters did not trot in across the back pasture under a white flag of truce to clarify why her transition from here to there had been so ungodly cruel. So John Robert did not forgive. And he did not forget.

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.