Le Guin Apprenticeship Journal VIII

You may not be surprised to hear that, on the long, trudging walk toward seizing control of my medium, I have once again slipped on a banana peel. I guess I'll have to wait on my literary genius certification a little while longer.

Also, amusingly, the word of the day offered up by my vocabulary widget today was nonplussed.

Fitting.

I can feel you vibrating with curiosity. What happened?

I accidentally did this week's exercise (partially, at least) last week.

Why would that be a problem, though? Doesn't that make you a genius, with an advantage going into this week?

NO!

Of course not. That would be too easy.

Some context before we continue.

First, a reminder: last week we covered Points of View, and the exercise asked for a narrative piece involving several characters. We then rewrote the piece using several POVs, the fourth of which was the Involved Author. ("The story is not told from within any single character. There may be numerous viewpoint characters, and the narrative voice may change at any time..." — Le Guin.)

And little old me went merrily spelunking through my characters' minds like a little naked mole rat. It was grand.

BUT

Because what we want is control, and in the world of control there is no such thing as a happy accident. And because we're still talking about viewpoints this week, here is what Le Guin has to say about changing voices:

"You can shift from one viewpoint character to another any time you like, if you know why and how you're doing it, if you're cautious about doing it frequently, and if you never do it for a moment only."

Le Guin, Steering the Craft

In other words, you better damn well know you're doing it.

Look, in my defence, I did know I was doing it. But I didn't know the way she talks about knowing: she uses words like superbly controlled, and really good reason. I did not have those. I was simply invited by the form to explore my characters' thoughts, and I leapt to do every character without interrogating why. I was mostly having fun. Which... not a bad reason to write, and not always going to give rise to bad writing. But not the reason for this exercise.

And at this point I begin to feel like a tiny resin model of myself, trapped in a snow globe, and the snow is a glossary of literary terminology for authorial points of view.

I'm standing in a gelatin puddle that used to be my brain.

Still having fun, though.

Masochist.

But I have, as I am prone to, strayed from the point. Which is:

Exercise Eight: Changing Voices

Part One: Quick shifts in Limited Third: a short narrative, 300-600 words. Tell the story using several different viewpoint characters (narrators) in limited third person, changing from one to another as the narrative proceeds.

Mark the changes with line breaks, with the narrator's name in parentheses at the head of that section, or with any device you like.

Ursula Le Guin, Steering the Craft

Here we go:

So, the key difference between this exercise and my accidental foray into overenthusiastic ventriloquism last week is the authorial voice.

In the involved author POV, you can do in-scene viewpoint characters, bystander viewpoint characters, or the authorial viewpoint. In limited third, you take on one mind at a time, and there's no authorial commentary. By which I mean no nudging and winking and jokes in the margins from the authorial voice.

So where's the line where all your fancy literary footwork meets authorial commentary?

Hard to know. Mostly you find it by faceplanting over it. Or at least I do.

For example, this line: "...the man takes four sugar packets from the self-service station and taps them into line." Originally ended with "like a deck of cards." But it's a bit ambiguous. Whose visual is that, Meg's or the Author's. Since I didn't know, I cut it. And it came out cleaner, I think. So I didn't put it back.

Behold my awesome editing powers!

Meanwhile, this: "As if there’s too much syrup in the air, let alone the coffee, and it’ll get in his mouth if he leaves it open too long." It's very figurative, but it's clearly an impression made on Meg's mind. And it gives her passage its own tone, the tone of her voice, so when we get to the detective's mind, it has a change of tone, less fanciful, more analytical.

See, we're doing things carefully. On purpose. We know we're doing them.

Hopefully this means the reader can follow whose head they're in (while not getting seasick) and can therefore enjoy all the excitement of miscommunication and rising tension that are the whole point of going to all this trouble, in ease and comfort. They get to know things not all the characters know, keep secrets with them; there's dramatic irony, etc. Layers. It's all very thrilling.

Oh, ok, I suppose it is worth it after all. I'll keep studying.

I am aware, in these exercises, that I'm doing a lot of what I'd call "eye work." Everyone's looking at everyone else, looking away. Glancing and glancing back. It can feel a little amateurish, a little like the youngest Bennets at the Meryton Ball. But it's practice, and these pieces are about observation, about interpretation and misunderstanding and being trapped in your own point of view. I'm going to take it as the nature of the beast and try not to obsess. A danger with studying like this is how aware of your own "skeleton" it can make you. Hyperaware.

Which brings me to a rare and strange phenomenon. I've found something I disagree with Le Guin about.

All this mind hopping has put a very fine point on the mechanics of how a character thinks on the page. And I've become horribly self-conscious. I've never particularly liked the construction "she thinks," and the way it hangs there, often at the end of the sentence, like a Christmas bauble too heavy for the branch.

Working on these exercises has meant working on ways to cleanly integrate it, which has meant I've found smoother, less ugly constructions I am comfortable with. This line ("Meg can tell the detective is winding up his questions by the way he’s swirling his cup, and his eyes are wandering toward the door.") began life as "Meg thinks the detective is winding up his questions." But I literally sat down to edit this morning, and it leapt off the page at me like Wile E. Coyote's eyes bugging out when he spots Road Runner getting away after the trap goes off. I hated it.

I've always done my thinking in italics; a fact of my origin story being in the First Person. It was a natural evolution. It felt smoother.

Here's what Le Guin has to say about that:

"Editors are likely to put thoughts into italics if you don't stop them."

Ouch. Again.

But her point is about emphasis, and that italicised thoughts are in danger of being overemphasised. I wonder if this doesn't risk thinking of the reader as an idiot. Especially a modern reader, irradiated as they have been by on-screen texts of every kind and typography.

Readers can recognise unitalicised thought that doesn't have a pendulous "she thinks" dangling from it at every turn. And italics may not shout to a modern reader with quite the same latinate aplomb that it once did. Meanwhile, internal thoughts are indeed a change of register. Can readers not puzzle out the differences without having their reading experience disturbed. For my part, I think they can.

I guess the place I've washed up is that I'm not letting my grip on control of the medium become white-knuckled. I'm still learning, but I shouldn't become a slave to my instructors (or my line edits, for that matter).

When you reach the point where you're just moving the commas around, stop.

On that note, goodbye for now. Maybe see you next week.

xx