Class 7 - Narrative Voice

Welcome Back

We’re going to spend this week thinking about Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place, and thinking about two things: the centrality of voice, and the centrality of storytelling. You should all have read the introduction. So let’s dive in by making a few notes.

1. What did you enjoy about Masud’s piece?
2. What intrigued you, or what did you want to know more about?
3. What are the themes Masud is writing about? What are the specific scenes she is giving us? How does she give her writing form?

I’ll then put you back into breakout groups to share. We’ll get back together and discuss:

Voice and Storytelling

Noreen Masud’s book is an extended essay, rather than being pure memoir. It moves fluidly between memoir and reflection on the big themes we have talked about. But what makes it creative nonfiction and not academic essay is a commitment to storytelling, and to a particular sustained quality of voice.

Today we’re going to think more about voice.

Voice

Thinking about voice allows us to turn our attention not just to what we say when we tell stories, but also to how we tell stories.

Sometimes writers talk about “finding your voice”. This process not only sounds like a very important thing, but it also sounds extremely mysterious. Where can this voice be hiding? How do you find it? What even is your voice? The questions multiply. And for many writers in the early stages of their careers, these questions about finding a voice cause a lot of anxiety. When something is marketed as being as important as this, but also as being so very elusive, anxiety is almost an inevitability.

One way of thinking about voice is in terms of what is sometimes called your writer’s persona. So the writer Vivian Gornick, in her brilliant book The Situation and the Story (2002), says that the narrator is something you have to somehow pull out of your own ‘agitated and boring self’, so that you can organise your experience. She calls this narrator the writer’s persona. It is the particular way you stage yourself, taking on a specific tone of voice, angle of vision and rhythm of speech. The persona you fashion also influences the materials you select to talk about, and the materials you ignore. It is your avatar through which you tell your story.

The word ‘persona’ is Latin in origin and was a wood or clay mask worn by an actor in a stage play. Apparently, these masks would cover the whole head, and the actors would speak through them to address the audience.

It can be useful to think of the persona as a mask. But even if it is a mask, we shouldn’t assume this means that the writer’s persona is fake. If you’ve even seen skilled masked actors, you will know that masks can reveal as much as they conceal!

The sociologist Erving Goffman in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) argued that in everyday life, we also present the self through a series of masks. So it is not something that only writers do. Instead, what you are doing in writing is becoming more conscious of the masks that you use, so that you can tell the most powerful story possible.

When writing nonfiction, Gornick says, although we can’t invent anything when it comes to our subject-matter (we are writing ‘true stories well-told’), we have to invent a persona, a narrator with a consistent voice who will guide the reader through the stories we are telling.

To do this, you need to make a decision about the kind of self who can best tell your story. For Gornick, the self that we create when we sit down to write (because we are always recreating ourselves) is “the instrument of illumination” we use to throw light on our subject-matter, and on the story that we tell. It is the lens through which we, and the reader, look at the world.

If you are writing memoir or personal narrative, there is an additional level of complexity, because the persona you adopt is not just a way of investigating your own experience, but also a reflection of the self you are investigating.

So when writing nonfiction you have a topic, but you also have a topic through which you explore this topic.

Voice in Noreen Masud

Let’s try this. What kind of voice do you think Masud has in her piece? Just add some adjectives or phrases to the whiteboard that you think characterise the quality of voice, or the kind of persona that Masud adopts in writing her book?

Exploring your theme

In this exercise, you’ll be assuming a specific persona as a narrator, and then putting this persona to work in telling a story. But first, choose one thing that you want to write about from the list below. Write the topic at the top of a new page.

• Why I don’t like Mondays (substitute any other day our your choosing).
• The city I love most.
• In praise of cats (or dogs, if you prefer to write about dogs).
• The problem with my father (or mother, if you prefer).
• The day I left home.

Make notes for five minutes. Don’t start the writing yet. Just make a few notes on things that you might write about.

Now think about the persona who is telling the story. What qualities do you want this persona and this voice to have? Here are a few suggestions:

confident; reflective; analytical; excitable; lyrical; blunt; teasing; furious; generous; distanced; assured; playful; unpredictable; astonished; informed; expansive; outraged; nostalgic; tentative; determined; belligerent, whimsical…

At the top of the page, write down three words (don’t feel limited to the ones suggested above) that the persona you want to adopt as you tell this story. These will be the qualities that characterise your persona as narrator.

Now start writing. Make sure that you sustain these qualities throughout the writing—don’t let the persona drift.

Write for 20 minutes. We’ll share some thoughts at the end.

Homework

For your homework, edit, refine and hone — and then upload your writing task from the voice exercise to the discussion board!