Question: Speaking and speculation: who’s saying what, anyway?
Having realised how I can separate ‘self’ as narrator from the characters I have created, recent workshopping has helped me to explore how the definition between two conscious voices could perhaps be flagged more effectively.
The dialogue in the short story I’m drafting is relayed through the conscious voice of two characters. But these observations moved without clarity from one voice to another within a paragraph, leaving the reader with too many unanswered questions with regards to focalisation. There are other elements of the narrative which I would prefer to be the focus the reader’s positive questioning. Making it clear who is speaking or who is speculating has become essential to resolve.
It was suggested that I may address this issue of clarity by looking closely at where I apply the breaks in paragraphs to indicate the change in focalisation. Ashley encouraged me to imagine my paragraphs as stanzas in poetry; rooms into which we walk. I observed a change in engagement with the female character once I applied this notion of paragraphs as rooms she enters. The observations and encounters within each room invite the reader to move through the story with her.
Previous drafts had implied a conversation between the female character and the piano tuner, but the change in the division of paragraphs began to change the emphasis, to become a narrative contained as a journey through physical rooms. This referenced the protagonist’s motion in the action of the story and echoed the abstract rooms of the female’s mind. The musing upon her own actions or the perception of her actions by others, either real or illusion, help create endless speculation.
I have noticed how placing narrative ideas purposefully alongside each other can be likened to the construction of movements in music, whose melodic and harmonious composition provoke tension in their sequential contrast. This caused me to think again about the musical links I have implied through poetic subdivisions. I have begun to think of this story as constructed from layers of complex harmony, enhanced by structuring stanzas as units of musicality, like a strophe.
Breaking up the shifts in trains of thought by imagining them as musical movements has helped me to make sense of each abstract notion I convey. It has highlighted how much the narration is focalised through the female character’s projection of fantasy. And fantasy has become an interesting preoccupation. I’m thinking particularly about Ali Smith’s May and the layers of shared fantasy between two characters and about all the words we can use to describe fantasy: day-dreaming, delusion, creativity, musing, wool-gathering. These words remind me of my desire to create a state of reverie through the language I have chosen.
Fantasy can be explored by the notion of half-truths, fitting with the ambiguity I wish to exploit. Ashley commented that in the story I have written, the projection of fantasies, where the narrative does not prescribe which elements of the action are real and which elements are the imagination of the female character, creates rooms within rooms; fantasies within fantasies. In this instance, the structure and abstraction work to reveal the female character’s vulnerability through her internal debate.
Now that I have grappled with the structure of these fantasies within fantasies as rooms within rooms, it has occurred to me that there is no beginning and no end to speculation within the story. There may be ways in which I can express this sense of ideas circling, such as through the form of repetition we might find in musical score. When I applied Da Capo al Fine to the end of this story, I found the effect of returning to the beginning and progressing to a new narrative finishing point expressed another level of engagement. Fine.
Ali Smith May from The Whole Story and other stories (2003).
Written for and published by the Unthank School of Writing 2015/6
Carrie Patten 