Finding My Narrative Voice: Part Two

My first time writing for National Novel Writing Month was in 2009. My aunt discovered this annual novel-writing marathon of sorts and knew I loved to write, so she sent the information my way and I jumped in a few days late. Fun fact: my aunt's first book in a three book series came out earlier this month. She wrote the first draft for that very book during NaNoWriMo.

As my first attempt at a full length novel, I couldn't decide how to tackle third person. I also didn't have a story. Then my mom called and told me about my brother's recent Halloween escapades. He was in high school, there was a big party and chaotic fun ensued. She gave me the very long run down of the night and said "it would make a fun story."

I didn't have my own plot, so why not borrow one from my brother's real life? It wouldn't take too much research and it would be fun to write. The only problem is I didn't know how I would fill 50,000 words with the events from his 4-5 hours of fun. I was still grappling with the best way to tell this story when an idea occured to me: write the story in first person but tell it from multiple perspectives.

I lovingly dubbed this idea a "round robin first person" but it's called many things including rotating first person narrative and other similar phrases. I chose the perspective of four characters. Each chapter covered approximately one hour of the evening. Each hour was told from four separate points of view. So the reader (and me as the writer) relives each hour four times over. It was fun to write it this way because I could show what happened in four places at once without one character's needed presence at each location. So Nate, Julia, Louie and Officer Sloane got to tell the story from their perspectives. Then at the end I added one chapter with a fifth, first person narrative: Nate's mom.

The story is fun and cute and unpublishable. The round robin helped boost word counts but there were still times I struggled to meet the 1,667 daily word count (even higher for me since I started a few days late). So I did things like have a character sing kareoke and wrote out all the lyrics. I chose Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody because that's a very, very long song and it's a popular kareoke choice.

Since 2009 most of my NaNoWriMo projects have been told in third person, but I struggle with the perspective. During my recent re-read of the yet-unfinished "The Librarian's Assistant" I found I jump from one character's point of view to another's...all while staying in the third person. That's easily fixed in most cases. One cool thing I did in this story is I write from a first person poitn of view when the MC's granddaughter is questioning her grandmother on her past and the family history. When the grandmother tells the story and jumps back in time, the narrative is from her perspective but in the third person (or should be - I still have to fix the perspective mistakes).

Last year's proejct is told completely in third person and all from my MC's ponit of view the story is relatively simple and there's not a lot of subplot so it was easier to stick with one perspective.

Now if I could just choose a tense and stay in it...

Make sure you read Part One of "Finding My Narrative Voice."