You’re The Voice (Try and Understand It)

Something I, and I think many inexperienced authors struggle with is narrative voice.

It can be difficult to decide not only which to use in the first place, but also to realise how it can limit (and obviously be used to work for) your story and how easy it can be to trip up and do it wrong! From the very beginning I knew I wanted to write my story in 3rd person, though it wasn’t until I took a creative writing course that I really learned that there were actually different versions of 3rd person narrative. The differences aren’t difficult to understand, but sometimes when you get into the finer details of what is and what is not permissible, it can get quite confusing! At least for me!

I am writing my novel in 3rd person limited (sometimes called 3rd person close). I won’t go into too much detail as there are much better resources out there for this kind of thing, but for anyone unaware what this means, it describes narration from the 3rd person perspective (he/she) whereby the point of view is limited to one character. Thus the reader is only aware of what that one character experiences. Alternatively 3rd person omniscient allows the point of view to be ‘all-knowing’ so the reader can experience events (and thoughts etc.) from anyone and everyone’s perspective.

My main reasons for choosing a limited perspective was that it allows me to hold information back from the reader by having events occur or knowledge fall outside of their perspective until such time as I want to reveal them. Also to be blunt, the omniscient narrative has very much fallen out of favour and is not currently a popular device.

Now, I have erred on the side of caution when writing so far, but I must admit I have often found myself wondering (and no doubt overthinking!) just how limited I am supposed to keep things! 

The obvious stuff is easy: if my character is in a soundproof room, I cannot describe the conversation between the two assassins outside the door, no matter how exciting I think it might be for my reader to know something my character does not (and that for me is where the frustration lies I think!). Nor can I have my character discuss their favourite ice cream with someone,  for them to agree that Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food had got to be in the top 5, only to tell my reader that the other person is secretly lying, hates ice cream and is therefore some kind of sick demon. I can say my character suspects they might be lying, by the odd way their eyes wince whenever the gooey caramel and marshmallow are mentioned, or the eerie whispered screams they hear from within the strangely heavy overcoat they are wearing in mid July, but they can’t know it and so neither can the reader.

But where I sometimes struggle and get worried I’m doing it all wrong is the sort of in between stuff. The adjectives, adverbs etc. I might use in my dialogue for example:

‘Who would have thought we’d end up in a blog post!’ MC said to the stranger by his side.

‘Who indeed.’ Replied the stranger with a knowing smile.

Can I say that? Would anyone really recognise a knowing smile? Or is it enough that, because my character is present, I can add that sort of detail that they may not be explicitly aware of? That’s the sort of thing I get confused about! Can my reader know that the smile is knowing without my character being able to tell? Maybe my character wasn’t even looking at the stranger at that moment and missed the smile anyway, in which case do I remove all visual descriptions?! I’ve struggled to find any ‘rules’ that go into this level of detail and frankly I’m beginning to worry that the more I obsess over it the more it will negatively impact my writing.

So, dear reader, if you have any thoughts or experiences on the matter I would very much like to hear them!