Haven’t read it, but, is there any sense that the narrator is an in-universe character who doesn’t appear “onscreen,” so to speak? Rather than an omniscient out-of-universe storyteller telling a fiction they can’t be in (because it’s fiction.)
I too enjoy circular references
One of my biggest pet peeves with 1P, when a character who flunked out of high school is narrating like they have an MfA in Creative Writing. We get it, you learned words. But pretty sure Timmy who didn't even make it past 9th grade isn't causually dropping "Insalubrious" when describing living next to a coal plant.
Yeah, exactly.
I too enjoy circular references
Here on Lit?
You can have voices that don't seem to fit the character, but in the end, the voice should fit the character, even if on the face of it it doesn't seem like it ought to. Like your example; or Timmy flunked out of school because math wasn't his thing, but he was a voracious reader and memorized the dictionary.Yeah, exactly.
Not only are they contradicting the characterization they already established, they're missing an opportunity to do more characterization, or to at the very least not undo what they did.
I mean, sure, yes, there can be such a character: Timmy the coal-country dropout who in fact is a creative writing savant or has a Will-Hunting level of literacy, but if that's not who the character is, then don't appear to characterize them that way by having them narrate that way ffs.
"Neutral" my ass
Set in County Cork, right? Denis O’Vans is such a compelling character.
No, outside of Lit. It was a while back, when I was doing more experimental stuff to screw around with different techniques and working on doing stories with radically different characters and voices. Denisovans, aliens, collective consciousnesses, planets, normal humans, that sort of thing.
This is the advantage of basing most of my female characters on me, that way I can get away with snark, scientific jargon, and recherché sesquipedalianism.
Chekhov's Gun: If coalcountry dropout Timmy is going to use a word like "insalubrious," his uncharacteristic intellect has to become a plot point by the third act.
I don't know what recherché means but I got your foot and a half right here
I still do that to some extent, because I
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I hear you. I tend to write NT male characters. Some of my FMCs are autistim-coded even if not explicitly stated to be so. Most notably my fallen angel, Lily White, though there is also an in-universe explanation for how she is.
The estate of Douglas Adams called and want their babel fish back.
I've considered trying to write a 1P with no internal monologue. I think it would almost exclusively be a reporting of events, but done in a way to keep the voice intact by the use of words and structure. Maybe with a couple one-word things, like emotion:
Oh, I don't think it would have to be.
More if you wanted to recreate the absence of an internal monologue, it would be reporting and other non-word thoughts, which, given this is written, makes doing a faithful recreation more difficult. I wouldn't consider reporting specifically as describing events as they occur, but painting the world without explicit commentary. The commentary would be in the words chosen to describe something: "An ugly blue sweater" vs the more explicit commentary of: "What an ugly blue sweater." Subtle difference, but the first one is a report with opinion, the second is more commentary on the sweater, which falls more into monologue (in my opinion). Hard for someone with internal monologue to fully understand how it works, of course, but that's how I would approach it.
Sure, description as well. That would be part of the reporting. You could go into great detail about the dog, the guy's outfit. But you'd want to avoid something like "Wow, what a pretty dog."
I'll probably get skewered for this but that's how I felt about 'The Adventures of Augie March' - Saul Bellows, couldn't do it, could not buy into it, and that's why.
