The writer’s voice

One of the challenges of writing this novel is that I need to use two distinctly different narrative voices. The first is the usual omniscient third person narrator, which is fun to use because it’s like playing God: in this voice I have total power over the lives of all of my poor characters, and can dip in and out of their scenes causing as much havoc as I choose. The majority of the novel is written in this standard, modern way. The second is the voice of the author of the Sphinx scrolls themselves. These are written in the first person, which immediately places restrictions on what the narrator knows and is able to write about.

In my earliest drafts of the book I wrote the scrolls in the third person, but I realised I could make this part of the story far more powerful and emotional if I rewrote the scrolls in the first person. The shift from third to first person required many changes to the plot, since the narrator cannot be in more than one place at a time, but I was able to find techniques to get round those problems.

The creation of a tone of voice, a vocabulary and a writing style for the ancient scrolls was particularly hard. The ‘translation’ of these scrolls runs for 22,000 words, and in that section I had to portray a culture and civilisation that is virtually alien to us. Their assumptions and prejudices, beliefs and habits, manner of speech and ideas of what mattered all had to be invented. However, I wanted to make sure the scrolls were not so obscure in their points of reference as to be unreadable. So I settled on a voice that was formal but also very personal. This is an excerpt of the first Sphinx scroll, and it’s currently the paragraph that opens the book (although it’s been rewritten many times and I may well change it again):

What remains of my body now imprisons me. I am rotting like a fallen Ceiba tree in the rainforest. I have a memory of hair on my head, but when I touch my skull I feel nothing. I remember breathing smooth, clean air, but now my lungs rattle and jump inside my chest. Scar tissue that once sealed old wounds can no longer maintain its repair. To walk is excruciating, and even the process of writing is more than I can bear.

This is the voice of the person who wrote the scrolls at the end of his life, following a great tragedy that destroyed his civilisation. At the start of the book we get a little taster of his predicament and the reason he wrote the scrolls, and then he is not heard from again until the scrolls are actually discovered.

All of the editing work I’ve been doing this week has been in the omniscient narrator’s voice, and one of the goals of the editing process is to make that voice consistent in its style. But actually the style does need to alter according to the character whose perspective I’m following at the time. The changes in tone need to be subtle and should flow readily from one to another. This is proving to be quite hard to achieve, and I think I have plenty of work still to be done to get that aspect of the narration right.

Did I ever toy with the idea of putting the whole novel into the first person? Yes, but doing so would have made it an entirely different book and I wasn’t even sure if it could work. But I wouldn’t mind trying a first person narrative novel from scratch in the future. Just need to get this one finished first (and possibly its sequel, but that’s another story…).