Jacques Strauss's Blog - Posts Tagged "narration"
Writing from the perspective of a child
A friend and I were having a discussion about writing from the perspective of a child. ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I hate it.’ Turns out what he actually hates are books written in the voice of a child. This is a different thing entirely. Loads of books are narrated by an adult from the perspective of a child (including er … mine). But since then I’ve been working on a short story that’s written in the voice of a child, and I’m trying to figure out what it is that I don’t like about it. I’ve made a list:
Implausibility: anyone who has spoken to a child, particularly a very young child knows that they’re incapable of maintaining a narrative. I might believe a sentence, even a paragraph, but after a page I simply cannot suspend disbelief and accept that I am ‘listening’ to a child. It’s almost an ontological problem in that I don’t believe in the existence of the narrator. Furthermore even if the writer does a very, very fine job of imitating a child, there will almost inevitably come a point where something rings false; a word or a phrase or a thought will be wrong or very difficult to attribute to a child. Every child narrator becomes exceptional, a prodigy.
Freedom of voice: If you decided to write from the perspective of a child (as an adult) you have a lot of options. You can, for portions of the text, slip into the voice of a child. . Alternatively you can use a heightened form of mimicry (when adopting the child’s voice) to mock the perspective of a child – which is fun – I mean who doesn’t like mocking children? All of these ‘voices’ are still available to you. If you want to say something astute or witty or adult, you can do it; you don’t have to find a way to crowbar it into the text to make is plausible. That’s why in Joyce’s ‘Portrait of an Artist as a young man’ you can have this sentence, “When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold,” followed not long after by this one, “The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light.”
It’s why we have babysitters: Look, there is a reason we have babysitters in the world. And that reason is that we do not want to listen to children all the time. So I really don’t want to spend a whole book with a child when it’s the child telling the story.
It’s cloying: Lots of books in the voice of a child eventually become cloying. That’s probably because we can’t get over the fact that it’s actually an adult narrating. There is an implied adult narrator – so you can’t get over the fact that it’s basically someone doing baby-talk, which is creepy and sick-making.
Anyway, I will persist with my short story but if you have any advice or thoughts on this that you’d care to share, I’d love to hear from you.
Implausibility: anyone who has spoken to a child, particularly a very young child knows that they’re incapable of maintaining a narrative. I might believe a sentence, even a paragraph, but after a page I simply cannot suspend disbelief and accept that I am ‘listening’ to a child. It’s almost an ontological problem in that I don’t believe in the existence of the narrator. Furthermore even if the writer does a very, very fine job of imitating a child, there will almost inevitably come a point where something rings false; a word or a phrase or a thought will be wrong or very difficult to attribute to a child. Every child narrator becomes exceptional, a prodigy.
Freedom of voice: If you decided to write from the perspective of a child (as an adult) you have a lot of options. You can, for portions of the text, slip into the voice of a child. . Alternatively you can use a heightened form of mimicry (when adopting the child’s voice) to mock the perspective of a child – which is fun – I mean who doesn’t like mocking children? All of these ‘voices’ are still available to you. If you want to say something astute or witty or adult, you can do it; you don’t have to find a way to crowbar it into the text to make is plausible. That’s why in Joyce’s ‘Portrait of an Artist as a young man’ you can have this sentence, “When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold,” followed not long after by this one, “The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light.”
It’s why we have babysitters: Look, there is a reason we have babysitters in the world. And that reason is that we do not want to listen to children all the time. So I really don’t want to spend a whole book with a child when it’s the child telling the story.
It’s cloying: Lots of books in the voice of a child eventually become cloying. That’s probably because we can’t get over the fact that it’s actually an adult narrating. There is an implied adult narrator – so you can’t get over the fact that it’s basically someone doing baby-talk, which is creepy and sick-making.
Anyway, I will persist with my short story but if you have any advice or thoughts on this that you’d care to share, I’d love to hear from you.
