My friend Raymond Andrews often said that there were only a handful of plots in the world, but a hell of a lot of characters. His Muskhogean trilogy and associated books substantiate this adage. He tells of the denizens of rural Muskhogean County, Georgia, found somewhere on the longitude of the Oconee River and the latitude of Ray’s imaginary GPS. His people, so to speak, are not quite real, a blend of hard-times Jim Crow Southerners and the tall-tale folk who poke out of the dark corners of rural America. There is Baby Sweets, the former voluptuous Black Peach of Hard Labor Hole, turned Fat Peach; and, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, the mixed-raced beauty who is the kept woman of her plantation owner; and, of course, Appalachee Red (Ray spells it with double “p”), the badest MF that ever set foot in any town with an ass-kicking sheriff.
The characters are fun and alive, not just because of techniques involving characterization, but also—and perhaps mostly—because of techniques involving that mysterious literary element we call “voice.” One critic, I forget who, referred to Ray Andrews’s narrator as “God as a very old man.” That is to say, the narrator is editorial and omniscient (within the scope of the history of his characters), but also that the narrator him or herself is characterized. Often Ray’s narrator interjects a “hallelujah” and other churchy exclamations. It is easy to imagine this narrator as someone rocking in a chair on the squeaky planks of a back porch. This narrative framework evokes the oral tradition, and Ray’s novels are often held up as strong examples of the revivalist storytelling tradition of the 1980s.
Though what Ray does in creating a narrator is more corporeal than most, all writers create narrators. We create the storyteller as much as we create the story. (This is just as true of so-called objective narrators as it is of first-person and editorial narrators.) We sometimes talk about “finding my voice,” (as if you didn’t already have one) but it is not your voice that tells the story, but the voice of the narrator, an artifice that is as much created by your imagination as any other element of the story.
The easy part of voice is that it is created by the techniques of POV (point-of-view), especially distance. Read Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. It has been one—if not the—most popular fiction writing textbooks for nearly forty years, and with good reason. Find any edition, they are all the same, and read the chapter on POV for a good introduction to the mechanics of the techniques. Then pick up David Jauss’ On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft. Jauss complicates the POV concepts, trying to convince you of the “prescriptive” nature of Burroway’s approach. Whereas her approach is largely “person-center”—first, third, etc.—and his is locus-centered—exploiting the perception of narrative distance to create emotional effects, both are useful concepts and you should play around with them.
But these concepts will only take you so far because they explain techniques, and techniques are tools—conduits for that thing which is difficult—imagination, especially imagination that is anchored in the emotional bedrock of the writer. This is how the writer finds the narrator’s voice—by knowing technique and by allowing that technique to draw up that hot, muddy effluent (regrets and proclivities!)—but also joys, loves and other complexities. This part is not rocket science—it is not science at all—it is the messy bio-psychological and social history that makes you who you are, and which inspires the narrative voices you might create. Keep in mind that these narrators are not you, though readers will hold you accountable for them.
Ray grew up in rural Georgia during the hey-day of Jim Crow oppression. He comes from a church-centered community and one which innovated in order to mitigate the ravages of poverty and injustice. These conditions certainly informed his way of being in the world, but they didn’t control him. He left rural Georgia, traveled in Europe and lived in Manhattan before returning to Georgia in the last decade of his life. His narrators could have come from any aspect of his life and travels, but he drew on his “coming up” in Georgia. His narrator’s diction, imagery, and rhythms reflect his rural experiences. Importantly, his emotional imagination creates the vitality of the narrator’s voice, and that voice molds both the characters and their actions. Hallelujah!
The paperback version of Tony Grooms’ novel The Vain Conversation is coming soon. For more information, go to AnthonyGrooms.com.