Style change

[gauchecritic]

I realise this is extremely presumptuous, because I have been very lax in not visiting the feedback place for quite some time and am asking for help now. So apologies first.

This is the thing.

I've begun a story which has started out in a very different style to how I usually write. First person conversational.

It's not that I find it difficult or am blocked or worried about the characters or plot (what little there is). What I am wondering about is how readable it is. How many backclicks will it generate? Does it meander too much?

So if anyone could offer thoughts on this I would be most grateful. Enough negative responses will see its demise as a style (but not as a story).

Here is the thing:

Rain Story

I once new a girl whose parents called all 5 of their kids pretty weird names. Well, weird to me anyway. Well put it this way, you’ve seen “Cat on a hot tin roof” right? Or read the Tennessee Williams book? Well the Paul Newman character. Damn. What was it? Brick. Big Daddy and his wife actually called their son Brick. Now that’s weird yeah? That is a weird name to give your kid.

Sort of like a hippy kid name, like Sky or Autumn or a rock star’s kid like Zowie or Moon Unit. Well this girl’s Mam and Dad didn’t even have that excuse, they weren’t hippies, they certainly weren’t rock stars they were just deaf. Does being deaf mean you have to give your kids weird names?

Maybe they did that Indian thing, sorry not Indian, Native American.

(If it was named America after it was discovered how could the Indians be Native Americans? Wouldn’t they be native big-land-to-desertions? Or whatever they called the place themselves.)

Anyway, that Native American thing where they called their kids after the first thing they saw when they came out of the tepee. Like Swift Horse or Running Dear or Big Cactus. I’ll bet that’s not true anyway. Whatever.

She had two sisters and two brothers and their names were Soda, Grey, Manly and Court. I’m just glad my parents weren’t deaf.
All the brothers and sisters could all do the sign language even though they could hear and talk.
Small tip, don’t call deaf people “deaf and dumb”, most of the time they can talk, well not talk but they do have voices, only they can’t hear themselves or others so they can’t learn how to make words properly, besides which, dumb also means stupid and that’s just not nice. Deaf-mute doesn’t apply in these cases either for the same reason.

Where was I? Storm. That was her name. She had a stormy temper. And she was the only one of the kids who was deaf too. Deaf people are quite well known for being aggressive, especially if in groups, that’s usually frustration, not being able to sign as fast as they think and learning fingerspelling isn’t a big help even if it does show willing. That’s just as frustrating for them. They have to concentrate really hard while you work out which finger is which vowel and they’ve already guessed the word from the context. Let them lip-read if you can’t sign, almost all the deaf people I’ve met are really good lip-readers and seem to use sign just as back up. Watch two ‘lately deaf’ people signing and they watch each other’s lips as well as noticing the signs.

Be that as it may, this isn’t about how to communicate with the deaf culture, it’s about me and Storm.

Storm wasn’t beautiful, but she wasn’t plain either. Her face and figure seemed to hold a beauty that, close-up, couldn’t possibly be there from the bits you could see. She had nearly a mono-brow for starters, which she refused to pluck or shave or anything. Her hair was generally straggly, with wisps dancing where they may to the tune of the slightest breeze. She had a mild squint in her left eye. Can you remember Karen Black the actress? Airport 79 or whichever it was. That sort of squint. Just Google her name, you’ll see who I mean.


So, the question is: Would you want to carry on reading that story? Or did you backclick after the first aside?

Gauche

 

[nushu2]

I liked it

...in the same way I like B movies and xither music. Anything unconventional is interesting, for a while. Meander all you want. It'll still sound clear compared to my local pub.

 

[BlackShanglan]

I liked it. Then again, I like Joyce and Woolf, so take it with a grain of salt. I think I'd be careful just how many aside you go on and think carefully about what they add, but as a style - that is, one that can be done well or badly - the style itself can be quite pleasant. Ever read "Orlando"?

Shanglan

 

[Rainbow Skin]

You can get annoyed with narrators who narrate like that, but it's not bad in itself: it depends on who they are and what they're saying. In this the asides are interesting hooks, not erotica cliches, so I keep reading and want to see what it turns into.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

First-person conversational isn’t necessarily bad, but I had trouble with the way this guy rambles. To me, it’s a bit too much like being grabbed by a tedious drunk in a bar, and I have to confess that I bailed out even before I reached the end. Unless he starts focusing pretty quickly on the subject of his story, he’s going to lose me.

---dr.M.

 

[Varian P]

Gauche,

I often quite like first-person narration. I read Camus' "The Fall" not too long ago, and there's a brilliant example.

Stylistically I like your approach--it feels intimate, like you're talking directly to me.

I'll agree with dr. M., though, and say that there was too much of what, with a bit of trimming, would have been a good thing. While I did not bail out before the end, had this been a full-length story I don't know how much longer I would have stuck with so many diversions of such length.

Varian

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Thinking about this a little, it occurred to me that I would be willing to stick with his rambling if it had a bearing on the story. I thought his comment about the deaf being socially aggressive was pretty brilliant, and I assume that would tie in with what's coming in the story, but his wondering about Native American names, well, that just seems like a dead end.

So I did that odious thing of trying to imagine how I would write something about this, and I think I might have him go off on some tangent about storms in general and how they relate to Storm the person. Or I might throw in some musings that tied in to his memory of her.

I think that stream of consiousness might be one of those things like dialogue, where sounding natural takes more skill and editing than we would think. I've never been able to get very far with Woolfe, but I'll bet Joyce worked damned hard to make his Stream of C. sound natural. I know Kerouac, who used to boast that he'd never revised or edited a thing he ever wrote, was bald-faced liar. He worked like hell to make his stuff sound spontaneous. There's a lot more to it than just writing the first thing that pops into your head.

---dr.M.

 

[vargas111]

Yes, It rambles. I was already skipping before the end of the s\egment.

Nothink worng with first person, you just need to make the first person more articulate

 

[gauchecritic]

Thankyou all very much for the comments. It looks like I may continue this after all.

I thought it was a bit over the top and that's why I had to ask, believe me Mab, it's certainly no easier than usual for me to write this. There's perhaps even more 'fly-editing' than I would normally do.

I obviously went too far with the Indian thing. Started with a simple digression and then digressed from that. I'll bear that in mind.

So the concensus seems to be that it can be interesting enough but, like wit, the soul of meandering is brevity.

I'm very interested in why you think the guy is inarticulate Vargas. I had to work like hell to not go into my more normal word invention/erudite, $10 dollar prose to make him speak like this.

Mab, your odious imaginings are exactly the things I have in mind as the story progresses. As soon as I thought of her name I thought "this is going to be a theme throughout".

Thankyou all again.

Gauche

 

[Huckleman2000]

Arriving late, but...

I'm a big fan of this sort of style, though I'd agree with all of the comments above concerning editing. I'm not familiar with the more well-known authors others have cited, apart from name-recognition. However, the brief passage you posted reminded me of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Meggers (I think - my Mom borrowed the book, so I can't go to the shelf and find it). His diversions sometimes go for pages, and he even added an entire addendum for yet more diversions. It's an extremely self-conscious style, by definition; your readers will probably assume ADHD without some ruthless edits, simply because their experiential connotations aren't the same as yours, i.e., the narrator's. To the extent that you draw upon iconic experiences, you can really draw a reader into the story this way. Or, you can use the diversions to explain things the reader probably has very little experience with, as you did with the discussion of deaf/hearing-person communication. In those cases, I would suggest you treat those passages as more coherent sidetracks. You don't want the readers to get mired in epicycles. If you're just tossing in an aside, whether for humor, irony, or character, keep those shorter and sharper. A little of that goes a long way, at least in my reading experience.

 

[fifty5]

Maybe the others are right, but my personal reaction on reading the last para was, "google for... well, OK that'd be interesting, but I want to know what's happening here, now."

Then the damn thing ended! I was totally pissed off not to be able to read more.

I suppose it's something to do with attention span - and how that varies in different contexts - but my personal reaction (not knowledgeable criticism) was that all this rambling sucked me into the person that was talking. I want to take all 650 pages to bed and read the lot. Maybe 'deaf' is a theme... Maybe native American is... I don't yet know, but I do want to find out.

FWIW, that's a reader speaking (I average about 3 novels a week, currently nearing the end of 'Whistling for Elephants'), not a literary critic.

f5