Erin sends Reading Throne: “I’m interested in voice, where it’s appropriate, how much of it to use...” http://tinyurl.com/2vtl6w

Folks: I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic of voice that Erin has presented. This piece, Reading Throne, offers a wonderful example for study of use of voice in storytelling. 

What is the voice the reporter uses?
What are some examples of voice (versus information) carrying the story?

STRUCTURE in READING THRONE

Folks—while voice is the obvious learning point in Reading Throne, there are also interesting issues of structure.
As you see, the reporter uses the classic narrative device of chapters. Interesting topic. When do chapters work, and when do they not?

One of the biggest pitfalls in narrative pieces by less-than-skilled writers is the notion that if you have a long piece, you can ipso facto divide it into “chapters,” and that will somehow magically move the story along.  That is simply not true. The “chapters” have to be skillfully thought out and constructed so that each one is a self-contained unit performing a specific story-telling function within the larger frame of the story.

In some chapter stories, the units are kind of like juggling balls—you can literally place one unit in position one, another in position five, the top at the end, the end in the middle, etc., and still have an integrated and thoroughly logical read.

In Reading Throne, that isn’t the case. Notice how the writer uses very specific interlocking mechanisms between chapters to link the one to the one before it—and how the story is rooted in the uber-chronology (Zach dies, Zach’s parents want to do something for a memorial, Zach’s parents go to the principal for help, the principal goes to the carpenter, the carpenter builds, the kids sit....)

A beautifully done “juggling ball” chapter story is one of Liam’s, the War at Home (http://tinyurl.com/2sapaj), in which the chapters could easily be moved around without losing the narrative hit.  Each one is a self-contained unit, but the forward motion of the story isn’t rooted in an uber-chronology. Instead, the writer uses a scatter shot of scenes whose back-and-forth-and-all-around serves to reflect the fractured mind of the soldier. (a chronology emerges, but it is not the core unifier).

Thoughts on Reading Throne?
War at Home?
The use of chapters as a storytelling device?
(Liam had some interesting comments on the building of that story, which I have posted in Stories to Read.)

Mary Ann - 30 December 2007 08:46 AM

Folks: I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic of voice that Erin has presented. This piece, Reading Throne, offers a wonderful example for study of use of voice in storytelling. 

What is the voice the reporter uses?
What are some examples of voice (versus information) carrying the story?

Thoughts on Voice in this story:

Usually, it’s helpful for me when discussing an abstract term to either provide or respond to a definition of the word before I get started writing about it. Since I’m the first to post here, I’ll take a stab at defining it and try to capture what Erin meant when she sent the story.

Voice seems to be more than simply “tone” or the style in which the story is written. It feels more like a conscious effort to me than that. In other words, every story has a tone, but not every one has a voice. Let’s say voice is an intentional tone that adds a post-textual, non-informational element to a story. It expresses a personal take on a story with the goal of establishing a consistent mood throughout. Perhaps, above all it is about the writer demonstrating his/her control over a story.

In this piece, “story-booky” jumped out at me immediately as the voice of the story. It seems as it was written FOR the children. That’s not to say it was written in a simple style, but rather it seems that’s who the author wanted her audience to be. I think her use of short sentences/paragraphs, linking verbs and unusual punctuation for a newspaper, i.e. exclamation points, are some examples of how she did it.

To answer the second question, here are a couple examples of where voice carried the story rather than information and some comments about it:

1. “The students came every day to paint the chairs.

The little kids watched them work.

Wow!  Look at Zach’s chairs!”

Short sentences. Separate paragraphs. Exclamation points. There’s not much going on here action-wise, but the picture one develops in his/her mind of this process is pretty complete.

2. “He was a good man who loved children. “ to describe the principal.

A sentence like this one is usually beaten out of us by the time we start writing seriously: Where’s the attribution? Why are you telling and not showing? Why a linking verb? But here I think she’s able to pull it off because it fits in the larger voice of the story and because she backs it up very simply in the next two lines.

Mary Ann - 30 December 2007 06:30 PM

STRUCTURE in READING THRONE

Folks—while voice is the obvious learning point in Reading Throne, there are also interesting issues of structure.
As you see, the reporter uses the classic narrative device of chapters. Interesting topic. When do chapters work, and when do they not?

Thoughts on Reading Throne?
War at Home?
The use of chapters as a storytelling device?
(Liam had some interesting comments on the building of that story, which I have posted in Stories to Read.)

Chapters, I feel, imply chronology. This happened first, then this happened, then this happened, etc. In Reading Throne that progression seems to work. I think it also fits with the storybook voice of the piece. Not that every story with chapters reads like a storybook, but here especially since the chapters are so short and their titles are written in the same tone it fits.

I am also wondering if the word “chapter” implies a fiction-like or narrative work in any piece of journalism. I think it for sure implies a longer piece, as Mary Ann wrote. It means that you have to delineate different ideas into different sections so people can understand. Also, I suppose in the good works chapters express a complete idea that fits into a larger whole and the idea/meaning of one chapter flows somehow into the next. My thoughts are unclear on this, but I suppose when I hear the word “chapter” the first thoughts that come to my mind are a parent reading to their kid before he/she goes to bed ...

Incidentially in the story of mine Mary Ann linked to, I took great pains to remove the word “Chapter” from the start of each section after an editor threw it in. At the time, I believed the word “Chapter” would trick the reader into thinking the story was more chronological than it really was. I still think this is the case.