Your Inner Dialogue

what's your POV?

I’ve started narrating my first audiobook. I didn’t want to wreak havoc on anyone else’s story, so I’m narrating my own. It’s taken me a while to get going, but I want to make sure all the tech stuff is really dialed in before I start spending serioustime on narrating and editing. I think I’m almost there. Needless to say I’m kind of tired of re-reading the first few chapters over and over, but I’ll get past the beginning soon enough.

This project got me thinking of narration in a broader sense. Assuming you aren’t one of those people who doesn’t have an inner voice (I KNOW! When I first heard there are people who don’t have an inner self admonishing them all the time I was like, oh, what lucky effing bastards!), does your voice happen in, like, real time, or is it more like a narrator?

Sometimes my inner voice slips into narration mode. Sometimes I even “write” out my inner voice. Like, I think thoughts as if I were going to write them down. And now I am thinking this might not make sense to normal people. Like that. Good lord, I hope this makes sense. At least just a little?

I wonder if slipping into narration mode is some kind of coping mechanism. It puts distance between what is happening/what is being felt, and the inner me. Like, maybe if things are too much, I narrate my way through instead of fully experiencing whatever it is.

If you’re a writer or an avid reader, you might be familiar with the different types of POV. There’s first and third (most common), omniscient (difficult to pull off). I’ve written five books in first person, and now four in third person. But other than that distinction, I’ve never given narrative distance much thought until recently. Something can be narrated with very little inner insight, sticking to the action or plot elements. Or something can have close narration, where you are informed about much more of the character’s inner landscape. I wonder if my inner dialogue modulates narrative distance based on stress, subject matter, intensity, etc.

As for my actual book narration … we’ll see how it turns out. A million years ago in college, I got high praise for the late-night jazz program I did for my university’s NPR station so I’m not terrible at voice overs. But I never had to come up with voices for old ladies, New York thugs, or grumpy police detectives.

What does your inner dialogue, your inner narration, sound like? I’d really like to know. We don’t necessarily have to discuss what it’s telling us; that is a topic for a whole other day and honestly, I’m not sure we want to go there!

A very good book

Big thank you to my Aunt Deepti for recommending Metzger’s Dog by Thomas Perry. I’d never heard of it—or him—before last week. But my favorite author, Carl Hiaasen, wrote a short introduction for the book so I was curious. I checked out the audiobook from the library.

This book is one of the funniest, most ridiculous, most clever books I’ve read in a long time. I’m not quite done yet, but I don’t expect to be disappointed coming into the home stretch. If you like political satire and over-the-top characters, do yourself a favor and check it out. (FYI - this book is written in omniscient POV and I think does a pretty good job at it.)

A very good video

I’ve known about Ólafur Arnalds for a while, but never really got into his stuff before. Well, this video changed everything. While searching for some good music to work by, I stumbled on this. Now I am in love. With Ólafur and Iceland.

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