The Novel is written – correction, being written – in the first person. It looks like this:
The outside air was freezing cold and ice glistened on the street. I stepped carefully down the side of the building and along the dark passage to the stage door. It was locked. A tiny bulb glowed above it, lighting the door and the ground beneath my feet but little more. I knocked on the door and then, when it became apparent that nobody was going to open it for me, banged it with my fist. Shit. I’m going to have to wait here in the cold for them, I thought. Then suddenly the door opened and Paul flew out, his hands clutched to his mouth. I sidestepped neatly as a gush of vomit flew across the narrow passageway, and walked past the retching young man into the warmth and light.
For a long time I wasn’t sure if the first person was the right way to go for this story. The difficulty, the limitation if you will, of the first person is that the narrative can only really ever express things in the way that that person sees things and only in terms that they are likely to use. The other problem is that the person always needs to be present in some way for the story to progress naturally, otherwise you fall into the kind of situation where the hero/heroine is embroiled in long, waffly chunks of dialogue that only exist to inform the reader about something important that happened elsewhere.
I like the first person, though. It gives me the opportunity to show the emotional development of the character through the story by giving the reader very intimate access to the way they think and the way they react. To almost be that person for a while. This can get a bit tiring for the reader, though. After all, would you want to spend 450 pages being a rabid sociopathic axe-murderer with an irrational fear of lemonade? (I don’t have one of those in The Novel, by the way, but it’s an interesting idea for a short story. A very short story.)
The Novel, then, has two first person characters. You saw one of them in the extract above. Her name is Elaine. At that point in the story she is a 19-year old who has very recently run away from/left home and is living in a small London flat with an as-yet unsuccessful musician. If that weren’t change enough, she is on the verge of a great deal more. A lot of stuff is going to happen to her.
Yet halfway through The Novel she ceases to be the first person voice and someone else takes over:
Halfway through the song I noticed A.R. and Harry Dixon having what looked like a heated conversation in a corner of the room. Harry was gesticulating wildly towards us, his face a dark blood-red. A.R. was his normal aloof self, shrugging as if to say ‘what can I do?’. The artist, still naked, stormed past the two men, his clothes balled under his arm. Harry swung around and began to follow him out of the room, pleading for him to return, before another coughing fit stopped him in his tracks.
This is Nat Hughes, the bassist in The Rocketmen. His job is to be the reader’s eyes and ears within the band, sharing the extraordinary experiences that fame brings. Clearly, Elaine can’t be in many of these scenes; particularly the ones with groupies. So Nat takes over until very near to the end of the story. Only in the final few pages does the voice jump between them a little as the reader becomes party to some final twists that Elaine has discovered and Nat couldn’t possibly know.
Earlier in the development of The Novel I seriously considered changing the whole lot and re-writing it in the third person. I was under the impression that the first person wasn’t a ‘real’ way to write novels. Not sure why. Received wisdom, maybe. Now I realise it’s not so clear-cut, but there are specific issues to consider when choosing the voice. First person can give a wonderful insight to the personality of a character, but it can also be very limiting in narrative terms. I hope that first person works for The Rocketmen. I really don’t want to change it now.
