That Little Voice: The Outsized Power of a Child Narrator
“Things look different depending on who is doing the looking and what their vantage point is. Points of view, like microscopes and telescopes, can reveal things ordinarily unseen.” ~Valerie Vogrin
I love words, I love children, and I love the way children stumble toward words then into them, the way they grasp for words and stow them greedily away in the pockets of their minds. I love watching babies wrestle their unwieldy tongues against the still-foreign objects of their teeth to form vaguely recognizable sounds, and I love watching toddlers learn to recall words, control and arrange them, recognize their meaning and willfully draw it from them. I equally love watching older children strive to make sense of the complex, elusive, and alive nature of language. And I find it exhilarating to see young humans—so new to this world— sprinting to catch up to words they thought they knew as they continually catapult between thought, speech, and print. As when my firstborn, Sophie—an avid reader who had, by middle school, acquired a vast working vocabulary from nineteenth-century novels—believed that the word anxiety as she heard it spoken aloud had a twin word only encountered in books, a twin with the same spelling (like a homonym) and the same meaning, but a different pronunciation. As it echoed in Sophie’s mind, Jane Eyre’s anxiety had only three syllables: angs-uh-tee. It took a bit of convincing before Sophie accepted, with astonishment, that Jane’s and her own anxiety were one and the same, and always had been—a linguistic wrinkle exemplifying the inextricable link between unknowing and surprise.
Such unknowing and surprise—arising from an especially elastic and incomplete relationship with language, and, therefore, meaning—are in part what make child narrators so compelling. Child narrators can, in the right circumstances, create effects, powerful ones, that other narrators simply cannot. Of course, not every project, especially within adult literature, calls for a child narrator. Only a few memoirs probably lend themselves to one, in light of how reflective memoirs tend—thanks to the conventions of the genre—to be. As for essays, Merriam-Webster defines them as “analytic” and “interpretive,” two traits not commonly associated with children. And yet, in certain situations, the voice of a child narrator can crack open a personal story—and world—like none other.
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This is the opening to my essay that came out today in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. You can the full essay here if you are interested in how we tell stories, and the voices and lenses we use to tell them!
I’ve been talking about this essay for a long while now, and I’m so excited to share it with you. It was a privilege to write this for Assay, and to be granted enough space to dive deep into what it really means to "narrate" a story, especially if that story is true, and your own. A memoirist's dream.
This essay is over four thousands words long and covers not just what child narrators can do as well as their limitations, but also digs into many of the intricacies of narration in general, including: Persona, Reflection, Restraint, Writing About Trauma, Point of View (from the perspective of how we control the dial on what a narrator knows/understands and what she does not), and Voice.
I worked so hard on this essay (which sprang from a craft talk I gave on child narrators at HippoCamp last year) and would be so thrilled if it turns out to be useful to a few folks.
Meanwhile, don’t forget that Writing in the Dark’s 30-Day Creativity Challenge starts TOMORROW! I have the first post ready to go bright and early and I can hardly wait to share this journey with you. Here are the details in case you missed the invitation. I am so excited and grateful!
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