I've been rereading Kathryn Stockett's The Help and remembering how much I like novels with multiple narrators. I'm not a fiction writer but I imagine it's hard enough to capture the personality, cadence and diction patterns of one narrator, let alone three. William Faulkner was a master of it but Stockett might even be better. Imagine if non-fiction stories could be told this way. It would eliminate all the attribution that I always think gets in the way of story flow. An unreliable source could be challenged by the next voice in the "chapter." It would be a huge step away from the old inverted pyramid, and I wonder if it would be a disservice in today's multi-tasking society where people might only read the first few grafs and move on. This kind of journalism would take a commitment from the reader to get to the end so you'd need a really compelling story -- like Charles Johnston's maybe. I wish I'd thought of this idea a couple years ago. Thoughts on approaching stories this way?
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Tracie MaurielloConverting caffeine into sentences since 1994. Archives
November 2019
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