Hi

In the novel I've been working on, one of the characters gives a long account of her life story. She is speaking to her husband - the main character - revealing that her life before they met didn't happen in the way she'd led him to believe. She'd been lying to him since they'd met, and the time had come for her to tell him the truth. Initially, I wanted it to be a chapter-long continuous statement from her without interruption from him, but I've since inserted a few statements and questions from him. This scene appears shortly after the mid point of the story.

What are your thoughts on this? How do I start a new paragraph in the middle of a character's speech, or should it be one big paragraph? I feel that her story pulls the reader along, and a person who has read it liked this part of the story most. But I feel it's probably breaking the rules of novel-writing.

KHG

I have read a fair number of page-long statements, sometimes extending to a couple of pages with interruptions, (I'm thinking of Pullman here, but even he had trouble pulling it off at times) but I've not seen one that was a chapter long. With the possible exception of a few Fantasy books where a character was placed in the position of a storyteller recounting the adventures he and his comrades have had over the years; or there's the long shaggy dog story, told while the characters are doing something else, eg, on a long walk, and maybe with a punchline at the end.

It all comes down to the old conundrum of whether or not the information she is divulging is interesting enough to hold the reader's attention. An alternative is to have him read her diary, (or have someone confide in him 'off screen', cut to new chapter when he confronts her and picks out key points to question her about.


- NaomiM

<Added>

oops, rogue winky.

To start a new para in the middle of someone's speech I believe you don't close the speech marks at the end of the previous para, but you do open new ones. So, ignoring the fact that these are very short and would probably not be separate paras, you'd do this:

"I was walking down the road and I saw him standing there, outside our house. "He was dressed in black, and holding a large black bag."

As for whether it would work to have a whole chapter of someone's speech, my suggestion would be to make it like narrative. The character is telling the story but becomes the narrator for the chapter. You may have to play around with whether you use speech marks and interruptions from the listener, or not.

I am actually just about to write a chapter which is similar. In my case the father is telling his adult daughter something significant and involved. At the end of the previous chapter he begins to tell her, with her as vp character, and speech marks etc. Then I break chapters, and he becomes the narrator and viewpoint character for the whole chapter, with no speech marks or interruptions. At the start of the next chapter we revert to her vp, and speech marks for his speech. I haven't written it yet, but have thought about it and think it makes logical sense.

When he is the narrator for 'his' chapter, it probably won't represent the exact words he would use to tell his daughter, but the reader is told the story that he is also telling his daughter.

Best of luck,

Deb

I do what Debac does. Set up at the end of a chapter that someone is about to give a lot of information, and then start a new chapter either with them as narrator or in third person, their viewpoint. If in first person, you can dispense with the new speechmarks at the beginning of each para which can be distracting. By starting a new chapter she'd be telling the reader what she told her husband, but without interruption. It can be a neat way of avoiding the listening character being implausibly still and docile during the telling.

I love monologues such as you describe - think of Nellie Dean in Wuthering Heights - marvellous stuff. Stories within stories.
I'd use paras whenever they occur naturally, as you would if she weren't speaking.

I don't see why it shouldn't work. Just as the audience accepts theatrical devices which don't follow real-life speech, the reader can accept this kind of device as long as it's sufficiently interesting. I think I'd go for it wholeheartedly, i.e. not putting in a few token interruptions from the listener. The interruptions could risk accentuating the fact that her long contributions are not real-life talking. Why not be uncompromising and stick with the device that you really want to use?

Chris

Deb's right about punctuation if you do have it as part of the ordinary dialogue - opening but not closing marks - but I rather agree about the possibilities of separating it off in some way.

It usually bothers me, in an otherwise modern, naturalistically-written narrative, to be given great slabs of speech, un-broken by actions, interjections, and so on, even if it's just pouring drinks and the other person saying, 'Go on,' when she hesitates. Maybe it's because actually we almost never speak, spontaneously, in slabs, and we certainly don't usually speak with no consciousness of the other person. Maybe that's why I'm wary of pages of a single speech: I'm too aware that I'm not being given what the other element of the scene - the other person - is doing/thinking/feeling.

Just rambling. I'm sure I've read things where it worked beautifully.

Emma

I agree with Chris that it's almost certainly better to be uncompromising and wholehearted by creating a 'story within a story', rather than half-hearted (overlong pieces of dialogue, using interruptions). I agree with the comments Emma and Cherys have made too.

Whatever you do, I would definitely stay away from writing a whole chapter as one para.

Deb

You might consider checking out The Partisan's Daughter, by Louis de Bernieres.
Just read a review which says it is made up of long excerpts of the MC's life story as told to another character.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/08/bober108.xml

Thanks for all your responses. It's certainly helped me to make up my mind, and I think the first-person "story within a story" is the best option. Thanks everyone.

KHG

Sorry this is a bit late. Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' told through 'embedded' accounts made by narrators.

Just recently I read a long short story by Jackie Kay which had a woman on a train journey across Siberia telling a travelling companion about a failed romance. It was interrupted from time as people got on and off the train and we learned something of the listener's impressions. It worked OK. I know it was a short story, but I don't see why it shouldn't work in a novel, although I agree it should be a separate chapter. If the reader is interested enough in the character it will help.

I've written a novel (unpublished as yet) in which someone relates incidents from their lives in a series of transcribed interviews and I wonder if you can do this as a diary or letter that could be put down from time to time.

You've probably solved the problem by now.

Sheila

Yes, as the others have said try something along the lines of...

1st Chapter
... I sat her down and began to tell her everything.

Second Chapter
It was a cold autumn night and the....

As someone said, like a story within a story.