**Posted on the beginners' board but no replies!!**

Hi writers,

I'm having a go at my first large piece of writing, for various reasons. It's like this:

I've got a fairly unusual personal history, or at least unusual to be in a position to write about it. A strong part of this writing is the bit that's for my own 'archeological' purposes. My current intention is therefore to start by mining my memory without concentrating too hard on either the specific significance of the content to the narrative as a whole, or on the style of the telling itself. I will deal with these in subsequent redraughts, distorting the chronology as necessary to satisfy readers' (as opposed to this writer's) appetite.

At this stage I'm thinking in terms of incorporating a different voice in each chapter, looking backward and forward with the assumptions of that person/voice. The narrative will then ultimately be balanced around a core event that constitutes motive and resolution for the strands and their implicit synergies.

I was wondering if anyone here has any tips on handling such an multi-strand, unreliable narrative POV? How have others sustained continuity across different voices belonging to a single individual? What kinds of events have people used to account for the splits. For narrative models, I'm thinking about Robert Selby Jnr's Last Exit, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy... or anything else where the sun total of a group of narratives is a meta-narrative.

Hoping to hear, and thanks in advance for any pointers,

Floyd's brother

You might find it worthwhile to check out Ali Smith's Hotel World and Ulverton by Adam Thorpe for examples of this sort of thing. The former has a suicide as its central event and the latter takes on the ambitious task of telling the history of a village through the centuries in the voices of a whole host of different characters.

There's a recent review of Hotel World here at WriteWords.

Mazzy

Thanks Mazzy, that's great.

Sorry to be picky, but the central event in Hotel World isn't a suicide, it's an accident. However, this novel certainly contains multiple viewpoints and is a good example to choose.

Frances

Oops, sorry. A while since I read it. I stand corrected.

Mazzy

Sounds a very interesting challenge you are contemplating. The best advice is for you to get on with it, write what you feel needs to be written and then see whether you have achieved your objective.

Normally with this challenge there is a need for a fundamental common denominator that links together the parts of the overall writing - and this denominator can be almost anything the writer feels. An event, a time, a place, an emotion, hate, love, greed and so on would be examples of this. However you sound as if you have given this much thought and have already planned the work.

I admire your decision to undertake such a venture, I am sure that this is an exciting task for you. Best of Luck.

Len

<Added>

May I add that the most difficult aspect of handling different POV is to ensure that the readers quickly grasp who the narrator is at that point.

Hi Len,

Thanks so much for your kind advice. If I've given this a lot of thought, I'm certainly very unconfident about it and I find positive feedback motivating. Thanks again.

I completely understand what you say about POV, though having recently reread Paul Auster's New York Trilogy I'm very struck by the way vague interconnections can provide very fertile ground for a reader's imagination. I would almost say that finding the unifying principle behind the strands of my own narrative would itself form the basis of 'what the book is about'. At this stage I think I'd like the chapters to 'almost' work as stand-alone tales in their own right - I'm very keen to raise questions in a reader's mind, and would actually be very pleased if different readers came to different conclusions. On teh other hand I find Perec's 'Life: A User's Manual' more sophisticated as a whole narrative than my capacity to read can really handle.

But what bothers me most is that the 'voice' I've been doing for the last couple of weeks seems pedestrian and not such fun. Though that's partly the point, I do wonder to what extent - or indeed how - I am making my text seem engaging. I'm slightly tempted to put this section on the backburner for a bit and jump into another, more impressionistic mode. I suppose that'd fall in line with your suggestion that I just take the thing where it goes, but I'm also concerned I'm going to end up with lots of disjointed pieces that really don't belong together at all. I can't help suspecting that my skills won't ultimately be up to the task of producing the integration I'm after. Which I suppose is part of the fun...

Anyway, any advice from anyone that's experienced similar thoughts would be appreciated as ever.

Floyd's brother