A Quote by Laurie Graham
I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.
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It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.
Novels are political because in them, we try to identify with people who are not like us. And, in that sense, I like the first-person singular because I have to imitate accurately the voice of someone who is not like me. The third-person singular gives me an authority over a character.
Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.
Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.
Choosing the narrator for a first-person story like 'Downriver' is a crucial decision because the voice has to be one the reader wants to listen to, and the voice has to be a match for the emotion you want the story to carry.
My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
When I was thinking about these women characters, no matter how bad a person I am - a bad writer, my limitations, my sexism, you know - the thought was, it would be useful as a writer to try to create a template for all the male writers, especially Dominican male writers, especially males of color, of how a writer can use seeing to create more nuanced representations of women.
I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can't totally be trusted.
I'm a huge fan of voice memos. I put down many ideas there and sometimes I even use some of those audio files in my actual recordings. You get this really raw energy from voice memos that you can't get when you sit down in a studio with a microphone. There's this sense of immediacy, which I'm really drawn to.
When I read to children, I try to become the characters. It's great if you can make a separate voice for each character. Sometimes you can lower your voice with excitement or get more intimate about it: you can lean forward and engage the children as a narrator or as a reader. It's particularly important that you find the voice that you want to use for each character, because then children can imagine that person as you're reading aloud. And of course, the illustrations help enormously.
If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, than don’t use online as an opportunity to say it. It is this sense of bravery that people get when they are anonymous that gives the blogosphere a bad reputation.
Social media is addictive precisely because it gives us something which the real world lacks: it gives us immediacy, direction, a sense of clarity and value as an individual.
One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.
We create through our voice, through the power of our voice. So, when a person frees up their voice energies, from a yogic standpoint, they're increasing their potency as creators, to create in their life whatever it is they choose to create.
That's always a cool thing to be the voice of what the eyes are seeing. It gives you the role of the Greek chorus and that's always fun to do.
Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.
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