Greetings, all. I've finally found time to sort through these threads, and, bigger head still a bit swollen with pride, I thought I might add a couple of thoughts, particularly about the matter of the narrator's "voice."
Cole writes: we try hard not to make the voice our own, not to slip into speech patterns we use.
This would be especially true if the "voice" belonged to a serial killer, a NASCAR driver, or a beautician on the lam -- none of which I have ever been (although I once put on make-up). Nothing kills a story more quickly than a narrator who doesn't sound authentic, or at least well-researched.
But in every story I've submitted to this site, no matter how much braver, funnier, sexier, and younger he is than I am in reality, the narrator's "voice" is in so many ways my own. If it works for the reader -- if Aidan ("Fifteen") or Miguel ("Still Life w/Three Boys") are worth spending time with -- then I suppose I can live with the ugly truth that I'm an extremely self-absorbed writer taking the good habit of recycling to extremes. I actually sort of talk like they do in real life, and I'm simply channeling myself when I write them.
I once asked a basketball player I coached what he thought his biggest weakness was: "my strength," he answered. "My biggest weakness is my strength." Now, out of the mouths of babes and all, and I don't think he was getting Zen on me, but in a way he captured what I sometimes think about my fiction: its biggest weakness is its strength, that is, my narrators are all so terribly verbal that they tend to overwhelm the storyline. They can't seem to get out of their own way.
Maybe I ought to write a gay NASCAR story -- at least all the drivers would be past the age of consent. But I don't know where the camshaft is, and I don't drink milk.
