The voices

There is something I haven’t told you yet. It relates back to the second blog entry called ‘How the story began’ and to the different voices that you can use in writing.

The Carlisle section of the story is written in the first person. We are in Judith’s head the whole time. We know what she is thinking and hear the conversations she has with other people and with herself. We only see what she sees; no-one does anything that we don’t know about at the same time as her. By the same token, we don’t know what anyone else is really thinking; we only have Judith’s perceptions.

Because she spends a lot of time alone and too much time thinking, she starts to call Joanna ‘you’ and talk to her directly in her mind. This starts right at the beginning of the book:

Monday 14^th September 2009

So it’s come to this; redeeming a free cup of coffee after work in a café bar in Carlisle. God help me! I must stop thinking like this. It’s not going to change anything.

    I study the back of your head instead. Head-instead. Redhead-instead. Hurry up and get off the phone, Redhead. You dial another number.

It is quite intensive and sometimes exhausting writing like that and I find myself thinking like Judith for hours afterwards. I wonder what it’s like to read it.

I decided that the Hexham part would have to be written in the more ‘normal’ third person. It will add breadth to story because we will be able to get to know other people better and get to know what they really think about Judith.

The notes I made in my journal on 9^th August 2010 having made that decision were:

·           It will give some relief from the intensity of Judith’s mind

·           It will give an insight to the way she affects the lives of others even when she is not there to observe it

·           The past can be referred to as well as the present time