Wednesday, 16 March 2011

Making Sense of the Senses

I've just been reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and was very struck by the bravado of having a central character who is a deaf mute, in her first book, what's more, at the age of only twenty-three.  Respect!

If your central character can neither hear nor speak, you automatically set yourself some narrative challenges.  However, if you deny the yourself some of the usual devices for developing a character and relaying and narrative, it can give other elements of your story greater concentration and emphasis.  If your heroine is deaf and cannot use her voice, her inner world of thoughts and emotions becomes particularly vivid and important and how she will relate to other people (and they to her) becomes more subtle and interesting.

It might be stimulating to have a go at something like this yourself. Why not try writing about someone who only has access to four out of the five senses -  it may help you to focus on other resources for narrating a story; you will have to delve further into your imagination and come up with tools that may be new and unfamiliar. At its simplest level, you could try writing a piece about somebody overhearing a conversation and the effect it has, because without the use of visual signals, your hero (and you as the writer) will have to rely on other means to explore what exactly is happening.

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