Gray - Happy to have been the occasion of usefulness. I think that many times, just the act of articulating a writing problem so that someone else will really understand it is what makes the solution clear. I mean, I didn’t say anything much, really. You did it all yourself.

As for revision… suffice it to say I’ve tried everything up to and including having the local equivalent of Tolstoy novelize his memoirs in-world. She is fascinated, and she has the right agenda, but it doesn’t work - and not just because I ain’t no Tolstoy.

There’s not really a lot of point in going into deeper detail on that particular work, but a couple of more general thoughts are coming out of this:

1) There’s a distinction between making the character do what I want (in the story) and making them do what I want (in recounting it). In the former case, I can sort of manipulate them by making different things happen around them - plot control. The latter is much harder to manipulate without changing who they are.

Therefore, it seems to follow that by changing my vision of why my viewpoint character would be telling the story afterwards, I ought to be able to monkey with the manner of the telling. H’mmm! I’m not sure how they’d dodge that.

2) I also now wonder if I’m not blaming the wrong thing. Maybe the granularity and handwave-level at which my plot and larger world make sense, is just much coarser than the one at which my narrator makes sense of life. In that case, the problem would simply be that I couldn’t have both that sort of world and that sort of viewpoint character - that it is, frankly, too insubstantial to take his weight.

So he necessarily reacts by only engaging properly with those aspects of his world which have enough ‘there’ there… Oh dear. That has a horrid plausibility about it. Perhaps I need to start building that world anew, this time from him outwards.

Implicit frame-story manipulation of first-person telling - check. Providing first-person narrator with the right sort of footing for the kind of viewpoint I want him to have - check.

I must go away with these tools and think about what I could do with them. Thank you. Even if the tale in question remains stuck, this has been extraordinarily useful.

My favorite first-person viewpoint story is told by this 16yr old kid who discovers hes a Prince. That was a lot of fun, except he’s a nerd and he likes history so there’s pages of his kingdom’s history as he learns it. It’s sort of like a history book told from first person. *I* think it’s interesting.

Chicoy - You’re right - education and social class affect a character’s syntax and word choice and speech patterns a lot. Impoverished peasants aren’t really any easier than princesses in that regard, though. It’s the distance from your own natural voice (and from whatever social class of character you’re used to writing) that makes it hard. Which is all to the good, in my opinion; I am very much in favor of stretching!

The protagonist of one of my favourite Unfinished Tales is a fair raconteur and writes a good memoir - in his world, it would be pure dynamite. When I hit his voice in the course of a flippant Usenet posting, and found the gates of story flung open in consequence, I was delighted.

I was somewhat less delighted several months later, when I discovered that though I was trying to write a Subverted Fantasy Trilogy, he was at best writing something a lot more like Cider with Rosa Lugburz. The angle of attack is all wrong for a reader who lives outside the fiction.

I know what the problem is - I created the guy as a narrative viewpoint, and I got his narrative agenda for free. The one is essential, and the other is essentially a pain in the posterior. But I still don’t know how to get one without the other.