Finding my Voice

 

I remember, about 10 years ago, reading a book called Baby Aliens Got my Teacher by Pamela Butchart. My 6 year old son had chosen it. The title didn’t appeal to me, but at least it offered some respite from books preoccupied with flatulence! We started to read it and were gripped. When we finished it, and my son immediately read it to himself (his first chapter book) and suggested we bought it for his friends. Later, when my daughter left year 2, I gave that book and a couple of the sequels to the class library.

What is so good about the book? Not the story, which is a little mad, but engaging; not the illustrations, although they complement the story well. What makes it so good is the voice. As with most modern children’s books, it’s a first person narrative and Butchart has made her 9-year-old narrator sound so realistic you expect to meet her in school the next day. The cadences, the choice of words, the mad non-sequiturs, they are all completely convincing. And that makes the book come to life. It made my children want to read it, because it spoke to them in their voice.

Butchart is not a 9-year-old girl, but she manages to inhabit the character of one.

I’m currently writing as a 16-year-old (which I am not, by a long way!). It helps that I have teenage children, but I also do my research. I watch teen programmes, I try to listen to conversations on buses or in cafes, to decipher the slang that teenagers use with one another, and note how they moderate it when they speak to adults.

When Jesus preached, he used the language of the people he was speaking to: the pastoral images of shepherds and grain stores; the domestic situations of preparing for a banquet or running out of oil. In a similar way, as a writer I need to try and inhabit the world of both my characters and my readers, finding a metaphor that means something to them, and using the language of their everyday. This may mean talking less about lost sheep and more about a lack of data!

  However implicit or explicit the faith content of our work, we are called to communicate meaning and truth to today’s world, in a way that attracts and challenges.

So if you find me moving from the parable of the two sons (Matthew 21:28-32) to an episode of Some Girls, In my Skin or Sex Education*, then you’ll know I’m fine-tuning my voice, so that I can sound like and speak to today’s teenage girls.

*Some Girls and In my Skin are both available on BBCiplayer; Sex Education is on Netflix; all these programmes may contain scenes you find disturbing