What Norman Mailer and I Have In Common – Day 154

As you can see on the right, I’m currently reading The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight about the “New Journalism” writers. It’s early reading still, but I’m enjoying it so far.

I came across this quote from Norman Mailer in the book today, and it got me very excited to think I was on the right track, emulating New Journalism. He said that his writing was “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience.”

That’s exactly how I’m writing my novel. It is a first-person narrative, but the story is really about another character. Without giving too much away, the narrator will very much influence how the reader takes in the story. In other words, the story itself is coloured by how the narrator interacts with the main character and the events.

If I do it successfully though, in the end the reader will see the story — or at least react to the story — slightly different than the narrator does. It’s challenging, to say the least. But I’m excited for the story, and looking forward to doing my best to pull it off.

~Graham