GCSE/GCE English : Creating a narrative voice with Keats’ Lamia.

Creating a convincing ‘voice’ for your story is essential and perhaps the ‘tone’ of the voice generates the content because it captures the heart of the speaker?  When we hear the voice of another person, we are led into assumptions about them, and pay as much attention to their tone as their content. 

Here I attempted to create the voice of a character who is capable of great transformation, as she is a ‘snake woman’ based very loosely on a long poem by John Keats called Lamia, where the snake woman is both villain and heroine at the same time. 

 

Time is a strange animal. It’s a she as you might know despite what you may hear. She changes when we change. Grave Tedium stretches her grey long tentacles out slowly examining each nail,  straining our capacity to endure, whilst her far more attractive sister delirium makes us greedy for moments, snatching at glimpses at perfect hours, at faces we never want to leave.

I was more of a tedium girl. Days were like other days, homes, conversations, love making. All very pleasant, all very clean and orderly. I played with my visibility a little. Sometimes I was more standout as the season required. But my range of visibility was how shall I say, quite predictable. Now, I am not one of those who bite the hand that nature dealt them. No I respect what nature did. It serves me well, I was a success so far as I can judge. Yet days stretched out, reflections of what had gone before and what followed. Destiny was marked off on my calendar along with food lists, oil  changes, and dentists.

My imagination was slumbering. Don’t you know that you only know you have been asleep when something wakes you and this sleep seemed to have lasted most of my colorfully dull life.   Cute eh? That oxymoron.  I am not cute of course.  Just slightly removed; an ironic observer of life.

I was buried within the neat contours of what passed for an ordinary, moderately successful and habit prone life.  No place for curiosity in this world. Even the book group read only books that stared back at us like mirrors.  I positively revelled, no leaked composure even when I slept. A lie. My dreams were the best part of being alive. The veiling fell away and baroque stalkers moved in.