Flash Fiction Friday - Shroud

There is an angel there in the gathering dark, hovering over my bed, watching over me. That's what Momma always told me. Momma believed, believed hard, wanted to see but couldn't and still believed.

Me, I've seen her perched there, all white and cold like death. Funny how you expect something different from what you get. Momma expected to see her and didn't see, and I expected an angel. Maybe she watches over me for protection, or maybe she's just there waiting. If you look closely, she's smiling, but it's not what I'd rightly call beatific, no ma'am. I've seen that smile before. Turkey buzzards grin too, when they're waiting for a body to die.

She never says anything, so I leave her be, but I'm thinking she's not an angel. What sort of angel watches over a bed anyway? I've done some things in that bed Momma wouldn't approve of, but the angel sure seemed to like it.

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I don't really want to talk about thought process this week. I'd like to talk about voice. There's a fine line between writing in a voice and writing the way people talk. Sure, in dialogue you want to write how people talk (unless you're writing something stylized) and you can get away with a lot there. No one expects all dialogue to be perfect grammar; in fact, if it is people may be thrown off.

But personal narrative is slightly different. You're not "speaking" per se, but you are writing something in a definite voice. Sometimes, authors write in the style of a tale told or written; in other words, as if the character doing the narration was either telling or writing the story. Huckleberry Finn is a classic example of this, but Twain used the same technique in numerous works. But where do you draw the line? Unless you're writing stream-of-consciousness, there is a difference between the character talking and the character's voice of narration.

I strive, in my blog, to have a voice, but not to write like I talk, because I don't talk in perfect grammar at all times. I leave words out. I mumble. I correct myself or repeat myself. All these things might work in dialogue, if I were writing this blog as an extended play or something, but I don't feel they work for prose. I may ramble, but I do look over things I write and touch them up. I try not to kill any immediacy, but let's face it, unless I live-blog, I'm writing after the fact and I've internalized and am now regurgitating. Nothing wrong with that. It's part of the process. Personally, I don't care for things which are written exactly the way the author speaks.

This all comes up because I had a bit of trouble deciding where to draw the line in this particular piece. In the end, I made it fairly grammatical with a touch of folksy charm, rather than writing it as I would if I expected someone to read it as a monologue. I left in some things which in a scholarly paper I'd take out, and I added some things which I might leave out in dialogue. It's an interesting exercise. Writing in a voice, but not writing dialogue, is good for character development too. The way a character narrates can tell you a lot about them, even if they don't reveal any internal monologue at all.

Okay, enough of the writers' workshop. As always, head over to Flash Fiction Friday to see all the other excellent submissions. The quality of work and the different ideas are really mind-blowing. And I'm sure someone will have written something more pornographically inclined as well, since mine of late have lacked a certain element of the more-than-risqué.