How close should first person narration be to the narrator's dialogue?

Late to the party as usual, but I get exactly where you're coming from Rzero, and from what I read it seems like you're doing just fine.
I'm on my second book in 1st person now, and my MC most definitely has a recognizable voice and personality. It pays that he's an artist so I can get away with him being very aware of his environment and able to describe what he's seeing where I feel it's necessary. There are certainly times where on my second and third drafts I've omitted sections where I felt he was describing too much.

My MC also has to narrate at his best and at his worse. He narrates drunk. He narrates stoned. Happy, sad, angry, or just laying and looking at the ceiling. It's all part of who he is and the balance isn't too hard to reach.

 

I appreciate the input, but the question was never "Is it okay for first person narration to sound like a completely differen't person?" Of course it isn't. That would be a very weird choice. You're welcome to read the numerous ways I attempted to explain this above, but the question in a nutshell was always this: Can the narration reflect the level of eloquence the character is completely capable of expressing, but doesn't necessarily use when speaking aloud?" When I type on this forum or in a book, I use more sophisticated vocabulary and more formal structure than I use in daily speech. I wanted to know if that sort of shift would be jarring or out of place in a first person narrative. The question in my case mostly applied to moments when she's describing her physical surroundings. I found a solution that works (you can read that above too, if you like,) and I feel like it's all sorted now, but I'd still welcome opinions on the matter.

 

What you're talking about is akin to style shifting. Every speaker will speak differently in different contexts, shifting from one style to another depending on the circumstance and social pressure: how you speak to your boss won't be how you speak to your husband, how you speak to your husband won't be the same as how you speak to your kids. This goes for thinking v speaking: How I speak out loud to my kids won't be the same as if I'm thinking about language evolution and morphological inventiveness with kids when I hear them play around with language as they talk back to me. Narration and dialogue offer the same same style shift context: both showing slightly different shades at any given time. So yes: your character's narration could be more formal in the narrative.

I think my question would be: will she always narrate in the same style? In dialogue, you'd shift styles: relaxing in certain contexts: If she's not relaxing in her narrative 'voice', would it come across as too atypical if that narration isn't... relaxing and shifting in certain contexts too? So long as you show those subtle shifts in the narrative voice too, I think you're fine.

 

To some extent this could actually develop character. If she speaks in a less 'educated' manner than she actually thinks, then it's obvious she's not revealing what she's capable of, is she? That can be a really interesting thing to play with. The reader knows what she's capable of, but the people she's speaking to might not.

It wouldn't be easy to do this in reverse, though. An uneducated person speaking as if they are?

 

That's a neat question. As I mentioned, first person is fairly new to me, at least on a full length, serious project, so there's a lot of discovery going on, both in terms of my characters and my writing style. I imagine there will be sweeping changes in the second draft to match the beginning to everything I will have learned by the end. As of now, I find that the mood of the narration changes more than the style, but one definitely pulls the other along for the ride. When she's in a good mood in a scene, the language in the narration is more flippant and playful. When she's devastated, the thoughts become shorter and have a disconnected fugue feel, using fragments and sentences full of clauses without conjunctions. Most of it just kind of happens because it feels right. I'm letting emotion fly the plane. That's part of why I hit that wall yesterday. I was off course. I had to rethink the problem entirely in order to establish the visual I wanted without stepping outside of the moment. They were carrying the dead body of a zombie/mutant thing away from their porch to bury later. She was absorbed in the task at hand. It felt wrong to stop and describe everything she saw. I had to work it into her experience instead.

For context, she has no memory of anything before the first sentence of the book, so everything she experiences, even food and music, elicits a visceral response. The first time she sees the nursery where she probably nursed and rocked and sang to the baby she can't remember, she's in that funereal fugue I mentioned:
*I couldn’t have said how long I stood there breathing in sunshine and the faint scent of talc. I whispered his name several times. “Miles… Miles…” It felt completely unreal and yet viscerally true...I scanned the walls, the shelves. There were no photographs, not a single one. I’d had a clear picture in my head of me holding a baby. It wasn’t a memory. I was just conjuring what I wanted to see, a beaming mother and her child. There was no such thing. I looked down. My hands had found their way to my belly again. I didn't remember putting them there.

Much later, in her walk-in closet the size of a small house, she's obviously in a better mood:
*She was right. I looked fucking fantastic. God, what was with this ego though? I hoped again that I hadn’t been a body-obsessed bitch before the mind wipe. I determined immediately not to be one now. How hard could that be?
(a few minutes later downstairs) Jason was at the stove, swirling a pan of sizzling peppers and onions above the flame and staring. “Wow,” was all he said.
“I know, right?” Shit. Maybe I had been a bitch. I’d have to try to remember to keep that in check. “You look pretty good yourself.” He did, too. He had the sleeves of his blue dress shirt folded up to the elbow, and his tie thrown over his shoulder. The cooking precautions did little to dampen the effect of the ensemble though. He looked exquisite, edible even.

I caught a number of places I'd like to adjust in there, but you get the idea, I'm sure.

*Nobody tell me anything that's wrong with these passages, please! I know there's plenty wrong, but I'm following the Stephen King prescription of writing the first draft "with the door closed." I do need advice on things. That's why I start threads, but I can't afford to get any more self-conscious about the writing than I already am. I'm sure some of you can identify. I'm only giving examples here to answer a question. Thanks!

 

I've heard actors say intelligence is the one thing no one can fake.

 

For what it's worth, sometimes I think it's okay for dialogue and the prose not to match.

The way I speak with my friends, with my parents, with professors, with co-workers, with a manager, are different (with a considerable amount of overlap). The way I speak with one friend from the next, in a group or one-on-one, differ to a degree worth noting. I'm not just talking inflection or tone but word choice, too.

It isn't necessarily a matter of being disingenuous-- although it can be, and my neurotic self sometimes worries about this. I generally write far more formally than I speak.

I'm not saying it can't be jarring when dialogue and narration don't match. I just don't think that's inherently the case.

It's actually a curse in some sense that I naturally write in a very formal way, or have a habit of waxing the poetic (a result of reading a lot of the Romantic writers and poets, perhaps). It takes considerable effort to mitigate this, and sometimes with results that aren't convincing. However, the dissonance with my dialogue is also a gift, because I believe it allows me to capture the informal manner that people tend to speak in. At least the kind of people I frequently hang around with are less formal when we're conversing with one another.

Feel free to play around with it. Certainly can be a frustrating element to writing, but don't forget to have fun. There's so many possibilities. Not everybody is like this, but many people I know speak a bit differently in different settings with different people, and even in regards to the subject matter. All it takes is a subtle shift to reflect that in dialogue. One can use this to reveal A LOT about a character, relationships, and the situation they're in.

 

Then they never saw a Russell Crowe movie, especially A Beautiful Mind.

 

Meaning you feel he fakes it well?

 

Meaning Russell Crowe is dumb as a box of rocks but he can convince me with his acting that the character is intelligent.

 

Yeah, he was good. I don't know that I was entirely convinced he was a mega-genius. Decent flick though. Paul Bettany stole every second he was on the screen. Now that guy I believe is a genius.