How do you tell a Story?

A Lesson from V.E.Day

I’m writing this on Friday 8th May, the 75th anniversary of V.E day. The news is full of heart-warming stories: virtual street parties, social distance dancing, music, home-made bunting. It’s good to hear people still want to commemorate these events in history. The story of world war two is still a huge part of the national consciousness – witness the huge popularity of novels set in that era – and in these precarious days we are all anxious for stories of how people made the best of challenging times.

 But it set me thinking how we tell stories. The narrative of the last war is made up of a huge number of different threads – the perspectives of ex soldiers, politicians, civilians, children, parents – all woven together to form a complex and highly nuanced whole. The more we read and hear from different viewpoints, the more we can build up our own picture of events.

I am currently reading ‘Hamnet’ by the wonderful Maggie O’Farrell. Maggie has a unique way of telling stories: inhabiting different viewpoints (even that of an Italian plague-carrying flea) ranging backwards and forwards through time, observing the world through different perspectives from that of detached observer to a close third person. Yet all these story-telling methods are stitched together in a satisfying and compelling whole.

 A reader once criticised me for introducing a new viewpoint two thirds of the way through my novel (did she calculate that I wonder) and for a while I felt anxious that I was asking too much of my readers. Yet in life, as these varied world war two testimonies show, we build up stories through a variety of perspectives and narratives. Sophisticated readers can cope with that, and find it a realistic way of presenting a narrative, allowing us to become invested in a story which we too have a viewpoint on.