If you are writing a story/memoir in which the narrator is nine years old and you are wondering how you combine a nine year old's voice with the wisdom of a forty-something author, this blog is for you!!
The best example of this is Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. I keep it on my desk at all times.
The character Del starts off as a nine year old just as you want to do. Del narrates the story and by the end she's about eighteen or so. So right away, it's a good model to show the developing narrator. It is told in first person, but 3rd is fine too if you're doing that lovely "limited third person" which is so close to first person.
So all lights are green. If you could just pay close attention to what Munro is doing in terms of narration, everything will be cool. It's a combo of young girl and this "other component" let's call it "the narrator." First, let's look at the young girl's voice. Here's an example from Lives of Girls and Women.
"Can you write?" said Uncle Benny to me, at his place, when I was reading on the porch and emptying tea leaves from a tin teapot; they dripped over the railing. "How long you been goin' to school? What grade are you in?"
"Grade Four when it starts again."
"Come in here."
He brought me to the kitchen table, cleared away an iron he was fixing and a saucepan with holes in the bottom, brought a new writing-pad, bottle of ink, a fountain pen. "Do me some practice writing here."
(Okay so the scene continues like that. Now let's look at a bit of narration).
He could read very well but he could not write. He said the teacher at school had beat him and beat him, trying to beat writing into him, and respected her for it, but it never did any good. When he needed a letter written he usually got my father and mother to do it.
Okay, notice the adult narrator voice never intrudes over top of the child voice. The vocabulary stays in a nine year old's grasp. The child is in reporting mode. So where is the wisdom coming from? Ahh, that's coming from the author/narrator. It's really subtle but what the author/narrator chooses to focus on is the key. The author/narrator is focusing on a serious topic: literacy.
So, in conclusion. The voice is the nine year old child's. The author's voice never intrudes -- only her wisdom, only her sensibility if you will.
Don't know if this helps you, but I hope so!!!
