Telling a story using multiple voices or perspectives – it has definitely been done in literature and cinema. In film, I immediately think of “Mystery Train” by Jim Jarmusch or“Rashomon” by Akira Kurosawa. And my favourite example in books is Matthew Kneale’s novel “English passengers”, in which each chapter adopts the language and point of view of a different person, including the various passengers on board a ship heading for Australia in the 1850s but also one of the last aboriginals of Tasmania. As the Good Reads website puts it, the various characters “come together in a storm of voices that vividly bring a past age to life” (see www.goodreads.com/book/show/14257.English_Passengers).
I have used multi-perspective narrative myself a number of times in my writing and my colleague Jane Maher recently reminded me of a good example. Nearly 10 years ago, we were piecing together the story of a group of doctors working with UK charity Macmillan Cancer Support to improve the care of people affected by cancer. We realised that there was one aspect of the story which the individuals involved (doctors and people in Macmillan) would never agree on. So with another colleague, Elizabeth Lank, I conducted one-to-one interview-conversations with each person separately. I then used extensive quotes, in their own words as far as possible, to construct a joint narrative of unmerged voices. In each version, the story was recognisable, but the interpretations of what had happened, especially where the difficulties had lain, were quite different.
We gave each person the opportunity to review their part of the story before anybody else saw it, and they could correct, expand or delete anything in the text. That way, we were able subsequently to share the written account across the group of doctors, and beyond. We got a sense that this helped people move on from history and turn their attention to what they wanted to do next as a group.
In one sense, every story encompasses multiple perspectives. When we tell or write stories, we may be drawing on many past conversations and reading. Other people’s voices and ideas have become interwoven in our internal dialogues. Nevertheless, it has proved very helpful to make diverse perspectives explicit in written accounts, especially where the aim of writing was to stimulate reflection and learning or to enable a group to make sense of their common but different experiences.
I have used multi-perspective narrative myself a number of times in my writing and my colleague Jane Maher recently reminded me of a good example. Nearly 10 years ago, we were piecing together the story of a group of doctors working with UK charity Macmillan Cancer Support to improve the care of people affected by cancer. We realised that there was one aspect of the story which the individuals involved (doctors and people in Macmillan) would never agree on. So with another colleague, Elizabeth Lank, I conducted one-to-one interview-conversations with each person separately. I then used extensive quotes, in their own words as far as possible, to construct a joint narrative of unmerged voices. In each version, the story was recognisable, but the interpretations of what had happened, especially where the difficulties had lain, were quite different.
We gave each person the opportunity to review their part of the story before anybody else saw it, and they could correct, expand or delete anything in the text. That way, we were able subsequently to share the written account across the group of doctors, and beyond. We got a sense that this helped people move on from history and turn their attention to what they wanted to do next as a group.
In one sense, every story encompasses multiple perspectives. When we tell or write stories, we may be drawing on many past conversations and reading. Other people’s voices and ideas have become interwoven in our internal dialogues. Nevertheless, it has proved very helpful to make diverse perspectives explicit in written accounts, especially where the aim of writing was to stimulate reflection and learning or to enable a group to make sense of their common but different experiences.
RSS Feed