To Be or Not To Be....A Narrator

Ok. I know. It's been a few days. My job's got me quite busy and tired all the time. I swear, I'll get the spaced out through the week thing down asap. But for now, you're just gonna have to deal with back-to-back days of posts.

So, today's title. A little corny, but completely appropriate. I've read a lot about the role of the narrator/interviewer in a multimedia story, including audio interviews, video, and audio storytelling. Quite the debate going on out there in multimedia story world.

On the one side, such mentions as "[The Kitchen Sisters] reputation for no narration, which we think of as a sort of ventriloquism - we speak through other people and other people speak through us".

On the other side, "The most interesting stuff usually came [in other people's stories] they interacted with the people in the stories, where there was a back and forth" (Ira Glass); and, "I break the rules of journalism in every paragraph. I write in the first person, and I have not kept any objective distance" (Katie Davis).

Jay Allison also touched on the subject, expressing how he believes that "If you interrupt or overlap your voice with your interviewee’s, you won’t be able to edit yourself out. This will eliminate that sense of the interviewee communicating directly with the listener; instead the listener will be an eavesdropper on your conversation."

But which is the side for me?

I guess I will have to continue with the recent discovery of my own purpose of writing, as developed in my summer class "Writers on Writing." I now look at myself as a postmodernist writer. I like the in-your-face way that I write so that readers know that they're reading. Do I want my readers to lose themselves in my writing? Yes. But only sort of. I still want them to be aware that they are readers. That they are not a character in the story I've created. I want to maintain some of that distance in an effort to really bring to light some of the ideas and thoughts my stories elicit. I want you to know who you are and be able to use that personal perspective to react accordingly.

So, to be or not to be a narrator? To be.