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LITERATURE
DO SOME RESEARCH
"The Other Writer" BY: MARYSSA ORTA
Authors write the story, but a narrator tells the story. There are plenty of stories where the narrator is “other” from the author---times when both authors and narrators have different genders, backgrounds, sexualities, etc. We’ve had women like Donna Tartt who uses a male voice to tell her first-person stories, and we’ve had men like Charles Dickens who uses a female narrator. We've also had Kathryn Stockett’s Help, a story told in the first-person view of black women told by a white woman. Ultimately, the author and narrator are not one but compliment each other through synergy to tell a story. So, should authors avoid writing in a voice that isn’t theirs? Well, no, and yes. No, because how else would we get such a great array of stories? If authors were limited to their own experiences then genres such as horror, fantasy, and sci-fi wouldn’t
