And they're texting their friends a running commentary of the lecture. They're googling a reference they're writing a sentence of a new story that pops into their head because of something he said-they're checking out the new Creative Writing website to look at the assessment criteria he has just mentioned. Surprised, hurt even, they say they are listening.

The lecturer at the front of the hall rails against what he calls such antisocial behaviour, admonishing them to close their laptops, pull the plugs out of their ears, turn off their mobiles and concentrate on the monotask at hand. They can flip over to playing a game too when bored. They are also listening to the lecture, looking at the power point slides, slouching in front of a laptop which feeds them Facebook news. Students sit in a lecture theatre, plugged into their iPhones. This paper will examine the complex process of writing the polyphonic novel and highlighting its potential value in today's multiplicitous climate. Cokcraco is an inadvertent polyphonic novel whose layers of discourse evolved during the fifteen year writing process and the author's struggle to find its ' voice '. Recently, there has been a resurgence of novels of this type that play with simultaneity, contradiction, and the empty space between voices, echoing our post-modern, multi-tasking reading practice. Mikhail Bakhtin borrowed the phrase from a musical concept referring to the diversity of voices in Dostoyevsky's novels. The polyphonic or dialogic novel is nothing new. The only way to resolve the issue of voice in this book was to create a multi-layered narrative in which contradictory voices emerged to create a polyphonic whole. My novel Cokcraco (Lacuna Publishing, 2013) took fifteen years and many layers to complete. The journey to finding the right voice for a novel can be an arduous one.

Polyphonic novels