Humans are a social species, and what that really means for our society for the last 80 thousand years or so is that we’re a vocal species. We talk constantly. We frequently talk out of necessity – from a need for information, acknowledgment of instructions, informing others of danger, and so on – but conversations that we enjoy the most are centered around arguing and storytelling. These kinds of talking translate into two fields of study (with a fair amount of overlap) that we work with in English classes: rhetoric and narrative. Rhetoric is a complicated field of study with lots of rules and schools and scholarly schisms that I don’t have the degree to get into – I’ll leave that to Jack, Eric and Ryan to hash out when they feel like getting into a drawn out debate. Narrative, though, is a frustratingly diverse concept that stymies the writers of everything from novels to haiku – and that’s what I’ll be talking about here.
Think of your friend who tells great stories. Everyone has one of these friends. He’s the guy who makes his anecdote about going to the mall on Christmas Eve into a forty-five minute tale that is alternately hilarious and harrowing, enthralling throughout, endlessly amusing and worthy of reiteration for years to come. She’s the girl whose stories about high school make you choke with laughter and burn with shame, effortlessly plunging you into memories of your own high school experience. These are the friends who never lamely wind down from a monologue with “well, I guess you had to be there,” because listening to them talk convinces you that you were there. These people are blessed with an unusual (sometimes learned, sometimes native) understanding of narrative. All that narrative really means (literally, when you get down to the Latin root) is “to recount.”
So how do you make narrative work in your writing? Well, there are lots of ways - there are all kinds of different voices and perspectives and chronologies that you can get into in order to make your work work, the trick is figuring out what works for your specific piece.
One of my favorite examples of the power of narrative experimentation is Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction is a wonderfully entertaining movie, but only because of the non-linear storytelling – if you watch the whole thing chronologically (maybe leaving the Christopher Walken scene as a flashback instead of the start of the film) Pulp Fiction is actually really boring. There’s no mystery to it, everything (except for the freaks in the pawn shop) makes sense and you end up with a pretty dull day-in-the-life flick with Butch as an interloping antagonist. But because Tarantino screwed with the order you end up with an intense ball of oddities an a wide range of intriguing antiheroes whose lives touch on and affect each other as a result of divergent motivation and the unifying element of Marcellus Wallace.
Now, just because it works for Tarantino and Pulp Fiction doesn’t mean that non-linear storytelling will work for your short story (or your poem, or your essay, or even other Tarantino films – his biggest critics in the last few years have been complaining that he’s come to rely on the non-linear gimmick to tell stories that are dull even when they are chopped to pieces.)
But if your work is missing something, consider what might happen if you re-order chapters or pieces to present aspects of your characters outside of the chronology of their story. It won’t work for everything, but it will make you consider what works in the story you’ve got, and what you need to add some more polish to.
But linearity is only one tiny aspect of narrative. Voice is a bigger part, and a more complicated one. We’ve all heard about the first-person omniscient voice, third-person narrators, and a whole slew of other bullshit that is primarily discussed in high school or lower-division college English classes. In upper division classes and serious writing groups focus less on the actual “proper” names and types of voice and more on the more literal “voice” of the narrator: who is talking to the reader? Do you tell your story through a character? Is that character trustworthy? Do you tell your story through your voice? Or through an unnamed narrator who might be you? Does your audience trust you? Should they? These are the questions that really matter when you’re working on narrative.
One of the best historical examples of this is The Canterbury Tales, which is not only written by Chaucer but is also narrated by the character of Chaucer the Pilgrim, and the potential distance between Chaucer the author and the character of Chaucer the Pilgrim has been the subject of Academic debate for centuries, with good reason: Chaucer the narrating Pilgrim is untrustworthy as a narrator which casts interesting light on the stories he tells in the Tales that might otherwise be devoid of interest (especially the essentially stolen tales that feature virtually no changes from their folklore origins) and gives the whole work a wonderful recounting air – by including himself as a character Chaucer tells his audience “I was there, so listen and hear what I saw” and by making his character untrustworthy (but more trustworthy than the other narrators in the tales) he creates drama and intrigue in a very contrived frame story.
But looking back over this blog so far I see that I’ve said a lot of words without saying very much about writing, so I guess I’m going to break off now, leaving you with a condensed history and definition of narrative, and I’ll be back next Sunday with some actual advice for you about making narrative work in your writing.
Thanks for reading, sorry I’m late, and I’ll see you next week.
Cheers,
Alli
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