Building your Writing Toolkit: Part 5.3 – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

As promised, I’m back with more on narrative, and this time I’ll actually be getting into a few specifics. Because I’m getting into specifics, this blog is about three thousand words long, and for that I have two things to say to you: I’m sorry; deal with it.

We’ve covered the fact that we all encounter narrative everywhere, and we’ve discussed that there are many forms that narrative takes, as well as many things you should and shouldn’t do to improve narrative in your writing. This week I’m here to talk about making narrative work in different written media – I’ll be covering narrative in poetry, fiction, academic and creative essays, and drama (briefly and badly – I’m not much of a dramatist.)

I decided to start with narrative in poetry because I have a lot to say about it. We at AFLM get a lot of poetry submissions, and sadly we have to reject a lot of poetry submissions. I want to give you aspiring poets an insight into one of the most common complaints we have about the poetry we reject – it goes something like this: “I liked a lot of images in this piece, and the language was good, but it just doesn’t say anything.”

I have this complaint about a lot of poetry: I’m not just complaining about the submissions we’re seeing, or the poems I hear in workshops, or the poems presented in creative writing classes – I’m bitching about the same thing on the poetry pages of The New Yorker and American Poetry and in poetry collections for the last twenty (at least) years. A prevailing attitude in poetry in the last few years has been that it doesn’t have to actually DO anything so long as it looks good doing nothing. This attitude is bullshit, and is roughly equivalent to cramming a Geo engine into a Maserati. If it’s crap, it’s crap, and no amount of chrome or styling will fix it.

I believe that poetry should always do something, say something, or reexamine something. Let’s look at one of the ballsiest poets we published, Ben Jefferson, who had the sack to submit a 9-word-poem to our magazine, and whom we published based on the sheer chutzpah of that submission. His poem “Eros and Psyche” goes like this:

“When Love gazed on Psyche
He fell into himself.”

What I like about this poem is that on the strength of allusion alone the nine words it’s made up of tell a story – Jefferson gets you to completely reexamine the whole of the Psyche myth (and hopefully the modern concept of psyche, the old concept of love, and by omission Narcissus) with a few words. Even though this poem is more clever than it is deep, it tells a complete story and asks for depth from its readers – and in nine words it does a hell of a lot more than 250 lines of purple verse that describe disconnected images to no purpose.

If you can maintain a similar effect over more than a few lines that's great. There's a reason that dear Uncle Walt is our poster boy - take a look through “Song of Myself” and experience not only a narrative, but an autobiography in poetry that reaches beyond the self and into a national consciousness. In other words, Father Graybeard was a master of narrative in poetry, so you should read more of his work - it can only help.

What makes Whitman fantastic in his use of narrative in poetry is his (mostly) delicate touch. Even though Whitman is a constant presence in “Song of Myself” he doesn’t impose himself on you with his voice, he allows you to get to know him through his vision. By way of contrast, in much of Poe’s poetry his narrative styling is too obvious to want to emulate (see "The Raven" as the most egregious offender) but Poe makes up for that by essentially creating mystery narrative right out of his ass, because he simply fucking felt like it.

Poe’s fiction is a good source to focus on for narrative because it is trying to do one very specific thing (creep you the fuck out) and it succeeds remarkably well. Poe’s characters are sometimes a little thin, his prose is frequently (brilliantly) overwrought, and his narrators are balls-out crazy, but just sane enough to hook you behind them and drag you screaming through his short fiction. Poe’s narration is personal because it’s trying to do one, excruciatingly hard thing (guarantee you have nightmares about mundane objects for the rest of your life) and that works best with a personal relation of the stories.

Twain, on the other hand, plays with his narrative style and voice a little more. Sure, you can hear the sardonic drawl of a semi-sleazy newspaperman bent on claiming all the world’s great one-liners in the background of almost every work, but go pick up The Adventures of Huckeberry Finn for a moment. Look at any passage where Huck is talking about Jim. The masterful blend of clarity and confusion in Huck’s vision of the world around Jim is the exact opposite of the narrative tone in nearly any passage about youthful misadventure that you’ll find in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Now look at something culled from Puddin’head Wilson, bonus points if it’s something about Roxy or her son, and see if you can spot the predominant attitude of the narrator (hint: while Twain manages to be sweet, salty, and sour in this story, it’s pretty clear that there are some things about which he can only be bitter.) If you’re looking for a golden boy in American Literature, you’re not looking for Twain, but if you want to see some adaptability in an author Samuel L. Clemens is certainly your man. Delicacy isn’t exactly his wellspring in most of his fiction, but he manages to be delicate with surprising adroitness when the situation calls for it. Kindness isn’t his bread and butter, but he can ditch the sarcasm to make a telling point when he needs to. I picked Twain here because he’s a pretty damn brilliant example of flexibility in narrative, and he happens to be only a century or so removed from modern readers.

If you want another, less literary, more contemporary, example of someone who can play narrative in novels like a fiddle, check out some Stephen King. In a lot of King’s books the narration follows the same pattern but in some (Gerald’s Game, The Eyes of the Dragon, Everything’s Eventual, It and most especially in The Bachman Books) King reaches into his methodology, strangles it a bit, and comes back with a way of telling a story that you’d never imagine coming from the man who wrote Christine, In a Buick 8, and the story that eventually became the awful movie Trucks, three pieces of fiction about homicidal cars.

Hold on a second. The man wrote three stories about murderous cars. And a story about murderous cell phones. Murderous rats. Murderous fog. Murderous governments. Murderous Gypsy curses. Murderous aliens. Scary-ass murderous clown-spider-alien things. Murderous alter egos. Murderous dead pets. When you really break it down, Stephen King has written the same story (“X” wants to kill you in the worst way imaginable) at least a hundred times. Really think about that. His books have topped bestseller lists for decades, he’s won the O. Henry award for short fiction, he’s written sweeping sagas and fantasy stories and the worst dreams in our collective consciousness (at least since someone put fangs and clown makeup on Tim Curry) and he’s done most of that by writing the Same. Basic. Fucking. Story. Over and over again. Never mind any disparaging comments I might have made earlier – this man has sold the same story to millions of people in dozens of books. He’s the fucking president of “People Who are Better at Long Format Narrative than Anyone You Know.”

Now that I’ve completely overawed myself by marveling at King’s immense body of narrative miracle working, I’m going to completely switch gears and go back to Twain. And I might as well totally turn the discussion in a different direction and start talking about essays. One of the best examples of narrative in critical essay writing that I’ve ever seen is Twain’s “The Literary Crimes of James Fenimore Cooper.” (If you haven’t read it I’ll give you a moment to go to Gutenberg.org, one of the best places on the internet, to download the complete Twain anthology that they have available absolutely free – it’ll only save us time in the end.) The “Literary Crimes” essay is some deliciously nasty literary criticism that also collects some of Twain’s finest opinionated vitriol on what was, essentially, the Twilight of the time. Twain’s narrative style throughout the piece is in-your-face, funny, cruel, and genuine. If you can pull this off in an essay for class then I tip my hat to you, because you’re a stupendous badass, but since I sincerely doubt that anyone reading this is as cool as Mark Twain I’ll expound a bit more on how to manage narrative in critical essays.

A lot of professors these days are lamenting the loss of the “I” in student essays. We’re trained from freshman year of high school that the worst word you can include in an essay is a self-referential personal pronoun, and so we tend to avoid it like the plague. I hate that attitude, and many professors do as well because when you use “I” well in an essay you convey greater conviction to your readers and you come across as someone who’s actually invested in your topic.

If you start an essay with “One has to wonder whether Stephanie Meyers had ever read a book before putting pen to paper,” you sound like a wishy-washy librarian. If you start an essay with “I’ve never encountered an author for whom I hold a greater loathing or more ill wishes than Ibsen,” you sound like a determined jerk (possibly a determined librarian jerk) – but you’ve hooked your reader. You hate Ibsen. You think he’s a jackass. You wish that all of his plays would dissolve into ash, and suddenly your reader wants to know why. Now, you can’t follow this up with “I hate Ibsen because I think he sodomized corgi puppies” and expect to be taken seriously by anyone, but if you follow up convicted “I” statements with numerous examples of sexism, stock characters, strained dialogue, and evidence of an utter lack of understanding of any human relationships, you’re on your way to earning some credit with your reader.

You have to be careful with narrative in academic papers – you’re trying to tell a story (i.e. the story of why Ibsen should die in a fire, the story of why Meyers is really just awful, the story of why summer vacation should be extended for at least a month, the story of Jane Austen as an early feminist) without sounding like you’re telling a story. You need to learn how to move through an academic paper in a natural way, introducing your reader to your topic (either slowly or shockingly) before supplying evidence and arguments (it helps to think of your arguments as characters – give them some personality, make them stand out, and use your evidence as setting to let them shine) and eventually reaching a conclusion that becomes inevitable as the narrative in your essay comes to a climax (inevitability is key here – surprise endings in academic essays are as ill advised as they are in romantic comedies; they’re proof of poor planning and generally a buzzkill.)

So that’s the academic side of essay writing – what about the creative side? Narrative in creative essays is perplexing. A lot of it depends on whether you’re writing about yourself or someone else, and what the purpose of the essay is. If you’re writing a creative essay about yourself then you should go to great lengths to tell your story the way you really would tell your story – seriously, record yourself telling the story, transcribe that recording and clean it up for publication. This will get you that much sought-after tinge of “authenticity” in creative nonfiction. If you’re writing about someone or something else your narrative should be shaped to showcase your subject – you are less important in this sort of essay than your subject is, but your opinion about what your subject says about the world is vital – tell the story the way you see it, but allow yourself to fade into the background (for how to do this, search me – I’m quite bad at this sort of thing – but take some cues from “Song of Myself” because, as mentioned above, Whitman was amazing at telling you how he saw the world by literally telling you about the things he saw in the world.)

Finally, I’m moving on to another topic I don’t know much about – narrative in drama. There are plenty of reasons I’m not the best source of advice on this subject, primarily the fact that I can’t stand live theatre, but I do have at least a couple of suggestions for you hopeful dramatists out there.

Drama is storytelling without the boring business of actually writing out all the crap that goes with a story. You’ve got dialogue and plot, and that’s really about it – even character is, to some extent, out of your hands and in the dubious grasp of the actors. So how do you make storytelling work if you’re not going to write, you know, an actual story?

Number one, for me, is chorus characters. I’m not talking about girls in stockings kicking dangerously high, I’m talking the about masked Greeks who used to stand on the sides of the stage and tell everyone what the hell was going on. Choruses haven’t been popular in the original sense in drama for quite some time now, but my favorite plays (read: the only plays I can really stand to read or watch) incorporate some chorus element. A fantastic example of this is Hamlet. Hamlet doesn’t run around with a bunch of dudes in sheets shouting out his plans over his shoulder – he does it himself. Hamlet’s soliloquies are his chorus – they tell you where the plot is going, why he’s thinking what he’s thinking, and they assure you (time and time again) that he’s not just batshit crazy. Want a different example? Oscar Wilde. In The Importance of Being Ernest Algy and Jack spend a lot of time vocalizing their plans, plots, motivations and ardent desires. This isn’t left up to the actors – you can’t trust the actors with this kind of stuff – Wilde wrote down all the pertinent narrative in what are, basically, superfluous speeches so that the audience could read more into the story than simply the action that was happening on stage. More examples? How about Tennessee Williams – is there any reason to provide all of the rehashings of character history unless it’s to fill in narrative gaps that are created by the lack of a narrator? Try a musical on for size – in Little Shop of Horrors the songs pick up a lot of the narrative duties, but not as much as the bloody she-bopping urchins, who step into the literal (and original) role of a chorus.

Another element that helps drama with narrative is setting – you can do this with words, like Shakespeare, Marlowe and most other Renaissance dramatists did (having your characters tell the audience that they’re on a battlefield, and how they’re shocked at the smoking ruin of war, works in building character as well as moving your story more into a story-telling realm) or you can do this with physical set changes and props (but you still need to tell people what room or forest or well they’ve walked into in order to suspend disbelief and keep your audience firmly ensconced in the story.)

I think I’ve run out of steam here, and said as much as I can reasonably (or unreasonably) expect anyone to read in a single blog. I’m going to leave off with the big question: what doesn’t work in narrative? A lot. You’ll find it, as you practice and grow in your writing. You’ll find that there are a lot of techniques that don’t work for you, and you’ll find many that do. But as you continue to write the field of “doesn’t work” will continually narrow as the field of “does work” continues to expand for you as a writer.

So long as you’re not Ibsen. Seriously. Fuck Ibsen.

Thanks for reading such a bloody long blog, and I’ll be back next week with exercises to improve your narrative technique, which should finish off my weeks-long exploration of narrative.

Until then, Cheers.

- Alli