Writing: Some jottings on narrative voice, POV
I don’t have a physical-world workshop. I constantly run up against the need to formulate my ideas, find out if they make sense outside my head-not just for the sake of being clear when I read ms for online friends, but of course for learning the skills to pluck the log out of my own eye, writing-wise.
The cob I’m mumbling over now is narrative voice, narrowed right now to point-of-view. I have to state up front that I don’t believe in the concept of “reliable narrator.” I think all narrators are unreliable-we’re writing fiction here, and no matter how hard we try to portray the truth as we know it, well, it’s still just as we know it.
In fact I think the concept of their being any kind of narrator, reliable or un, trips up some writers, especially those who have been trained to think of limited third as the only permissible POV. From what I’ve been seeing, the assumption, whether conscious or unconscious, that limited third=”truth” -that there is a direct line between text and reader-has some unfortunate results. For purposes of this ramble, I’ll name two: the writer is left fashioning awkward constructions in order to reveal the thoughts of a character outside of the present POV, and second, the writer resorts to the bland, supposedly neutral “journalistic” voice in presenting background material. I think the Deadly Data Dump is the result of the assumption that limited third represents “truth”, that there is no narrator. The characters not only do not react to the data, the story stops for the page, or even the single line, where the data is inserted, but the writer doesn’t see that-because, they argue, it’s part of the “truth” of the story. No, I say, it’s the writer stepping directly out from behind the curtain and telling the reader what to believe.
When one reads a lot of old novels, as I do, one is exposed to the accepted POV of that time-either first person omni or third person omni. (A side observation, made over the years of using classics in the classroom, is that many readers will assume that first person omni is automatically “unreliable” but third person omni isn’t! It’s a good exercise to look at various stories and books, and discover that most of the time, the narrator we want to accept as reliable is the one we sympathize with-like Huck Finn-and the one we disbelieve is the one that turns us off, like the barber in “The Haircut.”)
I don’t think there can be a straight line between text and reader, that there is always a narrator inbetween, like a bead on a string. Omni voice relies on the reader being aware of the narrator, and of the fact that the narrator is narrating a story. The narrative voices of the great writers sometimes slide the bead closer to the reader (that is, give us the camera eye view of the characters while never revealing their thoughts) and sometimes slide to the characters (that is, reveal character thought and motivation in the characters’ own voice, while the narrative voice retreats into the b.g., the extreme being stream-of-consciousness, which is a kind of excruciatingly close omni first without the character being aware of telling a story).
I wonder if the radical shift in literary fashion to what is often called “dramatic third” (or cinematic third) early in the last century gave rise to the idea that the camera-eye-view is “truth.” I know I’ve read many early essays about the merciless truth of the camera eye, and of course in those early days people roaming around shooting real life as it happened did convey a breathtaking sense of “verite.” Conrad, Hemingway, Chandler, Fitzgerald, etc, largely stayed outside their characters’ heads, relying on the “cinematic” technique of revealing character through description of actions, expressions, even objects. (Culminating in Dashiel Hammet’s ultra-cinematic writing, wherein his descriptions are the textual equivalents of camera shots.) But the thing is, these writers, I believe, were very aware of their narrators, because sometimes the narrator does intrude, very briefly, sometimes for just a sentence-even an adverb-to reveal thoughts, reactions, emotions, that the camera could never capture. These brief, telling inclusions are very effective: they intensify the story at just the right moment, often without the reader being aware of the narrator’s sleight-of-hand.
If I’m on the right track, then maybe it’s best, when workshopping with beginning writers in particular, to avoid stopping at just redflagging the DDDs. Too often that leads the frustrated writer, who feels the data absolutely has to be introduced right there, to other errors like maid-and-butler dialogue (the characters having to tell each other what they already know), or railroading the story from the gitgo with a data-lumbering prologue (in the disguise of a Big Sacrifice Scene or a Conflict Between Megapowers, whose effect isn’t exciting but more like walking in on the end of a movie with the sound turned way up loud). Instead, it might be more productive to ask the writer to decide who the narrator is, and why the narrator is telling this story, and what voice the narrator is going to use to tell it: ask just where you want to slide the bead?
The cob I’m mumbling over now is narrative voice, narrowed right now to point-of-view. I have to state up front that I don’t believe in the concept of “reliable narrator.” I think all narrators are unreliable-we’re writing fiction here, and no matter how hard we try to portray the truth as we know it, well, it’s still just as we know it.
In fact I think the concept of their being any kind of narrator, reliable or un, trips up some writers, especially those who have been trained to think of limited third as the only permissible POV. From what I’ve been seeing, the assumption, whether conscious or unconscious, that limited third=”truth” -that there is a direct line between text and reader-has some unfortunate results. For purposes of this ramble, I’ll name two: the writer is left fashioning awkward constructions in order to reveal the thoughts of a character outside of the present POV, and second, the writer resorts to the bland, supposedly neutral “journalistic” voice in presenting background material. I think the Deadly Data Dump is the result of the assumption that limited third represents “truth”, that there is no narrator. The characters not only do not react to the data, the story stops for the page, or even the single line, where the data is inserted, but the writer doesn’t see that-because, they argue, it’s part of the “truth” of the story. No, I say, it’s the writer stepping directly out from behind the curtain and telling the reader what to believe.
When one reads a lot of old novels, as I do, one is exposed to the accepted POV of that time-either first person omni or third person omni. (A side observation, made over the years of using classics in the classroom, is that many readers will assume that first person omni is automatically “unreliable” but third person omni isn’t! It’s a good exercise to look at various stories and books, and discover that most of the time, the narrator we want to accept as reliable is the one we sympathize with-like Huck Finn-and the one we disbelieve is the one that turns us off, like the barber in “The Haircut.”)
I don’t think there can be a straight line between text and reader, that there is always a narrator inbetween, like a bead on a string. Omni voice relies on the reader being aware of the narrator, and of the fact that the narrator is narrating a story. The narrative voices of the great writers sometimes slide the bead closer to the reader (that is, give us the camera eye view of the characters while never revealing their thoughts) and sometimes slide to the characters (that is, reveal character thought and motivation in the characters’ own voice, while the narrative voice retreats into the b.g., the extreme being stream-of-consciousness, which is a kind of excruciatingly close omni first without the character being aware of telling a story).
I wonder if the radical shift in literary fashion to what is often called “dramatic third” (or cinematic third) early in the last century gave rise to the idea that the camera-eye-view is “truth.” I know I’ve read many early essays about the merciless truth of the camera eye, and of course in those early days people roaming around shooting real life as it happened did convey a breathtaking sense of “verite.” Conrad, Hemingway, Chandler, Fitzgerald, etc, largely stayed outside their characters’ heads, relying on the “cinematic” technique of revealing character through description of actions, expressions, even objects. (Culminating in Dashiel Hammet’s ultra-cinematic writing, wherein his descriptions are the textual equivalents of camera shots.) But the thing is, these writers, I believe, were very aware of their narrators, because sometimes the narrator does intrude, very briefly, sometimes for just a sentence-even an adverb-to reveal thoughts, reactions, emotions, that the camera could never capture. These brief, telling inclusions are very effective: they intensify the story at just the right moment, often without the reader being aware of the narrator’s sleight-of-hand.
If I’m on the right track, then maybe it’s best, when workshopping with beginning writers in particular, to avoid stopping at just redflagging the DDDs. Too often that leads the frustrated writer, who feels the data absolutely has to be introduced right there, to other errors like maid-and-butler dialogue (the characters having to tell each other what they already know), or railroading the story from the gitgo with a data-lumbering prologue (in the disguise of a Big Sacrifice Scene or a Conflict Between Megapowers, whose effect isn’t exciting but more like walking in on the end of a movie with the sound turned way up loud). Instead, it might be more productive to ask the writer to decide who the narrator is, and why the narrator is telling this story, and what voice the narrator is going to use to tell it: ask just where you want to slide the bead?