notes on narrative in a vidding context
laurashapiro asked: What's narrative? What follows are my tentative notes towards a possible answer (or several). Dialogue welcome.
In A Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams defines narrative as "a story, whether told in prose or verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do." This definition is accurate as far as it goes, but it's a bit misleading because it implies that narrative is only an object or genre. Narrative can certainly designate a genre, or rather what I would call an umbrella genre, but it is also a mode of speaking or writing. By "umbrella genre," I mean that several distinctly different genres can be designated as narratives: novels, short stories, epics, romances, and films are all narratives, as a rule. By "mode," I mean that narrative is also a structural option within several other not-inherently-narrative genres; some nonfiction is written in the narrative mode. (When histories, for example, are described as "readable," it is usually because they are written in a narrative rather than, or in addition to, an argumentative mode: they use conventions of narrative that we are accustomed to in and associate with fiction.)
I make these fine distinctions as a preface to the suggestion that, while most vids can be said to tell a story, sometimes story is the object or genre and sometimes story is the mode - and sometimes the story is merely the side effect of vidding narrative genres like film and series TV. That is, nearly any vid can be understood in terms of a story, but the story may or may not be the *point* of the vid.
In thinking about different vid structures, I've noted three broad types, separable but not mutually exclusive: the narrative, the lyric, and the argument. Each has its own major organizational principle: story (narrative), image (lyric), and what for lack of a better term I'll call thesis statement (argument). I'm interested in these types not as firm categories but as elements that inevitably co-exist to some degree, with different elements predominating in different vids and sometimes at different moments within a single vid.
I'm trying to figure out how to pinpoint what makes these structures different from each other. I think it has to do with the relationship between events in a vid. In a narrative, the thing of primary importance is the events' relationship to each other in a (not necessarily chronological) sequence. In a lyric or thesis-driven vid, what's important is the events' mutual relationship to some external point: events are there to illustrate something else, not primarily to connect to each other. It's like the difference between a daisy chain (links connected one to the other in a linear - though, again, not necessarily chronological - way) and a wheel with spokes branching out from the hub: similar shape, different principle.
That said, there's a sense in which, as viewers, we tend to make narrative in vids because we know context: we fill in story around what we actually see. That's not a bad thing; many vids rely on exactly that kind of filling-in. But there are other ways of mentally organizing the relationships among clips in a vid. Still, I think narrative is the most intuitive to create and watch; it's the default setting for most of us, not only only because it's a familiar pattern in general but because it's the mode of most (if not all) of our source texts for vids.
laurashapiro has talked elsewhere about the notion of not simply retelling a source story as it originally appeared but rather what she calls "telling deeper": "As a vidder, my interest lies in retelling canonical stories with different emphases, exploring events or feelings that might have gotten glossed over in the show, or characters that received short shrift. I think of this as 'telling deeper.' And again, that's all about subtext: picking a clip not because of what it literally shows, but because of the emotional information it carries - which can be due to context, movement, facial expression, or even something as deceptively shallow as color." Laura's comment suggests, I think, points at which narrative can give way to other concerns; the "retelling" she describes can shade into either lyric or argument.
I use the term "lyric" as a placeholder at the moment, since I don't think it's a particularly good term for what I mean but I haven't come up with a better one. I'm working off the literary definition of a lyric as "any fairly short poem, consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and feeling" (Abrams' Glossary again). In a vidding context, a lyric vid would be a sustained evocation or exploration of mood, images, emotions, or possibly character; I'm thinking here of vrya's vids, particularly "Sleep Alone" and "Schism." We can understand these vids in narrative terms, because each clip fits into storylines on the show, and anyone familiar with the show can and probably will bring that context to the vids, but the vids aren't organized around storytelling. A literary analogue: William Carlos Williams' "Poem" describes an event, but the point is less the event than the description itself. There's an event, and it is narrated, but the poem is not a narrative poem; it is, precisely, a poem about "a process of perception." Some character study vids are what I'd call lyric: their primary purpose is to explore character, although because the audience can fill in the storylines around that exploration the vid may be understood (by the vidder and/or the audience) as narrative. (Other character study vids are, of course, more unambiguously narrative.)
Another way to think about the difference between narrative and lyric: the difference between a love story and a love poem (or love song). One is primarily an account of the development of love; the other is primarily a focused expression of love.
As for argument vids... I started thinking about some vids as making arguments (rather than telling stories) a while back, and wrote a bit about it towards the end of this post. I got sort of hung up on language in that post, because I was still talking about "Superstar" (which I would now call an argument vid) as a vid that tells a story (because, as noted, I think in the language of narrative unless specifically prompted to do otherwise). The way I'd explain it now is that narratives tell the story of something; arguments tell a story about something. "Superstar" doesn't so much retell Faith's story as tell a story about Faith, if that makes sense.
But in most cases, I think that even if argument is the point, narrative is the mode. Looking at my own vids, I think "Come On" is a good example of this combination. As I made that vid, my understanding of it evolved to the point that my core description of it became an argument: "Faith can't decide whether she wants to do Buffy or be Buffy." The vid makes a case for a particular interpretation of Faith. At the same time, the vid has been widely perceived as having a strong narrative structure. I think both things are true, but I think this is a case where the retelling of Faith's story wasn't an end in itself but the means by which the argument got made.
I think this is probably characteristic of slash vids in general. I mean, if one of the fundamental goals of a slash vid is to express "They are *so* sleeping together!", that's an argument right there - the vid is a way of making a case for a particular interpretation of the source text. In re-telling a familiar story with emphasis on certain facial expressions, etc., the vid becomes also a collection of evidence that supports the vid's thesis statement.
So I'm not at all sure that there's a clear distinction between argument vids and other types of vid from the audience's point of view - I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on that - but it's an important (if sometimes blurry) distinction for me as a vidder. "Here is what happened when Spike fell in love with Buffy" is a narrative; "Here is why Buffy's sleeping with Spike was a bad choice" is an argument. "Here is what happened when Willow went crazy after Tara died" is a narrative; "Willow's actions after Tara died make more sense in the context of her long history of using magic for selfish reasons" is an argument. Would the resulting vids look particularly different? Not necessarily, I guess.
On the other hand, they might. For one thing, I might choose my clips differently based on which goal I'm articulating to myself. For another thing, as I think about strategies I've used in my own vids, I realize that, for example, intercutting between scenes can mean pretty different things. Some intercuts are "narrative" intercuts - flashbacks that show the viewer what the character is thinking or remembering - and others are "argument" intercuts - juxtapositions that the vidder uses to make a point external to the character's frame of reference. "Glorious #1" and "Atropine" both use both types of intercutting. I don't know if the distinction consciously registers with those of you who didn't make the vid, but I would bet that, if pressed about a given instance, you could probably say whether you thought it was a character perception or an authorial interjection.
I haven't mentioned comedy thus far, simply because I don't think I've seen enough successful comedy vids to talk about them in any detail, but I'll note in passing that I think comedy can be done in any of these modes, at least in theory. sockkpuppett and sisabet's "Whatever" (AtS) and kitkatbyte's "Yodel" (BtVS) are narratives (partly because the songs are narratives). Dianne's "Comedy Tonight" (Farscape) is lyric (although that seems the wrong word to use for comedy). I can't think of any argument comedies, but that's as likely to be due to my own ignorance as anything else.
[ETA: It occurs to me that some of what I've said about narrative as genre and mode might map onto the distinction between story and plot. But it's late and I'm tired. Maybe later. Or, um, not.]
In A Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams defines narrative as "a story, whether told in prose or verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do." This definition is accurate as far as it goes, but it's a bit misleading because it implies that narrative is only an object or genre. Narrative can certainly designate a genre, or rather what I would call an umbrella genre, but it is also a mode of speaking or writing. By "umbrella genre," I mean that several distinctly different genres can be designated as narratives: novels, short stories, epics, romances, and films are all narratives, as a rule. By "mode," I mean that narrative is also a structural option within several other not-inherently-narrative genres; some nonfiction is written in the narrative mode. (When histories, for example, are described as "readable," it is usually because they are written in a narrative rather than, or in addition to, an argumentative mode: they use conventions of narrative that we are accustomed to in and associate with fiction.)
I make these fine distinctions as a preface to the suggestion that, while most vids can be said to tell a story, sometimes story is the object or genre and sometimes story is the mode - and sometimes the story is merely the side effect of vidding narrative genres like film and series TV. That is, nearly any vid can be understood in terms of a story, but the story may or may not be the *point* of the vid.
In thinking about different vid structures, I've noted three broad types, separable but not mutually exclusive: the narrative, the lyric, and the argument. Each has its own major organizational principle: story (narrative), image (lyric), and what for lack of a better term I'll call thesis statement (argument). I'm interested in these types not as firm categories but as elements that inevitably co-exist to some degree, with different elements predominating in different vids and sometimes at different moments within a single vid.
I'm trying to figure out how to pinpoint what makes these structures different from each other. I think it has to do with the relationship between events in a vid. In a narrative, the thing of primary importance is the events' relationship to each other in a (not necessarily chronological) sequence. In a lyric or thesis-driven vid, what's important is the events' mutual relationship to some external point: events are there to illustrate something else, not primarily to connect to each other. It's like the difference between a daisy chain (links connected one to the other in a linear - though, again, not necessarily chronological - way) and a wheel with spokes branching out from the hub: similar shape, different principle.
That said, there's a sense in which, as viewers, we tend to make narrative in vids because we know context: we fill in story around what we actually see. That's not a bad thing; many vids rely on exactly that kind of filling-in. But there are other ways of mentally organizing the relationships among clips in a vid. Still, I think narrative is the most intuitive to create and watch; it's the default setting for most of us, not only only because it's a familiar pattern in general but because it's the mode of most (if not all) of our source texts for vids.
laurashapiro has talked elsewhere about the notion of not simply retelling a source story as it originally appeared but rather what she calls "telling deeper": "As a vidder, my interest lies in retelling canonical stories with different emphases, exploring events or feelings that might have gotten glossed over in the show, or characters that received short shrift. I think of this as 'telling deeper.' And again, that's all about subtext: picking a clip not because of what it literally shows, but because of the emotional information it carries - which can be due to context, movement, facial expression, or even something as deceptively shallow as color." Laura's comment suggests, I think, points at which narrative can give way to other concerns; the "retelling" she describes can shade into either lyric or argument.
I use the term "lyric" as a placeholder at the moment, since I don't think it's a particularly good term for what I mean but I haven't come up with a better one. I'm working off the literary definition of a lyric as "any fairly short poem, consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and feeling" (Abrams' Glossary again). In a vidding context, a lyric vid would be a sustained evocation or exploration of mood, images, emotions, or possibly character; I'm thinking here of vrya's vids, particularly "Sleep Alone" and "Schism." We can understand these vids in narrative terms, because each clip fits into storylines on the show, and anyone familiar with the show can and probably will bring that context to the vids, but the vids aren't organized around storytelling. A literary analogue: William Carlos Williams' "Poem" describes an event, but the point is less the event than the description itself. There's an event, and it is narrated, but the poem is not a narrative poem; it is, precisely, a poem about "a process of perception." Some character study vids are what I'd call lyric: their primary purpose is to explore character, although because the audience can fill in the storylines around that exploration the vid may be understood (by the vidder and/or the audience) as narrative. (Other character study vids are, of course, more unambiguously narrative.)
Another way to think about the difference between narrative and lyric: the difference between a love story and a love poem (or love song). One is primarily an account of the development of love; the other is primarily a focused expression of love.
As for argument vids... I started thinking about some vids as making arguments (rather than telling stories) a while back, and wrote a bit about it towards the end of this post. I got sort of hung up on language in that post, because I was still talking about "Superstar" (which I would now call an argument vid) as a vid that tells a story (because, as noted, I think in the language of narrative unless specifically prompted to do otherwise). The way I'd explain it now is that narratives tell the story of something; arguments tell a story about something. "Superstar" doesn't so much retell Faith's story as tell a story about Faith, if that makes sense.
But in most cases, I think that even if argument is the point, narrative is the mode. Looking at my own vids, I think "Come On" is a good example of this combination. As I made that vid, my understanding of it evolved to the point that my core description of it became an argument: "Faith can't decide whether she wants to do Buffy or be Buffy." The vid makes a case for a particular interpretation of Faith. At the same time, the vid has been widely perceived as having a strong narrative structure. I think both things are true, but I think this is a case where the retelling of Faith's story wasn't an end in itself but the means by which the argument got made.
I think this is probably characteristic of slash vids in general. I mean, if one of the fundamental goals of a slash vid is to express "They are *so* sleeping together!", that's an argument right there - the vid is a way of making a case for a particular interpretation of the source text. In re-telling a familiar story with emphasis on certain facial expressions, etc., the vid becomes also a collection of evidence that supports the vid's thesis statement.
So I'm not at all sure that there's a clear distinction between argument vids and other types of vid from the audience's point of view - I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on that - but it's an important (if sometimes blurry) distinction for me as a vidder. "Here is what happened when Spike fell in love with Buffy" is a narrative; "Here is why Buffy's sleeping with Spike was a bad choice" is an argument. "Here is what happened when Willow went crazy after Tara died" is a narrative; "Willow's actions after Tara died make more sense in the context of her long history of using magic for selfish reasons" is an argument. Would the resulting vids look particularly different? Not necessarily, I guess.
On the other hand, they might. For one thing, I might choose my clips differently based on which goal I'm articulating to myself. For another thing, as I think about strategies I've used in my own vids, I realize that, for example, intercutting between scenes can mean pretty different things. Some intercuts are "narrative" intercuts - flashbacks that show the viewer what the character is thinking or remembering - and others are "argument" intercuts - juxtapositions that the vidder uses to make a point external to the character's frame of reference. "Glorious #1" and "Atropine" both use both types of intercutting. I don't know if the distinction consciously registers with those of you who didn't make the vid, but I would bet that, if pressed about a given instance, you could probably say whether you thought it was a character perception or an authorial interjection.
I haven't mentioned comedy thus far, simply because I don't think I've seen enough successful comedy vids to talk about them in any detail, but I'll note in passing that I think comedy can be done in any of these modes, at least in theory. sockkpuppett and sisabet's "Whatever" (AtS) and kitkatbyte's "Yodel" (BtVS) are narratives (partly because the songs are narratives). Dianne's "Comedy Tonight" (Farscape) is lyric (although that seems the wrong word to use for comedy). I can't think of any argument comedies, but that's as likely to be due to my own ignorance as anything else.
[ETA: It occurs to me that some of what I've said about narrative as genre and mode might map onto the distinction between story and plot. But it's late and I'm tired. Maybe later. Or, um, not.]