Writers and Narrators

[sartorias]

Narrators, reliable and un.

I didn't actually intend to relate them, but I was asked to write a riff about Megan Whalen Turner, who does some nifty stuff with her narrators, so I'm linking it here.

Discussion welcome at any of these places, and that includes suggestions of books that do cool things with narrators and narration.

Comments

[arielstarshadow]

I really liked this - is there a really good book or article somewhere that talks about each of the different POVs?

[sartorias]

I Megan Whalen Turner's books, or generally?

[arielstarshadow]

Generally :)

[sartorias]

Well, the best article I've ever seen on POV was this one by David Jauss: http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/writers/djauss01.htm

and the best book, Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, though there is equally cool stuff in Samuel Delaney's About Writing

[ext_257870]

Again, thanks for participating in Queen's Thief Week! And thanks for linking to your guest post here. :)

[kalimac]

Wow, thanks for that, and for the explanation of how narrative voice makes data dumps deadly or not. A really robust third-person omniscient narrator, like that of The Hobbit, can make data dumps as delightful as anything else in the book.

"Cinematic third" reaches its nadir in stories which use the camera's directed gaze to force the reader where to look. I remember a fantasy novel in which dragons attack from the sky. The characters are looking upwards in fear, you can hear the dragons, but the author refuses to describe the sight of them, describing only the humans' reaction to the sight. Argh.

[sartorias]

Yes, and yes. Some writers instinctively grasp narrative voice--either that, or inculcated so much of the best of nineteenth century lit, which explored all range of possibilities of omni voice, that they knew how to handle it. Tolkien was definitely one of these.

Terry Pratchett, Steven Brust, both have distinctive and wonderful narrative voices--their data dumps are as fun as action and dialogue.

[rachelmanija]

Great post. I (naturally) especially liked your thoughts on trauma, and the twins who reacted so differently to the same event.

The Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears, is a historical novel which has four narrators, two who are utterly loathsome and two who are sympathetic, telling their quite different versions of the same event. It's a fascinating read, though difficult in parts because of the loathsome factor. But a classic for exploring POV and unreliable narrators.

I feel like you can break down unreliable narrators in a couple ways:

- Narrators who are deliberately keeping something from you. (The Thief.)

- Narrators who are not being misleading deliberately and are basically accurate about the facts of the situation, but are interpreting things oddly because of their own preconceptions or mental state. (Mark in Mirror Dance, Cassel in White Cat.) This is my favorite type of unreliable narrator, because it's so completely character-based

[sartorias]

Yes, and yes.

[jodel_from_aol]

And then there's "writing for the movies". You run into a lot of it in fanfic, but it shows up in professionally published work as well. And it's usually a mistake. It tends to always read as an interuption. The whole back half of the Harry Potter series is lousy with it.

Basically it reads like the author has forgotten whether they are writing for the page or the screen. Grand sweeping images, which don't actually fit the situation, or action sequences or descriptions that make no sense whatsoever and have to be explained either into being before turning them loose, or retrofitted in after the fact. I have a tendency to get impatient when a scene is described too much like a standard sequence of cinema. I'm not sitting in a theater, thank you. And "show not tell" doesn't mean you string together a lot of images and expect them to tell the story for you. There's nothing wrong with "telling" a story.

[3rdragon]

The book that for a long time was my example of "the worst book I've ever read" started with a very cinematographic action scene that read like a Jackie Chan movie.

Protagonist slices through the ropes I mentioned last paragraph, holding onto the loose end so as to pull himself into the air, while the kegs that form the counterweight to this maneuver slam down onto the end of a table, neatly knocking out the attacker . . .

All the elements required for this feat had been mentioned, but a) in an infodump that I'd kind of skipped over and b) not in a way that made it clear that any of this could possibly be done until the character actually did it.

[jodel_from_aol]

Or passages that are all too obviously there just to *sound* impressive. Usually in aid of invoking "atmosphere". Whether they make any kind of sense or not.

Standard example being one pointed out on the Deathly Hallows Sporking community (yeah, I know, like shooting fish in a barrel).

Chapter 1. We have two figures -- who are soon enough identified as Snape and Yaxley -- materializing in the road outside the gates of Malfoy Manor. It's night.

They pass through the gates, they cross the park, they enter the dark entryway, enter the sitting room, lit only by a low fire in the fireplace, and pause for their eyes to adjust to the dark. Excuse me? When in this whole passage have they NOT been in the dark? And their eyes need to adjust to it? Is there any sense to this passage at all, or are you just trying to paint pretty word pictures and make us all think "Oooo spooky!"?