Writing Mastery 1, Assignment 8: Narration
In case you hadn’t noticed, we have done several exercises where you practiced description and
dialog. But as a writer, you also need to master narration.
When we narrate, we step in as authors to relate information at a bit of emotional distance,
simply telling the reader what happened. This technique is great when you need to condense a
long list of actions to a few small sentences.
For example, imagine that you’re writing a fantasy, and you have a king who tells Sir Roderick,
“Carry this message to Lord Hale. It must reach him by nightfall, in fourteen days.”
Well, you could take several approaches. You might have Sir Roderick rush out with the
message, get robbed by highwaymen, have him lose the message case, so he hunts down the
robbers and slays them, then he gets washed downstream while trying to ford a river, so he
crawls—wounded and bloody—to reach Lord Hale just in time. That might take a hundred
pages.
But then you realize, Sir Roderick’s journey isn’t what the story is about! You need to go back
and narrate. So you might write something as simple “After many days, Sir Roderick entered
Lord Hale’s realm, wounded and tired, and dropped the message case into Hale’s hand.”
Most new authors, when they try to write narration, do a shoddy job of it. They simply tell us
what happened, and they settle for telling it in what people call “a reporter’s style,” or a
“journeyman’s style.” In other words, they don’t think about it much. The result is that many
American writers narrate in a fairly standardized voice—a boring voice. As a result, their novels
are almost always unsellable, and if they are sellable, they sell at substandard price.
But a good narrative can really get editors excited. So you need to learn to up your game.
Now, there are a couple of things that you need to think about when you narrate.
1) What is the voice of your narrator going to sound like?
2) Who is your narrator? (Let me give you a hint. Your narrator should probably not be
you, the author.) A character often makes a better narrator.
So, for example, I start a story about a young wizard—a poor, uneducated boy. I might try
narrating the story from his point of view when he is an old man, say 600 years after the fact,
and has become eloquent and well educated. Or, in order to hide the fact that he survives his
ordeal, I might write from the point of view the fairee queen who loves him, or perhaps I might
tell it from the point of view of the king’s chronicler.
So create a narrative voice for your narrator.
Another thing that you have to work at is to make the narration emotionally powerful. By this I
mean, let’s say that your have a character who is trying to do something, and you are narrating
the tale. You should think about things like, “How will I make my character likeable to my
reader?” “What will he do to impress the reader with his cleverness?” “How can I put my
character in pain?” “How can I create tension in the narration?” “How can I deepen the pain
for my character once I create it?” “What metaphors and similes might I use to really bring this
to life?”
So, your assignment, is to
1) Write two pages of a narrative scene from the end of your novel.
2) In that, I want you to choose a voice for your narrator—not your voice, a character’s
voice.
3) Then I want you to put the character in pain as he or she struggles to complete a goal.
4) Make the goal a difficult one, a struggle. Have the character do things that make me like
him, and even admire him.
5) Have the character make a poignant sacrifice to achieve the goal.
6) Emphasize the change or growth that has occurred in the character. If he was once a
coward, show how he has become brave. If he once loved no one, show how he has
sacrificed his life for everyone, etc.
7) You may use two lines of internal dialog in the scene, or you may have a couple of lines
of external dialog, but no more. The goal here is to develop your narrative skills. Dialog
and description can always be added later.
8) Last of all, make this beautiful! Pay attention to the word choice and poetic elements in
your writing. Use original metaphors and similes.
Here is another example from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. He chose Death to narrate the
story of a little German girl during WWII.
Earlier, kids had been playing hopscotch there, on the street that looked like oil-stained
pages. When I arrived, I could still hear the echoes. The feet tapping the road. The
children-voices laughing, and the smiles like salt, but decaying fast.
Here is an example from A Series of Unfortunate Events, narrated by Lemony Snicket
There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because
there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something
different. For instance, people who hate stories in which terrible things happen to small
children should put this book down immediately. But one type of book that practically
no one likes to read is a book about the law. Books about the law are notorious for
being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read. This is one reason lawyers make
heaps of money. . .
The Baudelaire children had a slightly different incentive for reading these books of
course. Their incentive was not heaps of money, but preventing Count Olaf from doing
something horrible to them in order to get heaps of money. But even with this
incentive, getting through the law books in Justice Strauss’s private library was a very,
very, very hard task.
[Justice Strauss] had let them in the house but immediately went into the backyard to
do her gardening, leaving the Baudelaire orphans alone in her glorious library.