Tag: Narrative

The Here and Now

thestuartsadler

Hello again and welcome back.

How is your creative endeavour going? Mine is going pretty well thank you. Slowly, probably, compared to a lot of writers, but then I am not a full-time writer so I don’t have a fraction of the time I would like to dedicate to writing available to me, and of course being human, I only use a fraction of the time I do have available to actually write!

But it is going well! I have written eight chapters of my first draft and am in a good enough flow that the last two chapters have been written in just a couple of sittings each, so I am particularly pleased with that! And though I do claim not to write as much as I could, I am also prioritising it over a lot of other things! I’ve not played any PS4 games for months now and have probably halved the amount of TV I watch (which I don’t think was a lot anyway). My goal is to complete the first draft this year and I am really going to push myself to do it sooner than that.

But I thought it was also high time I wrote a blog post!

I originally started this blog to highlight the issues I came across whilst writing and recently I have identified something new that I am having difficulty with, which is what the title alludes to.

I’ve realised that the vast majority of what I write is what I suppose you would call ‘real-time’. I start a scene and write what happens to my character there and then until the scene is done. Then I will begin another scene and do the same. This might sound perfectly fine, but I realised that there are going to be times when I just want to describe general things going on, over a longer period of time, so writing in this style is not something that will work.

I’ve just finished reading A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book of the Earthsea series and I think Ursula K. Le Guin does what I am aiming to do perfectly. As I was reading it I realised that my interest was being held while the protagonist’s actions and life were, a lot of the time, being skimmed over. That is not to say that detail is missed, but that over perhaps two pages, the same number of days will have passed, and I will know everything I need to know about those two days.

This is something I think I struggle with. My worry is that without describing the immediate surroundings and actions of the characters, my writing will just read like a boring list of things that happened (‘John got up and had breakfast then went to the shops. When he got home he cooked dinner and sat down to watch some television, staying up late into the night.’ As an extremely bad example). I struggle to find the salient and interesting points in the overall story of the day or week that my character has lived, or at least I struggle to visualise how to write it in an interesting way.

It may be that I am focussing too much on two things: First is the narrative perspective of my story, and the worry that by stepping back in order to describe events that happen not in an immediate sense but an overarching one, the voice I use must be that of the narrator and less so the character, which may distance the reader and thus they will lose interest. The second is the idea that everything must serve a purpose for the story, that the writer should cut out everything that is unnecessary. In this sense a part of my mind says ‘well if you’re not going to go into detail about what John did on Tuesday, why write about it at all? Surely it will not add enough to the study to be worth mentioning?’ This is difficult to overcome, and as I’ve mentioned I therefore find it very difficult to write from such a perspective.

I am trying though and I know that the more I try, the more I will do it, and the more I do it the more I will improve. At least I hope so! I would be interested in hearing any tips of this that any of you might have!

Until next time! (Which I will try to make sooner!)

You’re The Voice (Try and Understand It)

thestuartsadler

Something I, and I think many inexperienced authors struggle with is narrative voice.

It can be difficult to decide not only which to use in the first place, but also to realise how it can limit (and obviously be used to work for) your story and how easy it can be to trip up and do it wrong! From the very beginning I knew I wanted to write my story in 3rd person, though it wasn’t until I took a creative writing course that I really learned that there were actually different versions of 3rd person narrative. The differences aren’t difficult to understand, but sometimes when you get into the finer details of what is and what is not permissible, it can get quite confusing! At least for me!

I am writing my novel in 3rd person limited (sometimes called 3rd person close). I won’t go into too much detail as there are much better resources out there for this kind of thing, but for anyone unaware what this means, it describes narration from the 3rd person perspective (he/she) whereby the point of view is limited to one character. Thus the reader is only aware of what that one character experiences. Alternatively 3rd person omniscient allows the point of view to be ‘all-knowing’ so the reader can experience events (and thoughts etc.) from anyone and everyone’s perspective.

My main reasons for choosing a limited perspective was that it allows me to hold information back from the reader by having events occur or knowledge fall outside of their perspective until such time as I want to reveal them. Also to be blunt, the omniscient narrative has very much fallen out of favour and is not currently a popular device.

Now, I have erred on the side of caution when writing so far, but I must admit I have often found myself wondering (and no doubt overthinking!) just how limited I am supposed to keep things! 

The obvious stuff is easy: if my character is in a soundproof room, I cannot describe the conversation between the two assassins outside the door, no matter how exciting I think it might be for my reader to know something my character does not (and that for me is where the frustration lies I think!). Nor can I have my character discuss their favourite ice cream with someone,  for them to agree that Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food had got to be in the top 5, only to tell my reader that the other person is secretly lying, hates ice cream and is therefore some kind of sick demon. I can say my character suspects they might be lying, by the odd way their eyes wince whenever the gooey caramel and marshmallow are mentioned, or the eerie whispered screams they hear from within the strangely heavy overcoat they are wearing in mid July, but they can’t know it and so neither can the reader.

But where I sometimes struggle and get worried I’m doing it all wrong is the sort of in between stuff. The adjectives, adverbs etc. I might use in my dialogue for example:

‘Who would have thought we’d end up in a blog post!’ MC said to the stranger by his side.

‘Who indeed.’ Replied the stranger with a knowing smile.

Can I say that? Would anyone really recognise a knowing smile? Or is it enough that, because my character is present, I can add that sort of detail that they may not be explicitly aware of? That’s the sort of thing I get confused about! Can my reader know that the smile is knowing without my character being able to tell? Maybe my character wasn’t even looking at the stranger at that moment and missed the smile anyway, in which case do I remove all visual descriptions?! I’ve struggled to find any ‘rules’ that go into this level of detail and frankly I’m beginning to worry that the more I obsess over it the more it will negatively impact my writing.

So, dear reader, if you have any thoughts or experiences on the matter I would very much like to hear them!