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Writing Workshop Week 4:

A Narrative Imperative

My dearest Tumblrinas—

Sadly we’ve come to our final week of workshop, but I’ve saved the best for last. Rather, I’ve saved my favorite for last. This week’s prompt is one I’ve taught in every class, from developmental composition to advanced creative writing courses. In the hundreds of fills I’ve read over the years, I haven’t found one that has been poorly written or uninteresting. This prompt tends to bring out the fire in everyone, and I’m jazzed to see what you do with it.

Last week we talked about setting as a function of narration. This week we’re talking about narration as a function of…nothing.

The reason I say narration is the function of nothing is because you can strip a piece of writing of every craft element—conflict, character, imagery, etc.—and you’ll still have narration. Even emails have narrators. A narrator is simply the acknowledgement of a mind behind the writing, the vehicle of comprehension. 

Click through for this week’s workshop and prompt:

Point of View

So many people know what a point of view is that we often see it as the acronym POV. It’s so commonplace that it’s almost difficult to pin down, but the definition we’ll use for the purpose of this workshop is the relationship of the narrator to the events of the story

In contemporary writing, the narrator is generally limited to a single character who exists in the narrative. This is called a homodiegetic narrator. A heterodiegetic narrator is one that is not a character in the story. For example, fairy tales often have a heterodiegetic narrator, a disembodied voice that’s telling you the story as if speaking it aloud. 

It’s only in the past century or so that we’ve seen a shift into the limited homodiegetic narrator as a kind of default technique. In fact there are some writers (and writing teachers, sadly) who are so dedicated to this style of narration that they consider any work that deviates from it “bad writing.” 

When we talk about limited narrators, we’re talking about narratorial access. In the mind of a single character in the story, we don’t have access to the minds of the other characters. Access is what creates an unreliable narrator—a character whose perspective of the external events of the story is in some way distorted, either in the literal facts of the events themselves, or in the interpretation to those events. An unreliable narrator is one who might lie in order to persuade us their actions are justified, or perhaps they struggle to perceive reality clearly.

Access also refers to how close we are to the narrator. How much access does the reader have to the true thoughts and emotions of the character we’re following? Back in Week 1, we talked about “show, don’t tell,” and if you abide by that rule to an extreme, you get a narrator who offers us little to no access to their perspective. Conversely, we can be so close to a narrator that we only have access to their thoughts and we lose sight of the external events of the story completely. (More on that in the Point of Method section.)

It’s possible that we could have access to multiple perspectives of the story, either by alternating limited perspectives or creating omniscience. The difficulty of omniscience, which is sometimes derogatorily called head-hopping, is that you’re tasked with infinite access. In Week 3, we talked about decision fatigue. Omniscience requires deciding constantly what information is given when and by whom and why. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to deter you from omniscience if that’s what you’re interested in writing, but I do think it’s more difficult than limited narration. When people refer to “head-hopping,” they’re usually saying the shifting access of the narrator is hard to follow or illogical. Your work, of course, is allowed to be hard to follow and illogical. No one is obligated to clarity. But if clarity is one of your goals as a writer, know that omniscience is often more obfuscating than illuminating

Point of Telling

Put simply, a narrative is a sequence of cause and effect. Thing A happens, and because of it, thing B happens. Because thing B happened, thing C then happens. The sequence doesn’t have to occur in order or chronologically. However, all narratives possess an order and a chronology. In other words, all narratives exist in time and space.

We talked about space last week. So let’s talk about time.

Unlike point of view, the point of telling is the relationship of the narrator to the timeline of the story. Here’s where things get confusing, because English has tenses, but in prose, past tense doesn’t always denote the actual past. You can write a story in past tense that doesn’t have an implied present. You can also write a story in present tense and give the narrator access to the future of the story via some kind of narrative magic or prophecy. So when we talk about point of telling, grammatical tense is irrelevant.

Currently the default of contemporary writing is to have a narrator who is experiencing the events of the story as they’re happening, which means they have access to their past but not their future, and their development unfolds accordingly. A narrator who has no access to their future is one who is limited to the biases of the present. 

However, you can also have a reflective narrator—one whose point of telling is the present and they’re reflecting on the past. Backstories and flashbacks can be reflective. Frame stories can also be reflective. What’s unique about the reflective narrator is that they have access to all the events of the story, and are unfolding them in a specific sequence, rendering them from the position of growth they’ve achieved from living those events. You can do cool foreshadowing stuff with a reflective narrator, like, “What I didn’t yet know was…” or “I would go on to believe that…” 

To me, point of telling becomes clearest when you have a child narrator. A child telling the present would possess a childlike narrative voice, but an adult character reflecting on childhood would have an adult narrative voice. The events of the story are the same, but the point on the timeline from which those events are told can vary, and therefore so can the voice.

Point of Method

Point of view is ubiquitous; I can’t remember where I first heard of point of telling; but point of method is a term Percy Lubbock defines in his book The Craft of Fiction. The point of method is the relationship of the narrator to the rendering of the story. Lubbock separates point of method by pictorial and dramatic, arguably the beginning of the adage “show, don’t tell” that we talked about in Week 1. A pictorial method is one that renders or “shows” a story; a dramatic one is one that “tells” a story. But The Craft of Fiction was first published a century ago and narration has changed a lot since then, so I’m going to offer some other ways of defining point of method.

Although it’s a false binary, I like to think of point of method as “in scene” or “in summary.” Screenplays are beholden to scenes—film is a visual medium and so it’s limited to what literally can be shown. In its simplest form, a scene is a discrete section of a story where a character interacts with their environment in some way. A scene is often portrayed in direct discourse, which means free and clear access to the actual dialogue the characters are speaking. In other words, we can trust the words in quotes to be what is really said—not an interpretation, summation, or distortion of what is said.

Many writers I work with develop a block when they pigeonhole themselves into scenic writing. Fanfiction is largely written in direct discourse and relies on sequences of scenes, I suspect because a lot of fics are based on canonical texts of visual mediums. When I point out that fanfiction is prose and can therefore access the interior thoughts and perspectives of a narrator, I think it can be pretty freeing for some writers. In prose, scenes are optional. 

On the opposite side of the scenic spectrum is summative writing. Writing in summary is kind of a zooming out of the narration, where events are rendered in a single paragraph or sentence. Summary can evoke indirect discourse, or interaction between characters conveyed within the narration. For example, “‘I’m sorry I rang the doorbell,’ she said” is direct discourse. “She said she was sorry she rang the doorbell” is indirect discourse. 

It’s important to remember that all narration is a negotiation of the internal and the external, or what I call interiority and exteriority. Interiority encompasses all thoughts, feelings, and interpretations of a narrator. Exteriority includes everything outside the narrator. “She heard the doorbell ring” is an interior sentence. “Someone rang the doorbell” is an exterior one. 

Scenic writing is not inherently superior to summative writing. Direct discourse is not inherently superior to indirect discourse. Exteriority is not inherently superior to interiority. They’re all just spectrums, and you get to define where your narrator lands on each of them.

This was a lot of vocab to throw at you. I’d like to offer a brief caveat that many of these terms are narratological, intended for criticism and interpretation of existing work, but I’m appropriating them as craft terms. To me, craft is the process of writing, and creating a lexicon of craft terms (ideally) helps us as writers to make more intentional decisions in our work and approach it with more confidence. 

Prompt time!

Although I’ve just told you about narration in relation to a sequence of events, we’re going to strip our writing of a formal narrative in order to focus solely on narration. 

First, I’d like you to read/listen to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” (It’s short, about 700 words.) You can find it here, or you can watch Jamaica Kincaid read it on YouTube.

What I love about this piece is that it’s not technically a narrative, it’s a lyric essay with not one but two narrators. There’s the voice giving the orders, the series of imperative sentences, and there’s the italicized voice questioning the orders. So even though we’re not given a discrete scene or bodies moving and interacting in space and time, we still have two characters: a mother, presumably, and her daughter. The mother is teaching the daughter the “rules” of womanhood, which are contradictory and overwhelming.

In lacking a narrative, this piece allows us to separate it from our understanding of writing grounded in time and space. In essence, it’s the opposite of last week’s prompt. It also questions our understanding of sentences in English requiring subjects, because all imperative sentences have an implied subject: you. This prompt is an experiment in how voice and style develops narration.

Next, I want you to write a piece in the imperative style of “Girl.” Here are some ways you can approach it:

  • If you want to write fiction, write a piece about the rules your character lives by. Consider how they feel about those rules—do they follow them or defy them? Consider also who is giving the rules and why. Is there someone who has power over them? Or perhaps they’re rules they tell themselves, that they’ve developed over time.
  • If you want to write nonfiction, write your own version of “Girl” using the rules you’ve been taught regarding some aspect of your life. Like “Girl,” you could focus on the rules of gender and culture, or perhaps you could take a more literal spin on it—the expectations of a job or a sport.
  • If you want to write something experimental (even though this is already experimental), write a version of “Girl” from the italicized voice’s perspective, perhaps a series of questions rather than commands. 

A second voice within the piece is optional. And because this prompt is already lyrical, I don’t think I need to list a separate approach for poetry. 

Bonus prompt

If you’ve filled any of the prompts these past four weeks, I would love to know what your biggest takeaways have been. What new insights have you gained about your own writing? Have any of your perspectives or goals changed as a writer? Feel free to sit on this one for a while; I know that it takes a long time for me to reflect on the things I’ve learned. So I welcome you to send me an ask or tag me in a post at any point in the future. My favorite thing is when writers update me on their progress and growth.

In parting, I want to share my lowkey writing-related newsletter, in which I write about craft and process as well as offer a roundup of all the writing advice asks I answer on my Tumblr. I also provide updates on the Fanauthor Workshop (currently accepting applications!) and OFIC Magazine. If you’re pleased with any of your prompt fills from our workshop, you’re welcome to submit them (or any other original work) to OFIC. Submissions for Issue #8 open September 1st. 

Lastly, if you’re interested in one-on-one guidance and feedback on your writing, I’m a full-time writing coach. I help writers at all levels reach their goals, whether that’s completing a novel, querying agents, or applying to creative writing graduate programs. Here are some testimonials from current clients

A huge thanks to @books for hosting these workshops! I hope they’ve been as fun for you as they have for me. I’ve had a great time reading your prompt fills, and I wish you the best of luck in your writing journey.

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Questions? Ask ‘em here before EOD Tuesday so @bettsfic can answer them on Wednesday. And remember to tag your work #tumblr writing workshop with betts if you want her to read your work and possibly feature it on Friday!

And, for those just joining us: @bettsfic has been running a writing workshop on @books this month. These prompts will stay up for you to fill at your leisure. Want to know more? Start here.

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