The following advice has been adapted from an old book called Good English by Kathleen Baron:
When collecting material for narrative, it must be assumed that you have the material for your story in your head, or you would not be sitting down to write it. Your problem is to decide what is to be omitted, what briefly told, and how you are to arrange the material that is left.
The arrangement of matter is to a large extent imposed from without. Things happen in a certain order, and in most cases the narrator should follow that order. It is true that in dealing with a long series of events, as in history or in an epic poem, it may be necessary to present various incidents rather in the order of importance than in the exact order in which they occurred. Epics almost never begin at the beginning: they start off in the middle of an interesting situation and go on, gradually picking up preceding events as the story develops. The same is true of many novels. On the other hand, many narratives, such as Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim’s Progress, follow the time order: they begin at the beginning and go right on.
Even in those cases where series of events are grouped according to their importance in the whole narrative, the events within each series must be given in their time order. It would appear, therefore, that once the general arrangement of series is made, the rest is a mere matter of memory. You start at the beginning of each series, and let the mind recall each event as it happened. But the matter is not quite so easy as it looks. Two opposite lines of error present themselves: we may omit essential points, or we may include points that have no value in the narrative.
Listen to children telling stories. One of the commonest remarks you will hear is “Oh, but I forgot to tell you that . . .”. This is said when the child finds that the development of the story demands a knowledge of some preceding incident, that at an earlier part of the narrative was not of sufficient consequence to command their attention. On the other hand, when we listen to the stories of certain garrulous persons we are not spared a single detail, however unimportant.
The true view is that here as elsewhere we must make a selection among the facts that present themselves, we must choose only those that are of consequence in respect of the purpose we have at the time. The reader of a narrative is entitled to assume that every fact set forth does something towards aiding the development of the story. For example, if we are told that a man walked to town “by the shortest route “, we have a right to assume that he was in a hurry to get there. If the context shows that there was no need for haste, then we are justified in assuming that later on in the story we shall find that something depended on his taking this particular way to town. Sometimes, it is true, a remark is introduced not for its own sake, or for future use, but merely to convey a present impression. / heard the wall-clock ticking at the far end of the corridor need not lead us to expect the clock to play a prominent part in the story. The context shows that the reference is made in order to strengthen the impression of the silence that reigned at a critical moment in the story.
While in narrative there is thus the usual need for a point of view and for a corresponding selection of material, there is always the great help of the time order. You must choose the proper incidents, but the incidents all pass through your mind in the order in which they originally occurred. In description, on the other hand, the facts may present themselves to the mind in any order. We must adopt our point of view, and then determine the relative importance of the facts at our disposal. It is true that, speaking generally, we have in description all the facts arranged according to space, as in a narrative they are arranged according to time. We may describe emotions, theories and other immaterial things, but the beginner in description will do well to confine himself to things seen, and there he has the aid of space arrangement. Even with this limitation he has to determine which facts are, for his present purpose, the most suitable to begin with.
Your treatment of the facts will be decided in part by your method of telling the story. The most usual method is to pretend that the author knows everything and is everywhere. In telling the story they can enter the minds of the characters and proclaim their secret thoughts; they can describe what happened in one place, and afterwards what was happening at the same time in another; they can traverse infinite distance, and leap across the years. This method is clearly most convenient since it imposes no restraint upon the writer, but there are times when other methods are appropriate.
When a story deals very particularly with the experience of a single character, it is common to make that character the narrator, and to write in the first person. David Copperfield and Robinson Crusoe are examples of this method. It has certain limitations in that you can only present what the narrator themselves heard or saw or experienced, but it is often a more convincing method, since the reader easily imagines themselves in the place of the character who is telling the story.
A third method is to make an imaginary character tell the story for you—a difficult method, which should not be attempted by the inexperienced. It is often used when the story would be incredible if told in a more direct form. Reading it, you feel that the author is not vouching for the truth themselves, but heard it from another, who possibly heard it from a third. Henry James uses it very brilliantly in his ghost story The Turn of the Screw, where the events would seem utterly beyond belief if the story were told more directly. Many ghosts stories employ this method. It is used with different effect when the narrator is a “character” like W. W. Jacobs’ night watchman, for then much of the fun of the story lies in the way it is told. “Q” uses all three methods in a very skilful way in a short story, The Roll-call of the Reef.2 It opens in the first person, with a conversation between the author and his host, but this merely serves as introduction. His host tells a ghost story, which he himself heard from his father, and because he is telling a story well-known to him he uses the freer direct method as if he himself were the author. He thus reaps the advantages of all three methods. Phillip Pulman’s uses a special device for this in His Dark Materials with the invention of demons, an external form of the human soul, to tell characters, and the reader, things that they wouldn’t normally be able to know. You will be well advised not to try any such intricate methods of story-telling yourself if you’re new to writing stories, but rather learn from these tricks by studying how they are handled by accomplished writers.
Recent Comments