posted
A character's action or reaction to stimuli is purely visual and aural in film. Maybe a narrated voiceover expresses thought actions or reactions, though.
So how might you portray a purely thought action and reaction scene in written word?
Setup: a character sits on a sheltered bench. No one else is present; the scene is narrated in close third person, though, and the viewpoint character cannot observe himself, herself, or itself think or act nor act or think volitionally. The exterior setting is also a reflection of the interior discourse.
The emotional meaning of the scene is anxious anticipation of a change of any kind: weather, lighting, arrival of someone or something, or state of mind or being change, like sad to happy or living to dead. In short, reversal. Or discovery: reconciling a cognitive dissonance, unraveling a mystery, an epiphany arises, maybe even watching for a signal. Either a discovery that causes a reversal or a reversal that causes a discovery.
In brief scene or summary and explanation, how might you describe such a scene in written word?
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posted
I wouldn't. Not unless I misunderstand you. It sounds like you are describing a forced tell-not-show situation. There is always the option of character action to display internal discourse. Or at least, to help illustrate and expand on internal discourse. Without direct action by the character, it becomes an infodump.
Maybe I am not comprehending what you are talking about?
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posted
My interest specifically is how other writers might manage this difficult to portray scene.
One of my methods, in brief, is to use external sensations, mostly visual, to cue internal and external reactions off of.
Maybe the shelter is vandalism proof nickel-plated steel and bullet-proof glass. Immutable-like. The bench is cast concrete. In front of the shelter is a vacant four-lane street dimly lit by sporadic streetlamps, but a late-night vehicle goes by dragging a buffeting gale every once in a while. Beyond the road is a rusted corrugated metal-sided warehouse surrounded by concertina wire topped chain-link fencing. Behind the shelter is a dark forest; eerie and damp sounds come from it. The smells of late night, forest, road, and industry meld into an ashen dryness in the back of the throat and burned rotten eggs stinging nostrils. It's hell waiting for the last bus home.
That's pure summary though. In scene would be different, using sensation, action, introspection, monologue for conversation, and emotion writing modes, more robust verbs, and carefully chosen modifiers.
Also, little to no dramatic complication is directly given or implied. Why is this person here? What is this person wanting at the moment? To get home, yes. What is the problem opposing getting home? What is the underlying want and problem wanting satisfaction? Say, wanting to get out of this hell-hole life that makes this person wait for a bus home in the middle of the night. That's also a why, but not a how. How, working a graveyard shift on top of a regular first or second shift for the overtime pay. Where is relatively given, a city with mass transit. Where absolutely? Say Wichita, Kansas. The job is meat packing and this person is a vegetarian. When is also relative, when roads and motor vehicles are common. When specifically, absolutely? Say the BDK Strangler is still on the loose.
The whole could be composed in first person narration, but a simple transference to third person lends a degree of objectivity that first person lacks, and without compromising close narrative distance. So that readers feel they participate in the action.
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posted
Well, I tend to have characters walking pensively rather than sitting, probably because that's what I do. But I'll give you an example (emphasis added):
quote:Kate scrambled to the top of the bluff, and was relieved to see her ship make a clean repulsion landing right next to the pinnace. Kate started toward the ship, then decided she wasn't in a hurry. She sat down on the edge of a steep place on the marine bluff, dangling her feet over the edge and watching the sun-dappled water. From time to time she plucked a long stalk of grass to throw down the slope to the beach below.
In this example, Kate is at her low point in the story and emotionally vulnerable; there's someone in the ship she does not want to face. This is all clear to the reader at this point, so I don't have to voice her thoughts, I only have to show her changing her mind about meeting the ship (which tells the reader she doesn't feel ready to see him), and then give her some props (the grass) to kill time with.
I think that kind of implicit clarity is best, although it does go over the heads of some readers. Still, it's not always possible. If I have to voice the characters thoughts, I usually have the narrator do it in free indirect speech, borrowing just a smidgen of the dialog style of the character to reinforce the notion that it is the character's thoughts we are hearing. Still I try to give the character some props to play with and scenery to look at, so that the reader doesn't feel like he's been dropped into a sensory deprivation tank. Where possible, I try to make the props (e.g. a photograph) or scenery evocative of the character's dilemma, e.g.,
quote:As the teasing session roared on, Hector stepped out of the weight-room. To keep himself occupied he watched Liam organize a half-court basketball game across the gym.
Liam's basketball game was dreadful. Most of the players seemed incapable of moving their feet and doing anything with the ball at the same time. It was a sorry spectacle, like almost every other Plumfield athletic endeavor.
Except baseball.
Here the POV character Hector is a student just on the cusp of realizing that he's fallen in love with a baseball playing tomboy. His best friend is flirting with her. Unaccountably upset, Hector removes himself only to confront something that turns his thoughts back to her. That's easy, because when you're falling in love that's where your thoughts tend to go.
I always feel exposed writing a scene which is supposed to convey character thoughts and attitudes without actually presenting any kind of turn in the plot. Like readers will see I am shoveling background information at them. So I try to find concrete things to weave into the scene.
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You've got the gist of what I'm interested in. Are your excerpts summaries or actual scenes? Narrator voice predominates, which I understand is your preference. You favor an invisible bystander objective, as in camera objective. That voice allows for selective omniscient narration.
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posted
These are actual excerpts of scenes which illustrate my thinking. The whole scene naturally is balanced somewhat differently. I think it best for the POV character's thoughts to interact with the scenery rather than for them to take place in a sensory vacuum.
Recently I've been reading George R.R. Martin's *Song of Fire and Ice*, and it's given me a new appreciation for the power of scenery. It's a big part of what readers look for in fantasy. That said, I find the way Martin deploys his powers of scene painting crude. Characters suddenly turn into close observers, whether or not it makes narrative or thematic sense at that point. It feels calculated, almost as if Martin counted pages to make sure there weren't too many between descriptions of exotic landscape or props.
It's kind of a pulp writing sensibility, albeit better executed.
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posted
Do you feel narrator voice more so than character voice describes the scenery? Or is the description more or less a meld of character and narrator voice or indeterminate?
Martin's works are on my reading list for the word-of-mouth buzz they've generated; however, I'm reluctant to bite without a strong sampling to excite my interest. No nearby libraries carry the franchise. Getting the novels on interlibrary loan is currently impossible due to strong patron circulation at the libraries nearby.
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: Do you feel narrator voice more so than character voice describes the scenery? Or is the description more or less a meld of character and narrator voice or indeterminate?
Well, that's one of the things I feel is a bit dicey about Martin's narration; the scenery is presented as if it were supposed to be the POV character's perception, but it sometimes*feels* like an omniscient narrator is intruding into the character's stream of consciousness to point out interesting landmarks. My gut reaction is "this character wouldn't be observing this scene so closely at this juncture."
The scenery descriptions themselves are usually quite good, occasionally brilliant, but sometimes a bit, well, "Kong Island" if you know what I mean. Usually I'm a sucker for cheesy pulp exoticism, but I'm reading the story a lot more critically than the intended audience which probably spoils the story.
In one passage I particularly admire, one of the characters takes a ritual bath in a lake:
quote: ... Dany felt soft mud squishing between her toes as she pushed through the tall reeds. The moon floated on the still black waters, shattering and re-forming as her ripple washed over it.
Notice how he gives us both touch and sight; the moon image struck me because it reminded me of the "moon in a bucket" motif from classical Japanese poetry (e.g. Zeami Motokiyo's noh play, *Matsukaze*). And this is a scene where close observation by the character makes perfect sense.
Other places the observation seems a bit predicable, even phoned-in. After reading a few hundred pages I began to get a sense for when Martin was about to show us some entrails, or flies walking across dead man's open eyes. That's why I say that *Song of Fire and Ice* has a kind of horror sensibility; that said I think some of the horrific scenes feel a bit mechanical, although that's in part a function of the story's absurdly epic scale. *A Game of Thrones* is almost exactly 300K words long, and it doesn't resolve *any* of its plot lines; its separation from *A Clash of Kings* is a purely arbitrary cut-off at 831 pages.
The sex scenes feel thrown-in too. Martin tries to give them a morbid twist, but I don't feel like his heart is in it. He's much, *much* more interested in writing about food. He likes roasted meat with garlic and herbs, which is s regular staple of feasts in SoI&F.
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quote:Originally posted by MattLeo: In one passage I particularly admire, one of the characters takes a ritual bath in a lake:
quote: ... Dany felt soft mud squishing between her toes as she pushed through the tall reeds. The moon floated on the still black waters, shattering and re-forming as her ripple washed over it.
The first sentence to me reads like narrator voice from naming Dany less than as fully artfully as I believe could be managed. The second sentence is much stronger character voice. Though the tactile and visual sensations are fairly strong and clear, and the language mostly artful, both uses of "as," and in back-to-back sentences, are hiccups for me. The two sentences are syntactically similar too. I'd vary the syntax more, break the independent ideas into their own sentences, adding a bit more specific sensory detail, and use more robust verbs and modifiers.
I'd sampled what is available on Martin's website and Amazon. I see similar shortcomings to your observations: concluding that limited dramatic complication development, character and setting development, and an ensemble cast of name-dropped thousands, are overall shortcomings of the whole.
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: I'd sampled what is available on Martin's website and Amazon. I see similar shortcomings to your observations: concluding that limited dramatic complication development, character and setting development, and an ensemble cast of name-dropped thousands, are overall shortcomings of the whole.
Well, I don't want to sound like I'm arrogantly dismissing a successful writer's work. I'm reading this one with my critic's hat on, looking for things that were done well, and things that might have been done better. I'm finding plenty of both.
One thing I'm learning from *Song of Ice and Fire* is the value of transporting readers to Kong Island. I think a ticket to Kong Island is what draws many readers to speculative fiction, so you'd better show them natives capering in front of the brooding cyclopian wall, and glimpses of the colossal monsters that stalk the jungle beyond.
I believe it's particularly helpful to me to remind myself of the value Kong Island has for readers. At one point in my writing I produced a scene transition that went something like this: "The shuttle docked at the space station and she went straight to the parade ground level." A reader then asked, "What did the docking procedure look like?"
At first I was nonplussed. What possible difference could that make? It had no significance to the character's feelings or decisions. For her it would have been like city dweller getting off the subway and exiting onto the street. She'd navigate the that part of the scene on autopilot, without its details actually passing into her consciousness. But then I realized that these details were nonetheless important to the reader. Part of the implied contract I had with readers of that particular story was that in return for their reading it I'd transport them to a universe where gleaming needle-prowed rocket ships plied the stars.
And there turned out to be interesting logical constraints governing how the shuttle docking procedure could work. The shuttle would have been designed to function like a kind of space bus: comfortable, shirt-sleeves mass transportation between orbital facilities. So I painted a picture of what that might look like. Not the only possible picture, not even necessarily the most plausible one if you think very carefully about it, but one that is credible sounding on an intuitive level.
This stuff is mere decoration. The precise details make no functional difference in the plot or character development and they don't always have any particular thematic significance. But decoration can still make a difference. Your house doesn't have to look like a knicknack shop, but if you took *all* the decoration out of it, it would feel more like a prison than a home.
I don't naturally produce non-functional scenery in rough drafts, I have to go back and add it in where the narration feels a bit dry. But churning out a nice, self-contained piece of descriptive writing turns out to be fun and satisfying.
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posted
One of the hardest writing principles I've struggled with is "authenticating a narrative." My understanding of the principle comes from studying creative nonfiction, several poeticists of that vein, each a published creative writing professor. Developing narrator identity is another principle unique to creative nonfiction with a degree of overlap into fiction, especially narrated pieces with a narrator holding an attitude or in first person narration.
Features that authenticate a narrative are scene "decorations," but exquisite details that relate to the three meaning spaces of narrative: willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge), appealing secondary settings different from everyday alpha ones (Tolkien), and participation mystique (Falconer, Lévy-Bruhl).
The example you give of a space shuttle commuter exactly fits the three meaning spaces' tendency to authenticate the narrative. The personal observations of a viewpoint character commuting on a space shuttle lends believability to the setting and milieu, which is an artfully appealing exotic secondary setting, and gives the audience a feeling of participating in the mystique of the setting.
Commuting is a ritual custom most people participate in, many unwittingly, autonomously participating in the ritual. Portraying an exotic commuter situation, albeit routine and taken for granted within the narrative's setting, blends familiar circumstances with extraordinary circumstances. Unique circumstances that authenticate a narrative in an otherwise routine ritual performance space are what stands out as different for the viewpoint character. The routine wraps the exotic or unique or idiosnycratic portrait.
Though a setting development may not appreciably influence a plot, it may or should develop characterization, and, most importantly, authenticate the narrative. Narratives missing or short on setting development feel less authentic, hence, challenge willing supsension of disbelief, miss an opportunity to portray appealing (and empathy and curiosity inciting) secondary settings, and keep audiences at arm's length, or farther, from participating in the mystique.
Translating visual sensations to written word authenticate a narrative.
Edited to add: Thank you, MattLeo. This discussion has given me an epiphany about setting and visual stimuli, and other sensations, authenticating a narrative. A puzzle piece just fell into place.
posted
My first question is, why is he sitting on that bench? Only then can we know what he'd notice, and its significance.
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posted
Why he or she or it sits on the bench is up to your imagination for purposes of the question how would you portray this scene. Why is certainly a question regarding texture that should be satisfied in the scene.
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posted
As it turns out, I have a scene from my first novel which is quite close to what you are asking for here, although the emotion is not anxiety, but self-satisfaction. Nonetheless it illustrates how I'd handle this particular writing problem.
The story satirical urban fantasy set in 1938. The main character is a charming but insecure teenaged Lothario, who after being thrown out of string of prep schools is packed off to an elite experimental school practicing the ultra-liberal educational philosophy of Bronson Alcott (Louisa May's feckless but brainy father). Maximillian is a cynical schemer who'd normally be unlikable, but at Plumfield he's become a more sympathetic fish-out-of-water. Over the course of the story he's gradually humbled by his misfring schemes, forcing him to admit to himself he's gone from being the smartest guy in the room to the dumbest.
quote:Maximilian strolled down to the pond, to the exact spot where he'd first met the girls, sitting down on the very bench he'd spied the Day girl from. He removed his trilby hat, set it down beside him, then brushed a few specks from his trousers.
[Two paragraphs of self-satisfied, misguided gloating in free indirect speech]
[Three paragraphs of cynical scheming in f.i.s.]
He stretched out his legs, slouching on the bench, and watched the swallows darting over the pond. It was a beautiful Indian summer day, and Maximilian sighed with satisfaction. This was going to be good.
This shows both how I like to show the charcter's subconscious (not necessarily unconscious) actions, and how I try to integrate the character's thoughts with scenery. At the outset of this scene Maximilian sets his natty little hat aside and literally preens himself. He is aware that he's picking at his clothes but he's unaware what it shows to an attentive observer. Had I wanted to show him anxious, he might turn up the collar of his jacket, or take a hunched, crossarmed posture (notice how he takes up space in the final paragraph).
His conscious perception is drawn to a pleasant scene -- swallows darting over the pond. Had he been anxious he'd have focused on something less pleasant, like bits of trash floating at the water's edge, or transformed the swallows into something a bit less relaxed. Perhaps instead of marveling at their agility he might wonder if the swallows are going to crash into each other.
Either way I try to bring in a bit of sensory detail every few paragraphs that ties into the POV character's frame of mind. This sample goes longer totally inside the POV character's head than I'd do it today.
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posted
I see. Narrator reporting is not my preferred dominant aesthetic.
Free Indirect Discourse is a topic dicussed at length in linguistics, semiotics, and semantics as well as narrative theory. Free meaning untagged attribution: no he said, she thought, it wondered, etc., tags; indirect meaning paraphrased; and discourse being speech, thought, narrator reporting, or blended speech, thought, or reporting. Free indirect speech is untagged, paraphased dialogue. Free indirect thought is untagged, paraphrased thought. Besides dialogue, soliloquy and dramatic monologue are examples of direct speech, perhaps attribution tagged or untagged. A thought exclamation (interjection part of speech), like Oh no, is one example of a direct thought, either tagged or untagged (free).
The six types of voice in terms of indirect discourse are FID, TID, FIS, TIS, FIT, and TIT; and direct discourse's six: FDD, TDD, FDS, TDS, FDT, and TDT.
I've spent years unraveling discourse's aesthetics since Hatrack first introduced me to free indirect discourse circa 2007.
posted
The Group W bench reference, for those not familiar with the cultural reference, comes from Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," 1967. The Group W bench is where military draftees or inductees are sent to wait for consideration of a moral waiver, hence Group W, permitting induction with a juvenile felony record at the time of induction, though many are rejected as unfit for service.
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posted
A somewhat accessible article that's somewhat close to explaining free indirect discourse by Jon Gingerich at Lit Reactor "The Benefits of Free Indirect Discourse."
The essay biases against second person narration, where FID is a fundamental technique of its reflexive voice variant; favors narrator reporting as a form of speech in the sense written-word reporting resembles oration, though written-word narration is distinctively written word; doesn't offer as strong and clear of examples as might be ideal; doesn't analyze the given examples for narrative reporting and indirect discourse distinctions; doesn't compare and contrast narrated narratives to nonnarrated narratives, where indirect discourse is part of character voice instead of narrator voice; and doesn't go as deeply into the method's principles and applications as is possible. Gingerich claims indirect discourse is experimental, weird, and challenging to read and write. Challenging to write is the only qualifier I agree with. The strongest point Gingerich makes is how indirect discourse adds artful variety to a narrator voice. The essay is a strong summary survey beginning useful for leading into further exploration, though.
Wikipedia's article on the topic wanders even farther afield from what I can only surmise is inadequate knowledge of the principle. John Gardner's The Craft of Fiction gives the topic short-shrift. The Longman Guide to Fiction Writing for Beginners by Sibyl Johnson--unfortunately mistitled, should be titled something like Beginning to Write Fiction--mentions indirect discourse several times, gives it two subchapters amounting to several summary paragraphs. Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse has the most comprehensive explanation of indirect discourse, of course, though it too inadequately explores the topic.
Indirect discourse's strengths in terms of translating visual sensation into written word is psychic access to character perceptions, speech, thoughts, attitudes, emotions, and voices and, hence, close narrative distance. After developing a grasp of the individual principles, putting discourse, psychic access, and narrative distance principles together was for me a tipping point.
posted
While I have no argument with the article's description of free indirect discourse, I'd take issue with a number of assertions the author makes. For example, I think free indirect discourse has been so common for so long, I don't think it looks the least bit odd on the page. Of course anything starts to look weird if you look at it long and hard enough; call it "editor's itch."
quote:First-person offers unparalleled access but is extremely limiting; third-person offers a more objective view of the world but promises limited access
This is so grossly oversimplified it's almost meaningless. I find the challenge with first person (at least first person past tense) is there is so much to manage.
When characters in fiction speak, they're doing so to advance their personal agendas; when the narrator is a major character in the story, he's fabricating a version of reality he wants you to believe for his purposes. So in first person narration, you have to deal with (1) what actually happened; (2) what the narrating character thinks happened; (3) what the narrating character wants you to think happened; and if the narrator is particularly conflicted even (4) what he mistakenly believes he wants you to think. Even a narrator who intends to be reliable has to have biases; that's part of his characterization.
I always find a first person narrator who is intended to be utterly reliable phony-sounding. Nobody is that truthful, and even those who want to be completely honest are still biased observers. The challenge is to reveal these biases so the reader has access both to the narrator's version of events and what actually might have happened.
In third person omniscient narration, the narrator by convention does not lie outright, although he may mislead by omitting important details. Anything he says can be relied upon. If he says "Alice was frightened," then Alice was frightened and that is that. If Alice narrating the story says "I was frightened," she might be misleading us. If she says "Bob was frightened" she may be misleading herself *or* us.
I think things get interesting in third person limited narration, which pretty much goes hand in hand with free indirect discourse. There you deal with two things: what is happening and what the POV character believes is happening. This discrepancy is useful for things like creating suspense, and indispensable for writing comic scenes. A scene's effectiveness often depends on making the reader aware of things which the POV character is not.
I don't suppose that anyone other than writing geeks draw a strict line between third person omniscient and third person limited; I see no logical reason that an omniscient narrator can't choose to confine his narration to the POV character's consciousness, but only for part of the time. But I do find certain assertions that can only be made by an outside observer jarring when the narration is otherwise close (i.e.,inside the POV character's head).
For example, if we're using strictly limited third person narration, and the narrator says "Alice blushed," that's fine if the POV character is Bob, but if the POV character is Alice and there isn't a mirror handy, it always bothers me. Perhaps that's just me having a case of editor's itch. I'd rather have Alice feel her cheeks burn. I'm less fussy about this happening in first person narration (e.g. "I blushed") because I expect a first person narrator's account to be defective.
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quote:By MattLeo: I don't suppose that anyone other than writing geeks draw a strict line between third person omniscient and third person limited.
I don't think of myself as a geek in any discipline. Omniscient narrators as I understand them are narrators with selective psychic access. If every thought and perception was accessed and reported, they would be inaccessible and contorted. In the case of third-person limited omniscient, psychic access is to only one character's thoughts and perceptions, the viewpoint character. A short story probably should have access to only one character's thoughts and perceptions throughout, other than from a narrator persona if the narrator is a featured persona. A novel might access more than one character's thoughts and perceptions, but only one at a time in limited third-person narration.
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Ordinary Omni: the narrator's POV, despite any thoughts interjected by characters (the narrator may even comment on those!)
Limited 3rd: only one character's POV at a time, of which we have a zillion examples.
Omni-3rd: An all-knowing narrator, but internals are kept tightly to a single person's POV -- sometimes just one person's POV for the entire book.
Examples:
Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth is written in very tight omni-3rd. All scenes are from a single character's POV, with events expressed as that character sees it (rather than being described by the narrator), and that POV never wavers. But the whole is still told by an omniscent narrator, who adds external details as needed (but never from some other character's POV). She does this very, very well, so you're as tightly in the character's head (including emotionally) as with close limited 3rd, despite it all being technically omni.
Anything by Katherine Kurtz. While the whole are definitely omni, any given scene only dips into one person's head, and sometimes stays there for a while, tho everything is phrased as the narrator's observation. -- Her writing has been characterized as 'overly dry' (an assessment with which I concur) but she herself says she is not writing fiction; rather, she's recording a fictional history.
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posted
That's three third-person narrative points of view. Any one may be used to portray the bus stop scene. I distinguish narrative point of view along several distinct axis gamuts:
Degree of psychic access: none to occasional to frequent
Depth of psychic access: none to shallow to deep
Number of viewpoint accesses: none to one to a few to numerous
Narrator degree of attitude commentary: none to neutral to occasional to frequent
If graphed, the formula representing omniscient third-person narrative point of view variables would be a four-dimensional polynomial equation with infinite solution variables. At any given moment, the axes' nexus could be anywhere, though only varying abruptly to express an emphasis, otherwise its voice would transition seamlessly. Say NA^n + NB^n + NC^n + ND^n = x.
Again, I don't consider myself a geek in any discipline. Use of the term "geek" connotatively to mean a passionate expert in a technological field is comparatively recent. That meaning accompanied computer technology's development. I know its earlier meaning from the unskilled wild man exhibits that used to be very popular carnival entertainments. Those geeks acted like feral humans recently recovered from the wild, capering like a wild animal, biting heads off snakes and chickens, and crudely attired. Peculiar that a term's meanings can be mutually exclusive.
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extrinsic: Peculiar that a term's meanings can be mutually exclusive.
mattleo [takes chicken head out of mouth and spits out some feathers]: Oh... Anyone here got mouthwash? Something antiseptic might be nice.
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quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: That's three third-person narrative points of view. Any one may be used to portray the bus stop scene. I distinguish narrative point of view along several distinct axis gamuts:
I'd say that's a reasonably comprehensive model. If a person needed to model it in 3D space, one axis might be converted to 'density' or 'brightness' instead. Perhaps with color variations.
. . .
<goes off to find some chickens>
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posted
Well, if you seriously wanted to develop your equation, I've got the background in applied math to help you. But I think your equation analogy is a little bit off beam. The most fundamental reason to describe something as an equation is to divide the set of valid solutions from the invalid ones. Does any equation tell us which combinations of the terms you identify add up to a workable narration? I don't think so. What this tells us is that if there is such an equation, we don't know all its dimensions yet; nor do I think we are likely to ever know. Any combination of the factors you identify might possibly work, but it's up to writer's intuition to supply the unknown factors.
So where does this leave us in practical terms? I think we should think more in terms of a checklist than an equation, or maybe a flow chart. And I think there are more items needed for that checklist than you have yet. Let's look at an example, the opening of Charles Portis's *TRUE GRIT*, probably the finest example of first person narration I can think of off the top of my head:
quote:PEOPLE DO not give it credence that a fourteen year-old girl could leave home and go off in wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces he carried in his trouser band.
Here is what happened. We had clear title to 480 acres of good bottom land on the south bank of the Arkansas river not far from Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansas. Tom Chaney was a tenant but working for hire, not shares. He turned up one day hungry and riding a gray horse that had a filthy blanket on its back and a rope halter instead of a bridle.
I could go on for pages and pages about what's wonderful in this narration, but I'll confine myself to a few things that make my point.
Notice the inventory of stolen items Mattie the narrator gives. She lists the material goods she's been deprived of at length, but utters not a word on how her father's death made her feel. Isn't that odd? As she goes on, Mattie sounds more and more like is testifying in a civil trial. She is giving us what purports to be an objective account, and it sounds convincing as such, but it's highly suspect if you consider the particular details she dwells upon.
I like to think of narration, particularly first person narration, as dialog. And I believe in fiction characters speak with purpose; to pursue their own agenda, although not necessarily successfully. Mattie has an ax to grind: she wants to convince us that Tom Chaney is a bad, bad man. So narrator intent is one dimension to consider here. But there's also author intent. He's painting a picture of a materialistic, unsentimental girl, of a girl withot a trace ironic self-awareness (<yiddish_accent>comedy gold, I tell you!</yiddish_accent>), and of a primitive frontier Protestantism which considers material wealth a sign of divine favor.
This goes way beyond unreliable narration. I absolutely believe every word Mattie utters is the truth as she sees it, and fairly accurate to boot. But what she chooses to say tells us so much, and what she chooses not to say even more.
What makes this narration great is that you can so much out of so few words. TRUE GRIT is only seventy thousand words long or so. I'm currently at the 3/4 million word mark reading G.R.R Martin's SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, which has its admirable points but efficiency isn't one of them. You can get more out of a couple of pages of Portis narration than a million pages of Martin's. I believe that's because Portis use of first person narration, not only to allow the character to pursue her own agenda, but to make her inadvertently reveal things about herself. And because we readers figure that out for ourselves, it feels absolutely credible.
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A math metaphor is likely the least comparable to creative writing and the reading thereof for math's purety and creative writing's undefinable infiniteness. However, mathematics modeling potentials hold possibilities for imprecisely conceptualizing creative writing's structual and aesthetic scope and minutia.
I noted Portis' Mattie as a young adult convinced of the righteousness of her cause and her personality, to the extreme of self-righteous Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye conviction without a trace of sarcasm or mockery of it but profound and subtle satire. The first True Grit film captured Mattie's complex character, the second less so. Somewhat stronger Rooster Cogburn from Jeff Bridges for the second film, though the character overpowered by John Wayne's persona in the first film. Lee Marvin had the strongest ability to play ambiguous characters but not the girth for Rooster.
But that's the direction Hollywood goes. Filmmakers overlook the complex depths of meaning inherent in written word expression. I'm disappointed by trailers for the Carrie remake. Too much telling, summarizing, explaining, interpreting, lecturing direct expression about the novel's subtle implied meanings. Does anyone know how to act accessibly ironically satirical without sarcasm and farce anymore?
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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Well, I'd love to discuss the different merits of both movie versions of TRUE GRIT, each of which manages to be remarkably true to the book while being very different from the other, but I think that discussion belongs in a different board.
What I'd like to do is bring the discussion back to narration, and in particular sensation and reaction in narration.
First I'd like to put forth a postulate: Narration should be credible. Even if we have an unreliable narrator, we ought to believe that the narrator is misleading us, which automatically guarantees that the clever author has got us believing something different. So we can convince the reader that the sky is green by making him disbelieve the narrator's claim that it is blue. Perhaps a better way of stating this would be that narration should generate belief, but not necessarily in what the narrator is telling us.
Portis's narration enables us to figure out things about Mattie by reading between the lines, and because we all love to feel clever we believe those things without question. So a corollary to the credibility postulate might be that suggestions the reader picks up on are more credible than things he is explicitly told.
The technique you mentioned at the outset, of having the narrative camera see something followed by the narrator voice over with the character's reaction, could work if you're not too heavy-handed about it. You can go the other way too, of starting with the thoughts and ending with the sensation; I think I mentioned I like to break up a long string of thought bubbles with some scenery. If the observation and train of thought seem natural to the reader as they happen, fine, but I think it's easy to be too obvious when you do this.
I think having character actions reveal their state of mind through non-conscious action is safer. If Fred is sitting on the bench and you want to show he's nervous, rather than saying "Fred was nervous," have him do things that reader recognizes as nervous behavior. He keeps turning to look behind him. He lights up a cigarette, fumbles with the lighter, tosses the cigarette away after a few puffs, then does it again.
It was clumsy switching between scene-painting and inner monologue is what spoiled George R.R. Martin for me. His narration is for the most part serviceable, but a bit repetitive. After awhile I began to feel that it didn't make internal sense for the narration to suddenly focus on the background. It makes sense from an *authorial* standpoint; to "authenticate the narrative" in your terms, "visit Kong Island" in mine, but it felt alien to the POV character's train of thought. It was (to me at least) an obvious bit of literary manipulation, and once I perceived that the jig was up.
Once a reader glimpses the man behind the curtain, he never forgets that man is back there.
Posts: 1459 | Registered: Dec 2010
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I think the general writing principle you're talking about is subtext. Subtext's strength is not so much believability or credibility, I think, as it is interpretability; in other words, accessibility, and then readers' privilege to understand and decide the subtext's meaning.
If a writer intends to show religous righteousness as a moral issue, then the writer shows it as an obsession that has negative consequences, based upon poetic justice.
Martin's narrator describing larger world stimuli, to me, emulates ancient historical epic legends, like Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aenid, both noteworthy epics but heavy in traditional scriptural omniscient, ominpotent, and omnipresent lecturing voices. Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions satirizies the traditional historical epic legend form. Do Martin's descriptions have subtext meaning? No, not timely accessible meaning.
My preference is narratives which estrange narrator voice altogether and express from one viewpoint character's voice. An anchor to align with throughout a narrative, for the sake of unity, though, can as easily be a narrator whose identity is firmly developed. William Thackeray Makepeace's Vanity Fair does that, having a degree of psychic access to multiple viewpoint characters, which is a strategic reason for having a narrator persona. Furthermore, Makepeace's narrator expresses emotional attitude commentary throughout: omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The narrator is the strongest attitude holder and readers align with the narrator because of the attitude.
For me, third-person character narration's strengths are that it is objective to a degree, trustworthy, acceptable as one character viewpoint's reality, no matter how fantastical it may be. Mattie firmly, if naively, believes in poetic justice and the righteousness of her convictions. The beauty of the subtext is that it is simply expressed as her reality and readers decide for themselves what it means and whether they align with it. That Mattie's belief system is flawed adds antagonism to the drama. Readers want to see her struggle, if for no other reason than she personally grows from taking for granted her beliefs are righteous to adopting them wholeheartedly as a consequence of the crises of existence she has.
Subtext that is accessible but implied, is interpretable and open to a degree of interpretation is one of the strongest magics of creative writing. Dislike a totalitarian belief system? Demote it by glorifying its culture. In that regard, express an extended verbal irony. Actually, also a courtly irony--reminiscent of royal court entourages jockeying for status by damning the competition with faint praise or praising with faint condemnation, or both.
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Well, I'm pretty sure Martin never came up with a metaphor as good as "wine-dark sea" (pretty good for a blind old guy, I'd say), but I take your point about his narration. In fact you've given me something of a brainwave on what's wrong with it.
Martin actually narrates in strict third person limited -- the narration is limited to the awareness of the scene's POV character. However, the SoI&F saga has, by one estimate I've heard, a total of *31* characters who at some point are POV character in a scene. Discounting minor characters who only get one or two scenes, I count maybe ten major POV characters up to the point I've reached (about 3/4 of a million words). Martin does a pretty good job at differentiating the thoughts and attitudes of each of these characters, but each character's perception of scenery and props sounds exactly the same all the others. That's what rings false. Real people would naturally perceive different kinds of details in a scene, and would describe them in different ways.
My wife has a hobby of of sewing 19th C ball gowns. Where I would just see an old fashioned dress, she'd see the whole (e.g., mid 1870s Victorian silhouette), then all the parts that would have taken tricky stitching, and then the neat way the dressmaker managed to match up the checked print at the bodice's seams. On the other hand walking in the park where I'd see willows and red oak and sycamore, my wife would see nothing but green blobs on sticks. No matter how many times I've tried to show her how to identify poison ivy, any shrub less than four feet tall stands convicted in her eyes.
In Song of Ice and Fire, every character seems to see the same kinds of things when he looks at the landscape, or at one of Martin's absurdly rococo knights. Even the metaphors they use to describe those things they sound the same to me (e.g., blood blooming at the tip of a knifepoint).
To be honest, I don't think I would have noticed this, but when I passed the 250K word mark with no plot resolutions in sight, something about the narration started to bug me. I think you've helped me put my finger on what it is. If he *did* write in third person omniscient, it wouldn't be a problem. Tolkien wrote that way, so it didn't matter which particular hobbit was traipsing through the bosky underbrush -- it was the narrator telling in the narrator's voice. So while I think Martin's narrator doesn't display omniscience, the narration might work better if it were omniscient -- at least in this one respect.
As for subtext, that word fits part of what I was talking about, although I tend to avoid using the word because it carries a certain critical theory baggage. Some people use it, not only for the things the narrator reveals indirectly about the story, but things the text inadvertently reveals about the attitudes and values of the author, or of the society he lives in. I have no objection to literary scholars attempting to do that, but it has no relevance to the things I'm trying to do. I never say, "gee, I need to add a little subtext here." It's more like, "I need to lead the reader to believe that Alice is not quite as angry at Bob as she's pretending to be."
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From what I've sampled of Martin's writing, his metaphors are colorful but empty and often lackluster and vaguely expressive. Blood blooming from a knife tip directly states its meaning, is tangible, with little to no subtle but accessible implications and leaves nothing open to interpretation. No decoding; no reader use of imagination, no subtext. "A wine dark sea," though, is as colorfully rich as a sunset sirah waterway glade: fraught with intangible meaning and complex flavor.
That wine metaphor is what Seymour Chatman labels an estranging metaphor: a metaphor that estranges narrator voice in favor of character voice, citing "stupid embarrassment" and "beautiful tears" as character voice, narrator estranging examples. Two features of artful estranging metaphors are a tendency to be at least paradoxical, if not oxymoronic--ironic without calling undue attention to the irony--and poetically accentual verse reminiscent of understated or overstated interjection. Though artful expression, estranging metaphors have tangible and immediately accessible intangible meaning. They are especially artful when they also serve another function, like foreshadowing or expressing subtext, though they should be used timely and judiciously, not excessively, like interjection sentence fragments.
Though a fraction of literary analysis examines writer identity--psychoanalyism, historicism, feminism to name a few--labeling those subtext is a misnomer. Of course, writer identity is a possible meaning between the words; it's not a textually essential criteria. Maybe determining writer identity (beliefs, values, mores) is essential for preparation against undue influence; however, a text should stand on its own merits and not upon a writer's cultural identity.
Orson Scott Card's position on alternative lifestyles is widely known and a potential "subtext" background that may indirectly influence his writing, more so from what he doesn't include. Those communities reject his fiction outright, at least publicly. Yet his fiction isn't in and of itself critical of those lifestyles. Attempts to connect the two fail on general principles. A narrative's subtext is part of the drama, not per se part of the message, though artless writers may injudiciously cludge the two together. Then it's artless propoganda.
Subtext in a simple, situational use or extended use expresses a different intent and meaning than a surface one. In that regard, subtext is akin to allusion, metaphor, allegory, simile, satire, irony, etc. Subtext's only necessary criterias are that its underlying intent and meaning be accessible and appealing.
Similar to subtext, dramatic irony--one party in the know, another not in the know, ideally readers in the know--is when, for example, readers know Alice is not as angry at Bob as Bob thinks she tries to project. Also, that is a double bind. A double bind is a folkloristics and other social sciences concept where a surface intent is contradicted by an underlying intent.
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It seemed to me that "wine-dark sea" and "rosy fingers of dawn" just kept appearing in Homer's work--as if he couldn't think of any other expressions to use.
While I realize that a great phrase is a great phrase, it doesn't mean that you can keep using it until it becomes almost cliche-like in the work in which it was introduced.
Sorry, just had to insert that. Returning you to your regular topic, which is very interesting, by the way. Thank you, all.
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Homeric scholars attribute metaphor repetition in the Homeric Cycle to replicant fading by copy scribes. Whether Homer was an actual living person remains open to interpretation, too. Like One Thousand and One Nights is a compilation of Arabian folklore, the Homeric Cycle is believed to be a Greek equivalent accumulated and perhaps complied under "Homer's" auspices over a long time span.
Aristotle would note that repetition is a potentially persuasive rhetorical scheme; though repetition without substitution and amplification is lackluster. The principles of symbolism and its related visual allusion imagery rely upon motif repetition, substitution, and amplification.
For example, "a wine dark sea" may in an early use foreshadow a coming calm. The metaphor in some interpretations is comparable to "red sky at night, sailors' delight." A red sunset heralds calm and pleasant weather. Contrarily, a red sunrise heralds turbulent weather. In a later use then, "a wine dark sea" may foreshadow a coming storm, figuratively, literally, or both.
Other uses of "a wine dark sea" may symbolize a plentitude of self-gratificatiion, like from a sumptious banquet of food and wine and the emotional sensations of a pleasantly fully belly and a contented mind at peace. Contrarily, the metaphor may represent an excess of deprivation, mayhem, and heartache.
Altering a metaphor or symbolism's context and texture renews it. Unchanging, repeated metaphor is lackluster. One key feature of metaphor, imagery, and symbolism is that they use concrete, tangible, material circumstances to represent abstract, intangible, immaterial circumstances. The Biblical burning bush and other flame metaphors are examples of imagery that represent divinely inspired messengers, for example.
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Kathleen -- poetry is a different animal. I believe every ancient poetic tradition in the world makes unabashed use of stock phrases. You have gray-eyed Athena, armor clattered down around him, wine-dark sea in Greek; in Old English you have hanged god (Odin), fighting-gear (armor), and whale-road (sea). In Japanese waka there are stock "pillow word" modifiers like "soramitsu Yamamato" ("Land of Yamato, seen from the sky").
Stock phrases help you shoehorn the meaning you intend into the verse form you're using. If you're doing Old English alliterative poetry and you need to say "sword", you can use "ben-grefill" (wound-hoe) if you need to alliterate with a plosive consonant like "p" or "b"; or "ímun-laukr" (war-leek) if you need to alliterate with a vowel.
Martin doesn't have Homer's excuse, but in his defense Martin is not writing literary fiction. His prose is meant to be serviceable, not savored. Much of his sensory descriptions and the associated figurative language is intended to evoke horror and revulsion; that's hard to keep up for millions of words. I found that after a quarter million words or so entrail-fatigue set in.
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Well, you lasted a lot longer than I did with Martin, MattLeo. I feel vindicated for quitting even sooner by what you've said, so thanks.
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