The Narrator's Promise
Story Challenge | Week 7 | The best narrators tell all ... they establish an agreement with readers: if you stay with me, I’ll tell you everything as soon as I know or remember. ~John Mauk
Happenings & Other Stuff
🗓️ Our First Live Salon for Story Challenge Live Salon is Friday JAN. 19th 12:30PM CT and we’re so excited! We’ll have a Story Challenge Q & A, speed sentence shares & more (Zoom link sent 2 hrs ahead to all founders; manage your subscription options here & share comments/questions on this post!
✍🏼 Our next seasonal intensive starts in April and is devoted to embodied writing. Our bodies store memory, experience, and the raw material of story, so we’ll use use powerful but gentle techniques to articulate our cellular knowledge, muscle memory, and fascia of connection from which we weave all stories. Join us!
🎥 Bonus video on narration included with this post for all paid subscribers: Me, Myself & I: Harnessing the Power of the Narrative Gap
First of all, what even is a narrator? Put another way, what chain of dominoes do we start knocking down when we decide who should tell the story and how they should tell it?
We should consider these questions before we start asking our narrators to promise anything to anyone!
So we’ll start off with a brief, nonlinear, and wholly incomplete introduction to the topic of narration, which I love because and in spite of the fact that it’s so complicated.
Yes, narration is complicated. But it’s also so, so fun. And, anyway, we can do complicated things, and we have already begun doing complicated things with narration, because narration is connected to both voice and POV, which we played with last week, in the Story Challenge Week Six post, Voices Impel the Telling.
So we start by playing with the question of who’s telling the story, and how they’re telling it. It’s actually a very fun question to play with. When we’re just casually telling a story in real life, we naturally default to the speaking in some combination of first, third, and second person. Here’s an example:
Hey, honey, I was walking on the beach just know and saw this woman. She was alone, but singing into the sky in the most beautiful haunting voice. She was singing as if the ocean were a prayer. You would have loved hearing it. You could have listened all day.
And because of this—the way we narrate our lives in a combination of first, second, and third person POV (though, yes, it’s primarily first person), we’re pretty comfortable with those modes, even if we don’t fully technically understand them. (But here’s a cheat sheet if you need a reminder; the main mistake writers make is to accidentally/unintentionally “break POV” or “head hop” by letting a first-person or third-person close/limited narrator know things/say things they should not be able to know/say).
Listen, what the narrator can know (or not) is fascinating to us because humans are fascinated always by what can be known and what can’t! This tension between what is known and what is not, what can be known and what can not, and how knowledge gets acquired, bestowed, shared … or not drives our lives, right alongside desire. It certainly drives story. So it’s worth giving it some attention.
To note, we have less natural familiarity with omniscient narrators. That’s because omniscient narrators are like God: they see and know everything. That’s an expertise we humans lack. And it’s complicated.
And because it is complicated, I’ll repeat something I said last week, which is this: if you are writing a story with an omniscient narrator (that is, a narrator who tells the whole story with the magical power of being able to know all the thoughts and feelings of all the characters—that is, who is allowed to “head hop” at will—and who can know what is happening in all of the places of the story at all times in the story—then you have chosen the most difficult path of all narration choices. Omniscience is harder not simply because it’s unconventional in contemporary stories and therefore harder to publish (ie, harder to convince the gatekeepers, such as agents and editors) but, also because it’s difficult to execute well on a craft level. The craft challenges of omniscience stem from its lack of intimacy, yes, but also from the vast information and knowledge omniscient narrators must contend with. When writers execute it well, omniscience can be amazing. Ann Patchett wasn’t able to do it until her fourth novel. She tried unsuccessfully with her first three books, according to her own account in her essay “The Getaway Car” in her terrific memoir (about writing) This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.
I won’t go further into the issues of omniscience here, but if you are interested, you can find more in this article by K.M. Weiland, “What Every Writer Ought to Know About the Omniscient POV.”
If you’re not writing omnisciently, then you are most likely writing in first person or third-person close/limited. First-person is pretty obvious: you use the pronoun I and are (mostly) limited to what the I who is narrating can know/see/remember. If you are writing in third-person close/limited, it works pretty much the same as first-person in terms of what your narrator can know, but you use he/she/they pronouns instead if I. Some people write in second-person, which is the most experimental, and I’m not going to unpack that this week, except to say that usually (though not always) second person functions a lot like first-person, where the you is actually reflecting/referring to the narrator, not the reader or some other you (to see what I mean, just take a look at this Brevity essay by Suzanne Rich Farrell, “If You Find A Mouse On A Glue Trap,” which I love, by the way).
One important thing about first-person and third-person limited/close narrators, is this: you can let them tell us anything you want them to tell us, whether or not they were there or had/have any way of knowing about such things. In other words you can bust pass the “close/limited” fences of this kind of narration, as long as you can maintain your narrator’s credibility and, therefore, our confidence in your narrator. As long as you can do it with strategy and intention. I like to say: you can do it, if you can do it (well).
In The Part That Burns, my narrator tells the readers about events that happened to her mother long before the narrator was born, and she uses speculation in order to do this (Maybe it was this way, or maybe it was that way…):
My mother’s Smithville home was a squat clapboard farmhouse in a field on the edges of Duluth. I never asked if the chickens that lived upstairs in winter had dominion over the whole second floor. Mom only talked about the squawking and the shit. Details make the legend, and the legend forms its own truth. Another legend— though this could be wrong, too—is how once during an overnight bender, Mom’s uncles burned down the outhouse. When she trudged across the sopping grass the next morning, all she found to piss in was a hole in the ground and a pile of smoking ash. What I know for sure, though, is that Grandma and Grandpa Krause were both dead by the time Mom turned seventeen, the same year she got pregnant and married my father.
Then the party on Park Point.
Here’s how I imagine that thick summer night. Mom was eighteen and smoking True Blues, her teased hair sprayed stiff, Coral Candy lipstick to match her dress. My father was a young James Dean, what with his tight Levi’s and leather jacket, hair slicked back with Brylcreem. As for me, I was up the hill in the West End at Aunt Flossie’s—Mom had roped her younger sister into babysitting. I was probably asleep. Maybe crying. Maybe gazing at Flossie with my watery newborn eyes, wise and floating. I was still easy then.
Other narrators spin their yarns in a whole variety of creative ways, very often breaking the so-called rule that a first-person or third-person close narrator can never tell parts of the story that happen outside their limited field of vision. This Publishers Weekly round-up of great narrators includes one of my favorites—Ruth, from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, saying this about her (which includes a nod to her ability to narrate beyond her own field of vision):
In relating her and her sister's somewhat feral childhood in fictional Fingerbone, Idaho, Ruth depicts events and scenes she could not have witnessed firsthand but which have taken root in her imagination. The result is an intimate bildungsroman interwoven with a world-swallowing depiction of place, people, and history. All told through a voice that, at times, approaches the “I am nothing. I see all.” of Emerson's Transparent Eyeball. As stealthy as it is ambitious.
If you’re deeply curious about how to control the dial on what a narrator knows and doesn’t know, what she tells and doesn’t tell, and how you as the writer modulate this for maximum effect on the page, I’ve included a video with this week’s writing exercise below (writing exercises are behind the paywall). I made the video a couple of years ago for my handful of Patreon supporters back before I moved all the Patreon perks over here to Substack. I made this video when I was first starting to try to parse out my own thoughts on the intricacies of narration, so the video is like an early draft of something that evolved as I kept thinking about it.
Then, exactly a year ago, I was on Write Minded,
’s podcast with , and I got to speak with them a little more about narration—especially this idea of the three levels of narration: the writer, the narrator, and the protagonist (if the protagonist is narrating). Brooke was interested in what I was trying to say, so she invited me back to teach narration for the Magic of Memoir series she curates with Linda Joy Myers. And prepping for that class helped me to refine my ideas even further. From the detailed notes I crafted for that presentation, I’ll eventually shape an essay for all of you.But not yet.
That’s more detail than we need this week, today, right now, to play with narration in our Story Challenge. In fact, no matter how deep down you want to dig into this (super fascinating!) topic, please make that when you’re done digging, you sit down, take a breath, and remember: it’s just a story.
Whatever pile of information (and overwhelm) you might have amassed can just ferment and rise in the background while you relax, shake your shoulders down and back, and have our narrator do this one simple but powerful thing.
What is that one simple, powerful thing?