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silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover, like half the month.]
Sometimes, in a big work, you have a lot of characters that need to get on stage, perform their lines and actions, and then go off until it's time for their next cue. Ensemble casts often need someone to help steer the audience through the action and provide context for what is going on. Choosing a narrator out from the group often requires some decisions to be thought through, to make sure that there's someone there for all the action that needs to happen in their view. Sometimes there's going to have to be more than one narrator if the action happens in such a way that there are two (or more) distinct groups that have all the roles and requirements to get the story told. Sometimes, even when there's a small cast, there still have to be decisions made about who gets the role of the narrator.
I think the question of the narrator is a lot easier to answer if you see that question as a similar one: "Whose perspective matters?" I have likely heard it from one (or more) of the panels on writing and creating that I've attended, so much credit to all the writers out there who have been saying this for as long as they have. The story that you're going to tell is going to have a perspective on everything, from how the characters see each other to how the action unfolds. You make choices about what and who to include and exclude from you story all the time. And more often than not these days, even if your narrative entity is omniscient and knows everything, they're going to have a perspective on things about which of your characters is right and heroic and which is villainous and wrong. So, whose perspective is the one that you want to promote and make important to the narrative?
Whether working in original fiction or genre fiction or fanfiction, the character you give perspective and narrative weight to influences the entirety of the story. It would be an entirely different series if it were Draco Malfoy and the Sorceror's Stone, or Dudley Dursley and the Sorceror's Stone. Or if the narrative generally believed that Harry Potter had no special destiny at all, and was just being a child who liked to make trouble for everyone else. Or a story where Harry is the viewpoint character, but it's Neville who is the child of prophecy and the real threat to He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named, and everyone is sinking their resources into protecting him and not Harry. These are all perfectly good stories, and I'll bet each of them has been written more than a few times and different ways. Whose perspective matters depends on the story you want to tell. Is it about a character that's reluctant to embrace the hero role? One that dives in too quickly and needs to learn more before going back out? An interested bystander? The reporter chasing Superman? A string of people who keep encountering an alien that's always just a bit off, but they go on adventures in time and space together? (The Doctor is almost never the narrator of the story of the Doctor, because we need humans to relate to the Doctor, rather than trying to understand the Doctor from a Time Lord's perspective.) Is the villain the storyteller you need, because you need to show that the way they've been portrayed is unfair, or because there's a much more sinister conspiracy or rot in the nominally-heroic department that needs exposing? Whose perspective can give you as much or as little of the story as you need?
So what happens when you have multiple possible narrative characters and any of them could shoulder the narrative duties that you have in mind? Well, at that point, assuming the characters that you have to work with are diverse enough that you have options to choose from that aren't "that cis white dude, that cis white dude, that cis white dude over there," my suggestion is that the character who can provide the most insight into the world, because they're not part of that world's majority/ies, is your best bet. It's a good way of getting in some worldbuild into your story by going through the perspective of someone who gets affected by societal prejudice, legal prejudice, or the intended "unintended" consequences of the way the society structures itself. It might inform the plot, but it also serves some other purposes, like giving representation to characters that might not otherwise be represented in stories and also it might help someone think through the consequences and the ways that their intended society idea might fail, skew, or otherwise do things it wasn't intended to do. Because readers of your work are likely thinking about those things, and if you fail particularly hard on something, they might put the story down and walk away at that point. (Or they might swear you off as a writer if you consistently seem to be failing at it.)
How do you avoid flinging yourself headfirst into the pitfalls that await you? Well, the only way to avoid it completely is to not write, and that's not what we're here for. So the next post will have some suggestions on how to potentially recognize when you're in a space that could be dangerous, and ways that the danger might be minimized or mitigated.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover, like half the month.]Sometimes, in a big work, you have a lot of characters that need to get on stage, perform their lines and actions, and then go off until it's time for their next cue. Ensemble casts often need someone to help steer the audience through the action and provide context for what is going on. Choosing a narrator out from the group often requires some decisions to be thought through, to make sure that there's someone there for all the action that needs to happen in their view. Sometimes there's going to have to be more than one narrator if the action happens in such a way that there are two (or more) distinct groups that have all the roles and requirements to get the story told. Sometimes, even when there's a small cast, there still have to be decisions made about who gets the role of the narrator.
I think the question of the narrator is a lot easier to answer if you see that question as a similar one: "Whose perspective matters?" I have likely heard it from one (or more) of the panels on writing and creating that I've attended, so much credit to all the writers out there who have been saying this for as long as they have. The story that you're going to tell is going to have a perspective on everything, from how the characters see each other to how the action unfolds. You make choices about what and who to include and exclude from you story all the time. And more often than not these days, even if your narrative entity is omniscient and knows everything, they're going to have a perspective on things about which of your characters is right and heroic and which is villainous and wrong. So, whose perspective is the one that you want to promote and make important to the narrative?
Whether working in original fiction or genre fiction or fanfiction, the character you give perspective and narrative weight to influences the entirety of the story. It would be an entirely different series if it were Draco Malfoy and the Sorceror's Stone, or Dudley Dursley and the Sorceror's Stone. Or if the narrative generally believed that Harry Potter had no special destiny at all, and was just being a child who liked to make trouble for everyone else. Or a story where Harry is the viewpoint character, but it's Neville who is the child of prophecy and the real threat to He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named, and everyone is sinking their resources into protecting him and not Harry. These are all perfectly good stories, and I'll bet each of them has been written more than a few times and different ways. Whose perspective matters depends on the story you want to tell. Is it about a character that's reluctant to embrace the hero role? One that dives in too quickly and needs to learn more before going back out? An interested bystander? The reporter chasing Superman? A string of people who keep encountering an alien that's always just a bit off, but they go on adventures in time and space together? (The Doctor is almost never the narrator of the story of the Doctor, because we need humans to relate to the Doctor, rather than trying to understand the Doctor from a Time Lord's perspective.) Is the villain the storyteller you need, because you need to show that the way they've been portrayed is unfair, or because there's a much more sinister conspiracy or rot in the nominally-heroic department that needs exposing? Whose perspective can give you as much or as little of the story as you need?
So what happens when you have multiple possible narrative characters and any of them could shoulder the narrative duties that you have in mind? Well, at that point, assuming the characters that you have to work with are diverse enough that you have options to choose from that aren't "that cis white dude, that cis white dude, that cis white dude over there," my suggestion is that the character who can provide the most insight into the world, because they're not part of that world's majority/ies, is your best bet. It's a good way of getting in some worldbuild into your story by going through the perspective of someone who gets affected by societal prejudice, legal prejudice, or the intended "unintended" consequences of the way the society structures itself. It might inform the plot, but it also serves some other purposes, like giving representation to characters that might not otherwise be represented in stories and also it might help someone think through the consequences and the ways that their intended society idea might fail, skew, or otherwise do things it wasn't intended to do. Because readers of your work are likely thinking about those things, and if you fail particularly hard on something, they might put the story down and walk away at that point. (Or they might swear you off as a writer if you consistently seem to be failing at it.)
How do you avoid flinging yourself headfirst into the pitfalls that await you? Well, the only way to avoid it completely is to not write, and that's not what we're here for. So the next post will have some suggestions on how to potentially recognize when you're in a space that could be dangerous, and ways that the danger might be minimized or mitigated.
