The Trick I Use For Writing Narration

Last week I promised I’d explain the new technique I’m using to help overcome some of my writing insecurities. So here it is. Consider the following lines from Brandon Sanderson’s The Alloy of Law.

He opened his eyes, and rested his hands on the balcony railing to look out over Elendel. It was the grandest city in all the world, a metropolis designed by Harmony himself. The place of Wax’s youth. A place that hadn’t been his home for twenty years. 

Though it had been five months since Lessie’s death, he could still hear the gunshot, see the blood sprayed on the bricks. He had left the Roughs, moved back to the city, answering the summons to do his duty to his house at his uncle’s passing. 

A nice mix of narration and exposition that fits perfectly into the flow of the scene. Although it’s not clear whether the character is actually thinking these things or if it’s the author telling us these things, the passage works because it’s in the character’s voice. All well and good. However, when I try writing passages like this, I’m immediately plagued with doubts. Am I telling too much? Does it sound like authorial intrusion? Am I distancing the reader?

I have no problem looking at someone else’s words and deciding if the narration is good, but when I stare at my own passages I have no idea if they work or not. I simply have no feel for it—like a color blind person trying to decide if a shirt and tie match. And this indecision really kills my creativity.

So I’ve spent a lot of time studying as many stories as I can, searching for that elusive “rule” that would allow me to “know” whether a passage of narration works or not. Since my stories are in third person, I’ve focused on stories written in that POV, but lately I’ve been studying stories written in first person and I think I finally stumbled upon my “a-ha” moment.

Writers who write in first person don’t worry too much about authorial intrusion since the narrator and the character are one in the same. As long as it sounds as though the POV character is telling the reader stuff in their own voice, most of the concerns about “telling” and “distancing the reader” go away. It’s still possible to do too much telling in first person, of course. You don’t want the POV character to tell us“I was scared,” but it’s perfectly acceptable to have the character tell us “I hadn’t felt this scared since that time I bungy-jumped off Lover’s Leap.” 

And then it occurred to me. What if I wrote my story in first person, letting the character tell the reader what’s going on in his/her own words, and then rewrite it in third person? Looking back at the narrative passages I’ve admired in third person stories, I see how this technique could have been applied when writing them.

So that’s my trick. Perhaps you think it's silly.  Or perhaps everyone else in the world already knew about it, but I had to figure it out on my own. It might be a month or so before I know if it helps, but for now I’m hopeful. 

P.S. In case some of you are wondering why I don’t just write the story in first person and be done with it, I have two responses. First, I prefer writing in third person, at least for now, and second, I think my current story works better in third.

Doesn’t mean I won’t be writing in first person in the future, though. :)

ChemistKen

Action Or Description - Which Comes First?

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve always had difficulty with chapter beginnings. Writing those first couple of opening paragraphs often drives me crazy. I feel the need to begin with setting so as to allow the reader to orient himself properly—a paragraph or two if the area is new to the reader or a just a few sentences if it’s an old setting. But I also feel the need to get the scene moving as quickly as possible and that’s where the trouble lies. Scenes can be such sluggish beasts, hard to move at first (much like me in the morning), and unless the descriptions are lively, the scene stalls before it even gets started. And since I have trouble writing lively descriptions…. Well, you can see my problem.

Lately I’ve been rereading Brandon Sanderson’s book, Alloy of Law. It has a nice relaxed style which I find useful when teaching myself how to approach story problems. (BTW, for those of you who wish to write extended actions scenes without getting bogged down, this book has many excellent examples.) And I’ve discovered that one of his techniques is to begin scenes with a single line of action before starting the description. The action may be simple, but it gets the scene off and running before the reader hits the more static descriptions. Here’s an example:

Waxillium pounded on the door of the townhome. The area around them was a typical Elendel neighborhood. Vibrant, lush walnut trees lined either side of the cobbled street…(several more lines of description)

See how that works? Action is occurring in the very first sentence, so you scarcely notice the slowdown during the subsequent description. In fact, the description heightens the suspense as you wonder what’s going to happen when the door does open. I should note that the opening sentence doesn’t have to be a physical action. A simple line of provocative dialogue can be just as good an entry point.

Perhaps everyone else already knows about this trick and I’m just the last one to catch on. But if not, consider using this technique every once in a while.