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Narrative mode

Blog Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 11:21 on 9 March 2013

One of the challenges I'm facing in writing the Scalzi-inspired stories, outside of the biggest challenge of keeping up with doing them daily, is maintaining a consistent narrative mode in each of the stories. I've been choosing a specific mode, not always the easiest for a given story, and using that style to challenge the way the story sounds.

What I remember from my high school literature classes is that there are four modes:

First person - "I did this, then I did that."
Second person - "You are eaten by a grue," choose-your-own-adventure stories
Third person - "He did this, then she did that."
Third person omniscient - "He looked at her and thought, 'Wow, what a hottie.'"

First person is the easiest, telling a tale from the viewer's point of view. Sometimes it works very well; the Dresden Files is a fantastic example of this.

Second person is the rarest, and usually found in only the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and Zork-like tales.

Third person is where it becomes tricky with the omniscient parts.

The easiest way to write is to just blurt everything down, and leave nothing to the reader's imagination. This is also the least engaging for the reader with many authors' styles. When the omniscient part is thrown in and you know what every character is thinking, "He said this, he thought this, she thought this and then did that." there's less challenge for the reader, less to figure out, less to lure the reader into the story's world. I'm not particularly a fan of this style of writing, the third person fully-omniscient view, even as I use it sometimes when I'm lazy or haven't considered the narrative mode before I start writing.

Guy Gavriel Kay was fantastic with the third-person mode in his earlier books, The Fionavar Tapestry and The Lions of Al-Rassan. One of the beauties of his writing style was that he didn't spell everything out for the reader. In the Lions of Al-Rassan book, there's a scene where the heroine is walking through the town at night, and stops to look up at a lighted window. She watches it for a while, turns around and leaves. What is left to the reader's imagination, understanding is the internal conflict raging in the heroine as she stands there. We don't hear her thoughts, we don't know what she's thinking, we don't know what she decided, and that is what makes the scene so powerful. We read her actions, and need to fill in the details and understand the longing of this woman for the man in the window's room, without it being completely explained.

Kay's later books lose some of this style, which I find somewhat disappointing, but still enjoy the stories he tells enough to count him among my favorite authors.

So, I've been working with third person, where no thoughts are known, and third person limited-omniscient, where we know the thoughts of one character, but not all of the characters. I struggle to describe the characters' thoughts through their actions, but think my struggles will help me write clearer stories, the more I write. Sometimes the story needs to be first person, but I'm still finding enough of a challenge with a consistent third person viewpoint that I haven't tried the first person consistently yet.

Yeah, my thoughts on narrative mode, which I incorrectly termed "voice" when I first wrote this.

Time for another twenty minutes for the next Scalzi-inspired story...

I may have a problem

Blog kitt decided around 18:03 on 8 March 2013 to publish this:

Or maybe not.

Unsure.

Chapstick the Cat

Scalzi Story kitt decided around 08:34 on 6 March 2013 to publish this:

Wherein I take a band name from Scalzi’s Next Band Name list, and spend no more than 20 minutes writing the story with the band name as a title. Current one is Chapstick the Cat and the full story archive.

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"Is he going to do it?"

"Yeah, that's what I hear."

"But the last guy!"

"I know!"

"Oh my god, oh my god, I want to see this!"

The small group of teenagers quickly pulled on their gloves and checked their helmets before pulling up their glasses and putting them on their faces. Their feet strapped in to their boards, then jumped up and started gracefully sliding down the hill. Picking up speed and stringing out, they swished left and right as they winded their way down the snowy hill, passing skiiers and other snowboarders on their way to Medium.

The first teenager arrived at Medium, to find a large crowd already forming around Cat Rock. He could see over the top of most of the crowd, but the shortest girl in his group could not. "Want to try uphill?" he asked her. She agreed and they moved to the top of the crowd, the rest of the group dispersing into the crowd.

In front of everyone was an angry-looking black rock poking up through the high drifts of snow. Few had ever seen the rock fully covered in snow, those winters being some of the heaviest snowfall on record. The snowboarding terrain park, nicknamed Medium for its rated difficulty, didn't include Cat Rock. The outcropping had no edges to ride, no ledges to jump from. Most riders just boarded around it.

Today, the crowd gathered to watch Rich go over it.

Go over with with a flourish.

Some said he was going to jump the Cat. Which is why the crowd was gathered.

"Last time, that kid died, you know."

"Yeah. What was his name?"

"Charlie? Charles? Chuck? I don't remember."

"Me, either. Do you think he'll do it?"

"Who? Rich?"

"Yeah."

"I do. If he's insane enough to try it, he's good enough to do it."

The crowd continued to grow, the noise level of hundreds of riders wondering if Rich could do it, if he'd chicken out, if he'd succeed, or die as Charles had the last season. Questions of which route he'd take, how much torque would he need, could he get high enough, snaked their ways through the crowd.

After a bit, the crowd noise started fading. Heads turned uphill as people nudged others downhill of them, to move attention to the rider coming down the hill.

"He's bombing," a girl whispered, a tinge of awe in her voice.

The rider didn't move in the graceful arcs that most boarders took on their way down the hill. He didn't use the arcs to bleed off speed, to slow his momentum. He came straight down the hill, gaining every bit of speed that gravity would give him.

"Is this going to work?" a boy asked.

"It could. It has to. See that lip there?" Another boy pointed. "He'll use that."

The crowd kept silent as Rich approached. They heard his grunt as he hit the lip the boy had pointed out. They saw his bent legs explode up as he threw his arms up and back, arching as he straightened and launched himself into the air.

Eyes grew wide as they watched him rotate backward in a near plank position, feet to the sky, arms over his head, the whole of him swinging around.

Everyone stopped breathing as they watched him pull his arms down to his shoulders, nothing protecting his head as his momentum swung it around to the Cat.

Rich looked up and saw the Cat come over his head, reached forward, and kissed it as he flew over the top it, head down board up, and kept right on rotating. A slight twist of his arms to pull him around again, legs extended for the board to touch first, and sink into the landing as his legs absorbed the rest of his downward momentum.

The crowd erupted in cheers and screams and high-fives and shock, as Rich smiled, and continued down the slope. He'd chapsticked the Cat.