storytelling

There's a lovely commentary about first person narration here by Caitlín, who is a novelist, writer and a Farscape person. She has articulated (at various points in her blogging) some of the reasons I dislike reading first person stories. Here's a bit of what she wrote:

This is not to say that first-person narratives can't excel. They certainly can, despite the fact that they almost never do. Examples of excellent first-person narratives are easy enough to list. But I think they require a writer of unusual talent to do well. And I consider myself only a writer of usual talent.

I find it hard to list many excellent examples of first-person narration. Generally they just irritate me. If I pick up a novel and find it to be in first person, I will put it down four times out of five. I suppose the problem is, I don't like being stuck in one person's head. I want the broader story, the bigger picture. First person stories are by definition insular, and I usually don't have the patience to deal with that, these days. It's a little frustrating, I'll admit, as it seems to me that there are more of them being published all the time.

Certainly students I've worked with seem to gravitate toward first person narrative, out of fear or familiarity, I'm not sure. What I do know is, I chase them out of that yard as fast as they can run. I don't accept any first person work when I' teaching an intro to fiction course. The same way I make them submit all their work in double spaced Courier 12: because I want to make them focus elsewhere, and forget about the way the print looks on the paper.

Which reminds me of one of the funnier things I ever heard a faculty member say. This was at Princeton, when I was a grad student. Imagine a bald, serious professor of medieval literature with a heavy German accent saying: "No, this word processing nonsense, this will never do. If the sentence looks nice on the paper, an undergraduate thinks it must automatically mean something."

And since I'm on the subject, the funniest thing I ever heard an undergraduate student say at Princeton. A crowd of them were coming out of a seminar in the German department and one turned to the other and said: "I don't get it. Why was Nietsche so hung up on cows?"

The last word is the key. Pronounce it with a German accent; it's worth the effort.

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edited to add that the link to Caitlín is via Sillybean. Silly me.

Posted by at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

People who teach composition often have a bit of a blind spot about sentence fragments. A sentence fragment is (by one popular definition) a partial sentence that has been incorrectly punctuated.

To this I say: hogwash. Hogwash, say I.

I will admit that not every genre lends itself equally well to the kind of stylistic flexibility that produces these so-called sentence fragments. Legal documents, I suppose, really are better off without them. But that's about it.

The important thing for those of us who write fiction to remember about sentence fragments is this: people don't talk in classically defined sentences. Written dialogue will sound stilted if you insist on making your characters toe the line that your fourth grade English teacher drew in the sand. For example:

The kids always go crazy just about now. This kind of summer night.

Sure, it's a fragment. But put quotations around it and see what happens. "The kids always go crazy just about now," said Laurie. "This kind of summer night."

Characters talk in melodious fragments and riffs. It's a complex process, getting the right. It has to do with syntax and tag words and a good balance between direct and indirect dialogue.

Elmore Leonard, who is a master of written dialogue, put it like this: "The main thing with my dialogue is the rhythm of it -- the way people talk, not especially what they say."

A character who insists on toeing the line and speaking Stilt probably doesn't belong in your novel. Another interesting quote from Elmore Leonard, which comes from an NPR interview:

"From the very beginning, my purpose was to [let the characters talk]," Leonard says. "To first of all establish the characters, as many as possible in the first 100 pages and audition them. Let's see if they can talk. If they can't talk, they're liable to slip from view or get shot early on.

"If I have several bad guys, and I only want to end up with one of them, then I have to decide which one I want in the end. Normally, it's the one who's the most interesting talker."

To be clear: I don't like every novel the man writes. In the last years especially he's been uneven, though Pagan Babies truly impressed me. Here's a bit of dialogue from it (note the fragment, and the deft representation of non-native English -- this is set in Africa, this scene in a confessional).

"Bless me, Fatha, for I have sin. Is a long time since I come here but is not my fault, you don't have Confession always when you say. The sin I did, I stole a goat from close by Nyundo for my family to eat. My wife cook it en brochette and also in a stew with potatoes and peppers."

"Last night at supper," Terry said, "I told my housekeeper I'd enjoy goat stew a lot more if it wasn't so goddamn bony."

The goat thief said, "Excuse me, Fatha?"

"Those little sharp bones you get in your mouth," Terry said, and gave the man ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys. He gave just about everyone ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys to say as their penance.

Posted by at 7:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)