The Mythcreant Podcast 520 – Frustrating Narration Choices
Narration styles: Some are good, some are bad, and some are just frustrating! They leave you wondering whose thoughts you’re reading, how the narrator knows so much, and why they have to act so damned smug. Or maybe it’s just bad storytelling disguised under the banner of an unreliable narrator. All of that is our topic for the week, as we discuss books that did their very best to turn our hairs gray with frustration.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [opening song]
Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny, and here today is:
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And:
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: So I’ve run the numbers and I already know everything you’re going to say because I’ve been very clever and I’ve guided you into a probabilistic path that will result in the best possible episode.
Chris: Oh, I see. So we just do what you tell us to do then.
Bunny: Well, I knew you were gonna say that.
Oren: Or alternatively, we don’t do what she tells us, but she knew we were gonna do that, and that was all part of the plan.
Chris: She was just using reverse psychology on us?
Oren: Or if we do what she was gonna say, then it was double reverse psychology.
Bunny: Look, I just have a hand of Uno reverse cards right here, and I’m not afraid to use them.
Oren: This is great because it means everything automatically makes sense, because if you think it doesn’t make sense, actually Bunny has complete knowledge of time and space, and this is the only way it would’ve worked.
Bunny: All the other universes where something happened slightly different, they just ended in ruin. So this is the only way that we’re gonna save the day.
Oren: It just makes sense. It just works.
Bunny: Don’t worry, it’ll be a hilarious romp. So much hilarity. Just very romp. Trust me.
Chris: Do you wanna tell me where this book hurt you and which book? [Bunny laughs]
Oren: It was in a lot of places, Chris.
Bunny: So many places in multiple places, and this is an episode that’s definitely not born out of Oren and I sharing grievance about certain books that we’ve been reading and I’m sure anyone on our Discord can already guess where this is going.
Oren: [grandly] Begin the ritual airing of grievances. [Bunny laughs]
Bunny: Today we are talking about frustrating narration choices.
Oren: That title was a frustrating narration choice because it’s hard to say.
Bunny: It’s actually clever meta commentary when I trip over my own tongue.
Oren: We’re very smart.
Bunny: Perfectly calculated it.
Chris: You had to do that, otherwise the day wouldn’t be saved.
Bunny: Yeah, Oren’s computer would’ve exploded if I hadn’t pronounced that in a horrible way.
Oren: Oh, no.
Bunny: So both of the main offenders today that inspired this episode were a version of pretty much first person omniscient. Starting with that makes sense because it seems like the perspective that’s easiest – or maybe not easiest, but has a very prominent ability to go wrong.
Oren: I have only read three first person omniscient narration stories, and they have all been bad. Not bad for unrelated reasons; the narration has actively contributed to their problems, and it’s like my bugbear, second only to oppressed mages.
Bunny: The thing is, it’s hard to have an all-knowing narrator who’s also a character, ’cause if they know everything, there’s much less tension. And there’s also just the question of why we aren’t just in someone else’s head. I don’t know if I can think of a first person omniscient story that wouldn’t have been better by just being third person omniscient or a limited perspective in a character’s head.
Oren: There are several different ways you can go with first person omniscient, and none of them work. First you can go with, well, they’re not a character in the story. They’re like God watching the story. But why bother with a first person pronoun at that point? It’s just gonna cause confusion. Just do third person.
Chris: If they’re not in the story, why are they talking about themself?
Oren: But if they are in the story, how on Earth do they have all of this information? And how does it not just make them OP? The answer is either it does make them OP and they are ruining the story by being there, or you just have to ignore the fact that they know all of this when there was no way they could know it.
Chris: They’re not really omniscient, but somehow they’re omniscient and we’re supposed to just live with that contradiction.
Oren: The example of that one was from this book, Eifelheim, that I’ve mentioned a few times. I really love Eifelheim. It’s very good. It has this omniscient first person narrator who just turns out to be a random friend of the protagonist. It’s like, how on Earth did you know all this stuff, man?
Bunny: Or at least all of the first person omniscient stories, to some extent that I’ve read have been like, the omniscient characters are like puppet master-type characters, and you have to hear them talk for the entire story because they’re narrating it. Even if they’re not puppet masters, they’ll pop in and provide commentary and I don’t want that. I want to read the story.
Oren: I don’t mind commentary. Omniscient can provide commentary in a way that works very well. You have two options with this. You can either have the first person omniscient narrator, just be there constantly, in which case their presence gets very old, or they can just disappear for long sections of the book and then suddenly reappear. And you’re like, what? Who are you? Have you been here this whole time? And I guess we should stop dancing around the bush. I’m talking about The Last Murder at the End of the World.
Bunny: Oof. That title.
Oren: Yeah, so spoilers for that, ’cause Bunny and I both had to read it and certainly our time was spoiled.
Chris: Wait, let’s be accurate. Neither of you had to read it. You’re not in class, this was not assigned reading, I wasn’t grading you, I was not giving you credit-
Bunny: And it was Chris’s fault! [laughter]
Chris: This is something that you punished yourselves with, okay?
Oren: We were so depressed from Chris being mean to us last episode about our short stories that we made a bad decision and went and read this book.
Bunny: It was a coping mechanism [mumbles indignantly] Our interfering leads were better than Abby! [laughter] They didn’t have Abby in my story, so…
Oren: I don’t know this for sure, but I looked at some of the reviews for this novel. Because this author just likes to do weird, trippy murder mysteries, which in premise is fine. Weird, trippy murder mysteries can be very interesting. But I noticed that fans of his previous books were in the Goodreads reviews being like, what is this? What’s going on? And I’m not positive because his books are weird and trippy. But the difference seems to be that in this version, he has introduced the character of Abby, who is an omniscient AI narrator, and I don’t think his previous books had anything like that, and I really think Abby is the reason that fans of his previous books didn’t like this one as much.
Bunny: Yeah. There’s also the setting. I don’t know if his other books have the strange asinine setting details that this one does, but man, I did not like Abby. I don’t think Abby added anything, and in fact, I think she subtracted a lot of things. She’s an AI that’s embedded in everyone’s head. Her role is to keep them feeling good and tell them the time when they ask, things like that. But she’s also got Dr. Strange powers. She’s calculated that the only path forward is if these things happen.
Oren: And much like with Dr. Strange. If you think about it for two seconds, you can immediately tell that that’s just complete BS. Like with Dr. Strange, it’s like this 50,000 universes, this is the only one where we win. It’s like really? There’s no other universe where, what’s his face—Chris Pratt guy didn’t mess up the plan to defeat Thanos, because you guys were like this close to beating him and then Star-Lord messed it up.
Chris: Or Thor aimed for Thanos’ head. They make a big deal of that.
Oren: There’s no universe where he aimed a little higher or just his aim was a little off and it went higher? Come on. And it’s the same thing with this book, right? The moment the convoluted reveal gets made, you’re like, wait, hang on. That was your goal? There are so many more efficient ways you could have gotten about doing that.
Bunny: The other thing about Abby is that, did you even pick up on the fact that she can apparently control people’s bodies?
Oren: The book makes a point out of making you stumble over things that you would expect to have been established earlier.
Bunny: So we find out that she can control them when they’re asleep, but it turns out, no, she can just control them anytime. You’d think this would factor into things. I’m pretty sure if I went back through the book and looked at it with that in mind, I could be like, why didn’t she just control that character then?
Oren: There are a few points where that happens, where you’re like, hang on, you can control most of the characters, and if you could do that, you could have solved this problem much more easily and you simply chose not to. Then it does other things where it’s like, well, I have to obey the human characters’ directives, but clearly you don’t. You disobey them all the time, or you can interpret their directives in such a creative way that it’s basically no different.
Chris: It’s supposed to be a murder mystery, right? So how does a murder even happen then?
Oren: Through a very contrived series of events. It’s very hard to explain. It’s like 10 levels deep of “Then this happened,” and then it’s like a Rube Goldberg murder.
Chris: Why didn’t the AI stop the murder?
Oren: There’s reasons, okay? There are reasons, and they do not make any sense.
Bunny: Once the actual murder mystery investigation starts, the parts when Abby is very minor or functionally not present and the characters are doing some good old fashioned investigating—those parts can be very good in places. Just proving the point that Abby should not be here.
Oren: Abby is just what drags that book down, like a weight around its neck. I don’t know if she’s supposed to be smug.
Bunny: I don’t think she’s supposed to be. I think she’s supposed to be neutral. I mean, she’s what inspired our episode on emotionless characters. She talks about how she’s not supposed to have emotions, but you could tell the author seems pretty smug about Abby.
Chris: The thing about a know-it-all character is that she probably seems know-it-all because she’s supposed to literally know it all. Puppeteers, not a great narrator.
Oren: Abby has a lot of problems that are not specific to her being a first person omniscient narrator, but her being a first person omniscient narrator makes them all worse because you can’t get away from her. You don’t even have the advantage of her being a normal character who could potentially have problems that they encounter, because to be omniscient, she can’t really have any problems. It’s just a no-upside scenario other than it technically allows you to withhold information from the reader so that you can have a bigger reveal. That’s the only thing it does, and it’s just not worth it.
Chris: If a narrator has an annoying personality, that’s hard to get away with. Again, this was one of my issues with 10,000 Doors of January, and this was just regular first person retelling. It was not omniscient. It just felt like the narrator took joy in scolding you and telling you what you think, and then in fact, you were wrong within the first line. The first paragraph, I just already wanted to punch her.
Oren: That’s the book that tells you that actually, this is a great love story and if you don’t like it, you’re an imperialist. Gotta love the nerve of that to be like, my story’s actually great, and just have the narrator tell you the story is good.
Bunny: See, Chris, I should have put that in my short story. I should have ended it with “And if you didn’t like it, you’re an imperialist.”
Chris: Make sure you summarize the entire love story too.
Oren: I should clarify. Unlike first person omniscient, I do not think first person retelling is a viewpoint to be generally avoided. I like first person retelling.
Chris: Yeah, it’s fine.
Bunny: That was also like pretty common, whereas first person omniscient is like extremely rare. I can think of maybe three books off the top of my head that use it.
Chris: I think it depends on how often we’re using first person. I think that we would find the number is greater if we found every single mention of the word ‘I’ in any book. But I think if we’re talking about where the narrator is calling attention to who they are and using ‘I’ a lot, I think we would get it down. Maybe A Series of Unfortunate Events. That one actually does have a first person narrator who is a person, who I think is supposed to be somebody who researched events after the fact. It’s unrealistic. At the same time, the book is light enough that I feel like it gets away with it a lot easier than if it was really serious, and the overall realism is low enough that I think that narrator gets more leeway.
Oren: You can get a lot of mileage by being funny. There is an issue with first person retellings, which is that you need to be disciplined. You need to have discipline. Pardon if that sounded weird.
Bunny: [laughs] Sit down on the caning bench.
Oren: You have to have self-discipline because first person retelling can be an excuse to indulge in bad habits. We talked about 10,000 Doors of January, where the character is just lecturing us on the fact that her story is good. And I’m not gonna say that couldn’t happen in some other viewpoint, but I think an author would be much less likely to do it. And then the same thing with something like Deadly Education, because first person retellings allow you to do some pretty powerful things. Like, you could pause the action for your narrator to talk, which normally in a normal limited perspective, you couldn’t really do that, because narration indicates character thoughts, so passing time. But that means that if you have a tendency to ramble, now there are no safeguards to stop you from doing that, and you’re just gonna ramble.
Chris: Again, first person tends to encourage people to get more into character and write in a more casual voice, which often is good. For a lot of writers that’s very helpful, but it also can encourage a little bit too much rambling. Related to this, of not using enough restraint, I’d like to talk about the thought dimension. So we say, oh yes, there’s no safeguards, but sometimes when there are safeguards, authors ignore them anyway. The thought dimension is what I’m calling it when you have a narration that is supposed to be unfolding events, so it’s not a future character retelling the story. It’s not an omniscient narrator that’s outside the story. It’s the character experiencing events as they happen is your narrative premise, but the thoughts just defy time and space. It can happen anywhere, but it’s usually most obvious in dialogue. So he’ll have dialogue like, ‘“Are you okay?” And then he’s looking at me with his deep blue eyes as though I’m insect pinned to a board. There’s only one time he’s looked at me like that before.’ There’s a whole backstory around that look and what that look from him means in the middle of a conversation.
Bunny: It’s time for my manifesto, reader. Settle in.
Chris: The premise here is that the character is somehow thinking all of this before they answer. You can tell, if the character comes to some conclusion that changes their answer, there’s no way to explain that other than they had all of those thoughts. There’s other parts of the narration that shows they must have been thinking all that, but like, who can think all of those things?
Oren: They’re just like Xavier in the X-Men movies who just freezes everyone and has a little chat while everyone’s frozen.
Bunny: It only works if they come out of the thought dimension and the other character has been snapping their fingers in front of their face for the last minute.
Oren: Are you in there? Are you okay?
Chris: Again, it’s just a matter of restraint about how much are you gonna prioritize pacing when you really want to talk about his deep blue eyes, and what kind of look he’s giving, and how you’re interpreting that look, all of the previous instances where he’s had that look. And I think a lot of authors just want to say all that stuff ’cause they like the nuances of reading deeply into conversations or other stuff like that. But I think you should just keep it trim, and then create pauses in the conversation for you to add commentary.
Oren: Just to head this off at the past, ’cause I’m sure some smart aleck is listening to this and thinking, oh, I will make a character whose superpower is that they can pause and have a thought dimension. I’m not gonna say you shouldn’t ever do that, but be really careful because you would be amazed at how many sequences the drama is going to depend on your protagonist not having a lot of time to think. If they can pause and think about things, there will be no tension. They will just see the obvious solution and do it. Before you get real clever, consider the potential consequences.
Bunny: Ah, the thought-dimensionator. Another book that gives into its impulses in the first person retelling and hamstrings itself with the specific premise it’s chosen to do the first person retelling within is A Ministry of Time: the other book that inspired this episode, and part of our Hugo Bait binge. So the premise is that the British government has a time machine and they’ve brought forward some people from the past. And the main character, her assignment is to basically host one of the guys who is like a sailor from Old England who is on an Arctic expedition that got lost. And so she’s introducing him to the world and teaching him things and also getting really horny over him in weird and uncomfortable ways.
Oren: As one does.
Bunny: But the problem is once the novelty of time travel stuff and the kind of comedy of manners witticisms that they exchange, once all that wears off, you realize that nothing is happening and nothing can happen. Because the reveal of the end of this book is that all these tiny moments, they mattered. You’re just not gonna see them pay off in this timeline.
Oren: I’ve had dates like that. Nothing is happening and nothing can happen. [laughter]
Bunny: Because the twist at the end of the book is that it’s the narrator writing this—question mark—for her past self so her past self doesn’t make the same mistakes, but the sorts of things that she points to as like, oh, don’t do this. Or she’ll go off and meditate and be like, man, if only I had done something a little differently. If only I hadn’t paused for 12 seconds.
Chris: That was the one where the narrator was constantly pointing at everything in the story and being like, and this would be super consequential.
Bunny: Yes, exactly.
Chris: That’s its own frustrating narration habit there.
Bunny: Pinky swear, this really super matters.
Chris: I know this seems boring to you, but I swear this will change the world. And it’s like, will it really? And then you go to the next paragraph, and this will upend time.
Oren: Many things can upend time and change the world, Chris, you don’t know.
Bunny: It’s like Butterfly Effect, the book, except you never see the hurricane that the butterfly summons, because that’s in a different timeline. Didn’t happen in this book.
Chris: I would actually say that effect is a subset of another thing that really frustrates me which is overhyping, or if I’m gonna be a little more critical, lying, which is the one where the narrator is basically overselling the content to try to make it more exciting instead of just having exciting content. And this one is that you’re talking about is particularly special because the payoff is completely outside the book, and so the narrator can just say whatever she wants.But a lot of times what you’ll see is that I have a lot of my lessons post, my critiques post, is a deliberate setup that raises expectations only for it to just blatantly not meet those expectations. Probably the most blatant one is The Alchemist. You have a chapter that ends with “And in that instant, Josh Newman realized that the world would never be the same again.” And then in the next chapter, it’s just, oh, the bookshop he’s working in, there’s a couple robbers.
Oren: By the nature of entropy, the universe is never the same again from moment to moment. So it’s not technically wrong.
Chris: Or in the beginning of the Remnant Chronicles, we’re doing all this kind of meta mystery, vague buzzwordy opening where, oh, wouldn’t you know what to know what this ritual is where they’re scraping the protagonist’s back with knives and it’s like, calm down. They’re just applying henna.
Bunny: Yeah. You’ve ever been to a festival?
Oren: This is how they put henna on you, okay. Calm down.
Bunny: special knife henna.
Chris: So I’ve seen a lot of those and it’s all just like, why? Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that you do wanna make your narration exciting and sometimes there can be some judgment calls to make over whether you are selling it or overselling it.
Bunny: The other problem with this narrator is also that when she’s not saying, “Don’t worry, this little moment, it matters, pinky swear, trust me,” she’s apologizing to the reader about the bad choices she’s making. The government program she works for is shady, right? So she goes along with a shady thing that they’re doing and you, the reader are like, aargh, when is something going to happen, and she’s like, I know I did the shady thing, please. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done the shady thing. Please. You gotta understand where I’m coming from when I was doing the shady thing. All right, moving on.
Oren: Look, I can see the value in a first person retelling of pointing out that the thing that they were doing in the moment was wrong. But that doesn’t help the fact that it’s boring.
Bunny: and it is quite a boring book.
Oren: An interesting one that I ran into recently was the Watsonian viewpoint, which in retrospect, I actually almost never see in published fiction these days.
Bunny: Yay, pop a champagne.
Oren: I almost always see it in unpublished manuscripts, and I try to tell the author, please don’t do this. The reason is it’s a bad viewpoint choice, and it was annoying even back when Arthur Conan Doyle was doing it. We just let him get away with it ’cause he’s old and famous. I actually encountered a book recently that used it, the Justice of Kings, which was just the worst. We have our Sherlock character, the Watson character, and then a third character who is the POV character. The Watson’s Watson, if you will. This one is unusually extreme, so it might not be entirely fair to judge the entire practice using this one ’cause she gets nothing to do in the first scene. She has so little dialogue. I thought maybe there was gonna be a reveal that she was a ghost and that no one can see her. But no, she just has no presence.
Chris: That’s something that I’ve seen happen in client works is if you don’t have enough for a character to do in a scene, it can just feel like they evaporated. And sometimes it can happen with a viewpoint character where it just feels like the viewpoint character just isn’t there anymore.
Oren: But the beautiful irony is that I have seen more direct Sherlock retellings, and they do not use the Watsonian viewpoint anymore. Usually what they’ll do is one of three options. They’ll either just make Sherlock the main character, they will make Watson the main character, or they will make them more equal co-protagonists and switch between them. The Mimicking of Known Success does that.
Chris: Yeah, it’s much better.
Oren: I really liked it, and it worked really well. That’s where the actual Sherlock style of story has evolved to. And then you just have occasional weird throwbacks like the Justice of Kings, where the viewpoint character is like a camera following the main characters around. And you might as well just use a non-embodied viewpoint at that point. What’s the point of giving it a character?
Bunny: Just make it an actual floating camera. It’s just Cambot from Mystery Science Theater.
Chris: Okay, I got another one. I gotta mention framing devices where people talk about the story. [laughter] So, Interview with the Vampire, there’s the boy who is technically supposed to be the interviewer, but it’s really just the audience for Louis to tell him like, “Oh, what happens next? What’d you do?” Or the Titanic movie where we have this whole framing device that’s just not completely unnecessary. Or even Name of the Wind where we gotta talk about how cool Kvothe is before Kvothe tells us his life story.
Oren: Chris, if the story is boring, that’s just because it’s about a real thing that happened and real life is boring sometimes.
Chris: It just feels like all of these framing devices, their actual purpose is just to hype the story.
Bunny: If you’ve got a character whose only role is to be like, “Wow, gee, tell me more, man, what happened next?” you don’t have confidence in your story to carry itself.
Chris: It’s very storyteller wish fulfillment. They’re inserting somebody to be like, “Oh wow, storyteller, your story’s so cool. As your audience insert, I’m totally riveted.” Honestly, I’m not a fan oftentimes of narrators talking about stories at all. Like 10,000 Doors of January, for instance, is very much about stories. I found it all insufferable.
Oren: As people who our entire lives at this point are built around stories, being lectured by the fictional narrator about how stories work doesn’t work well.
Chris: I think my issue is that usually when we talk about stories within stories, it has a very romantic culture and connotation where we’re saying what to me is just a bunch of nonsense that sounds poetic.
Bunny: [long noise] Oh man.
Chris: I just don’t have patience for that.
Oren: Well, I think with that final pet peeve, we are gonna have to call this episode to a close. And wouldn’t you agree, Chris, that it was a very good episode.
Bunny: Just as I predicted.
Chris: We’re gonna need a minute while I go into the thought dimension to review this episode and ask our listeners to support us on Patreon at patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: While Chris is off in the thought dimension. I am going to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing theme]This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.