552 – Critical Types of Narration

Show Notes

• The Five Types of Narration
• Dialogue 
• Description 
• Summary 
• Action
• Ministry of Time 
• Alien Clay
• Star Trek: First Contact 
• Shield of Sparrows 
• Crescent City

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.

[intro music]

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: Did you know there are five types of lines in a podcast conversation?

Oren: Really? Five specifically. Okay. This sounds real.

Chris: Exactly five. Uh-huh. Yeah, there’s, uh, informative lines, uh, joke lines. Subtly trying to correct what somebody else says lines.

Oren: That one is pretty important. What about non-sequitur lines where I talk about spaghetti for five minutes?

Chris: That definitely happens.

Oren: There have to be sandwich discord lines, right? Like surely that has created a sixth category.

Chris: Oh yeah, that’s good. And our fifth time can just be laugh lines where we’re laughing in response to each other.

Oren: What about opening bit lines? Is that already covered by one of the types?

Chris: I don’t know. That might be part of the informative line, or is it its own?

Oren: There you go. You sorted it all out.

Chris: See, I’ve got it. I’ve cracked the code. Now all we have to do in a podcast is just pick one of those lines, but like every time before we say something, we need to pick a line type. It’s gonna go well.

Oren: Press it and then get some auto-generated suggestions. What could go wrong?

Chris: Sometimes I do feel like that when people sort things into types, that it’s just kind of silly and arbitrary and like, okay, but what are they for? But at the same time, in many cases, it is really helpful because it takes something that’s sort of big and amorphous and makes it a little bit less amorphous, makes it less vague.

So that you can get inspiration from different types or it can be ways of thinking a little bit further about it and kind of understanding it a little bit better, that kind of thing. Just like when we have turning points, we break it down into different types of turning points, that really gives people ideas for what they can do for their turning point.

And so, five types of narration is just me breaking narration down into what I see as the sort of natural divisions, and they have some overlap and fuzzy areas. But I do think that it is important for every manuscript to have some text in each of these categories. And when we get manuscripts very frequently, one of them could be missing altogether, one of them could be underused, and that’s actually a really big problem.

Whereas of course, they can be overused too, and that’s when people start to get bored.

Oren: As an enlightened centrist on the topic of categorization, I believe that you should do it when it’s helpful and you shouldn’t do it when it’s not helpful, and I’m sure that that distinction is very easy to tell and there aren’t any arguments over it.

With these particular types as outlined in the Five Types of Narration Every Novel Needs by Chris Winkle, I find these helpful because when I am working with a client, it is useful to be able to tell them there is a certain kind of narration in your work that needs strengthening, and I can tell them what it is because we have a term for it.

And because these categories at least generally correspond to actual things in the work, these are useful categories that I can tell them as opposed to, we just made some up about how your categories are aura writing and spiritual description, and that would be meaningless. I could tell them to work on their aura writing all day and they wouldn’t know what to do with that.

But I can tell them to work on their description and I can, you know, describe what that is if they don’t already know it, and then I can help them that way. And I don’t have to just say, work on your word craft. Just make it better generally.

Chris: And I should mention that I think almost all of these terms come from the writing industry in general.

I’m not sure I’ve made any of these up, like internalization maybe, but people talk about internal narration, I’m sure of it, all the time. So I’ve just put it into a neat list. We do look at narration. It always does generally fall under one of these types. Now, the other thing being dialogue. Which is not technically narration.

Oren: The secret sixth category.

Chris: Secret sixth category. As strange as that may sound, ’cause narration means that you have a narrator, whereas dialogue is also something that appears in live action, in a play or a movie when action is unfolding. So it’s technically not narration. We can talk about it a little bit, but unlike the other types of narration, it’s also optional. You can totally have a story with no dialogue and have it work just fine. The other ones, I think they’re gonna be problems if you leave them out. Not that people don’t try. Sometimes people try with some of them, but at least for a novel, when you have a really long work, I think you can do a lot more experimental things if you have just a piece of flash fic or a real short story.

But I think any novel that tries to skip one category altogether is gonna run into serious trouble.

Oren: I was just gonna say that I think a novel, it would be tough to do one without dialogue, but possible, whereas I don’t see how you could do a novel without one of these types of narration. I just don’t see how it’s possible.

Chris: Okay. Should we get started? So number one is description.

Oren: I refuse to describe what that means. I won’t do it.

Chris: Description is anything that is focused on building a sensory experience that kind of grounds you in the story world, obviously, what things look like, what they sound like, what they feel like. When it’s something that is there not to really build sensory splendor, but just to say, oh, this happened, like somebody shot somebody else, I might not call that description anymore, then I would call that action. But if you have movements that are part of the scenery, like birds flying between the trees, that’s not like an important event in the story, that’s scenery, then I would call that description. Description is pretty frequently neglected in the editing manuscripts we see.

Oren: I wrote a book where it was neglected. My description’s average at best. I got no stones to throw. Description, much like some of the others on this list, is one of those things that people often have horror stories about, books that went on way too long with their description.

We always make fun of Tolkien for that, and rightly so in some cases. And so as a result, that sometimes makes writers think that they should skimp on it. And also it’s hard to know what’s good description and what’s just going on and on.

Chris: The thing I remember in a lot of epic fantasy books is they arrive at a new city and there’s two, three paragraphs telling me exactly what the city looks like, and I oftentimes can’t understand it. It’s boring. I start to skip it. That’s not great. But I do think description is often best when it’s intermixed with other narration instead of in big chunks because it does not move the story forward.

It helps with immersion, it helps the story feel real. And when the story feels real, emotion is stronger and the story feels more impactful and that’s great, but the story also can’t move forward. It is stopping to smell the roses, which means that nothing is gonna happen. And so when you have big chunks of it, you end up putting the story off in some way.

It’s also great for emphasizing what’s important in the story.

Oren: Generally speaking, you describe things that are important more than things that are less important, because otherwise it feels like you’re wasting time. Partly it’s just down to expectations. Like if you describe a random guard with a lot of description, it makes it sound like that guy is important, and if he’s not, your audience is gonna feel misled.

But it’s also just a question of being efficient. If you try to describe everything in lots of detail, your book will never get anywhere. So you focus on the things that matter.

Chris: But what you do wanna do though, when you are in a scene, is to give readers a sense of the environment and a sense of place.

And so a lot of times what I see in manuscripts is there’s just a new scene and a new place, and I have very little idea of what that place looks like, but also just what it feels like. A lot of times it’s about atmosphere. Are we in this sterile clinic with white walls and you can smell the disinfectant?

Is that the kind of place you’re in? Or out on the beach and we can hear the waves and smell the salt. Can you smell salt? People talk about smelling salt. I’m not sure I can ever smell salt.

Oren: I don’t know if it’s salt, but is a smell I associate with the ocean.

Chris: There is a kind of a fishy smell, maybe seaweedy smell.

Oren: There is a fishy smell. I don’t know. There’s a different scent that I don’t think of as fishy when I smell it when I’m near the ocean. And maybe that’s salt. I haven’t stood near like big piles of salt to try to figure out if they smell the same. I just know that’s the smell that I associate with the ocean and I have not smelled it, or at least I don’t remember smelling it when I’ve been near, for example, the Great Lake.

So I associate that with salt water, regardless if that’s what it actually is.

Chris: And if your character is like talking to other people, is everybody sitting around a campfire? Sitting around a table? Is somebody behind a desk? The basics of making it feel like you can imagine the scene. And you don’t wanna get too specific.

You don’t wanna pin every aspect of the layout down. It’s about giving enough that readers can fill in the blank, ’cause they have a kind of idea of what kind of place it is, what position people are in, that kind of thing. And especially if you are introducing a fantastical world, like non-earth, then it becomes extra important because I’m curious, I wanna know, what do people dress like?

What do the buildings look like? And again, you don’t have to spend tons of words describing every aspect of the building, but it’s a huge difference whether they’re like castles or shanties. Again, it’s about giving enough imagery that you can kind of create that feel, instead of having that blank void.

Oren: The next one is action, which can get a little hard to tell the difference because again, we mentioned if you type out that someone is punching someone, did you not simply describe a punch? But it’s, I would say, different because it’s a fundamental difference in what you are portraying to the reader.

It’s not a question of what it looked like. You are now describing an action, and if they don’t already know what it looks like, telling someone that a punch happened is gonna create some image in their mind, but not much. If they don’t know what anyone looks like, it’ll just [be] clothing mannequins punching each other, which is funny, but maybe not what you want.

Chris: Action is about moving the story forward. These are the events of the story, basically, is what it’s for. And so of course it can be all kinds of things. It can be fights or people hugging each other or having conversation or landslide, rocks fall, everyone dies, any of those things actually happening, but the idea is that it’s a thing that somebody could actually watch.

So if you were at a play or looking at a movie, it’s something that you could directly observe That’s action. And obviously its big benefit is that it moves the story forward. It is the main thing that readers are looking for in the story, is to see action unfold, but it also is just kind of weak by itself.

Everybody has action. Action is not something that people leave out entirely as far as I know. I suppose there could be some experimental flash fic out there, but it also, when it stands alone, oftentimes it is very rushed and there’s no context that makes it matter. So there can be action, but nobody cares.

Oren: I would say that action at least has the greatest potential to carry the story forward, but it doesn’t automatically do that, I would say. If you describe a bunch of random things your character is doing that has nothing to do with your plot, like a random encounter they get into where they’re investigating a murder and on the way to investigate a murder, they get jumped by an alley-worm and the alley-worm’s not related to the murder at all.

Nothing about the murder plot changes and they fight the alley-worm. I wouldn’t really say that advances the plot just because by the end of it, you’re not any further along on the murder plot than you were before, just one dead alley-worm now.

Chris: It does need the support of a story to be meaningful for sure.

So action by itself is not necessarily gonna be brilliant. And you can tell when you’re overusing it, mostly because it starts to become more and more meaningless. If it doesn’t matter to [an] arc that’s happening. If it doesn’t make a difference to that arc, then pretty soon, even if it seems like it would be exciting, it’s going to cease to matter.

So you can have a whole bunch of people with swords running and stabbing at each other. And if there’s like no story hook around that, then it could be boring ’cause it needs that story support. Movies and plays often really do have to work hard to try to deliver the information that people need to know.

For instance, why is a character doing something? What are they thinking? What’s their plan? Why somebody is doing something is just very important information. And if you have a viewpoint character, that’s usually filled in with other aspects of the narration. Without that, a lot of times people are just confused or even what is happening, not just why are people doing what they’re doing, but even like, what is going on here are some very basic things that readers absolutely need that action cannot supply on its own.

Another thing, I talk about this a lot because I just see it a lot in manuscripts, is also making sure that your action does not become summary, which we can talk about next. But basically when you’re in a scene and you want all of the really important moments of the stories to be scene, just to make sure that the story time does not unfold faster than reading time.

And if you’re a speed reader, then definitely read out loud time. If you can read it faster than you can act it out on stage, that’s not good. That means you’re in summary and you’re rushing too much. So when people have too much action, not enough other things, they’re very likely to kind of summarize in that way.

You just gotta get more detailed and step through the scene slower with smaller actions. Whereas if you have a lot of stuff like people opening the door and walking in and walking out and other little in-between bits, then you may have too much action and you should just try to cut to the chase.

Oren: The third vital type of narration is summary, which, you can actually save a lot of time if you just use for the whole story. It’s actually pretty easy. It can usually take just a couple pages and you’re done.

Chris: No. Oh no. Yeah, I’m sure that’s what whoever wrote Ministry of Time was thinking.

Oren: Oh gosh, oof.

Chris: I shouldn’t be so mean to her.

It’s her debut work. She did get nominated for a Hugo though, and who knows? She might get it. So she’s doing pretty well for herself.

Oren: If you wanna be mean on the Hugo list specifically for having too much summary, you should just be mean to Alien Clay.

Chris: I’m sorry, Ministry of Time. Alien Clay is definitely the book that deserves my ire. Tchaikovsky!

Oren: It’s like, Alien Clay is literally a book told almost entirely in summary, it is real weird.

Chris: And that guy has two books that [are] nominated for Hugos too. Of course the other one is much better. The other one I understand.

Oren: One of them’s good and actually deserves to be on the list. The thing about summary is it’s an important tool because a lot of stuff’s gonna happen in your story that is not that interesting, and it would take forever to write it all out and it would be boring if you tried, so you summarize it.

The travel between important scenes, you know, your character, spending all day, cleaning the house in preparation for someone coming over. Stuff like that, that is important. You need to summarize it. I have occasionally read manuscripts where the author didn’t know to do that and it was bad.

You gotta stop when something important is happening.

Chris: But you gotta stop. And with summary [it’s] interesting because it’s still relating events that are at the current timeline of the story, shall we say, but sometimes it’s not really anchored in time. Sometimes it’s like, oh, over the next month, sometimes these things happened.

There’s no specific place or time. We just know that this was kind of a trend that happened at some time during these passing moments. And other times it can get very specific. And then in the first week this happened and the second week this happened, but sometimes it’s just unanchored and if it’s ever un anchored and talking about general trends or often this happened instead of like a specific moment, then you definitely summary.

Otherwise, that rule about story time versus reading time I think is a good way of judging whether something has veered into summary territory. One thing about it though, is that kind of like borderline, is it action? Is it summary? That is generally not a good area for your narration to be in. I think sometimes you might want it if you have, for instance, a scene and then you just want to skip over like 10 minutes while somebody’s waiting or something, then it might be useful there.

But what I sometimes see also in manuscripts is there’s tons and tons of summary and the reason is because the summary isn’t actually summarized enough.

Oren: There’s too much information. You spent the day cleaning the house, and you could have just summarized that by saying, I spent the day cleaning the house.

But instead you’re like, first I cleaned the living room and I found five dust bunnies. And then I went to the dining room and I found several old raisins. And sometimes details like that can be nice, but if you’re doing a lot of it, ehhhh.

Chris: If you find that you have a lot of summary, and again, sometimes you need a lot of summary, but for me, three paragraphs is when it’s time to like, check in.

Do I really need three paragraphs of summary or should I condense it down? Is this important? Should I just cut it, or is there something actually important going on here that should actually be in a scene and I should make like a conflict outta that. So the thing about summary is it is very low immersion.

It keeps you very distant, and so nothing that happens in there feels very real. So it’s not gonna be very interesting and it’s not gonna be very impactful. The whole point is to just get stuff over with quickly, especially if you have things like, realistically, my character has to do this, or else it’s just unrealistic.

Well, nobody’s gonna believe that they didn’t try to go ask somebody for help, for instance, but it doesn’t matter because they’re gonna ask somebody for help and that person’s just gonna say no. And it’s not gonna make any difference. That’s the time when you’d be like, okay, I summarized. They went and called the administrator and be like, Hey, can you help me with this?

The administrator’s like, no.

Oren: Don’t worry about it.

Chris: And then you could just move on. It’s good for that. It’s good for that kind of connective tissue. And in many cases where you have summary, another option is to just cut out and skip forward in time. But skipping forward does need a little bit of text to make sure that the transition is smooth, people can get a little disoriented, and summary still gives you some kind of sense of what happened.

It has advantages over a jump. Sometimes a jump is better.

Oren: Well, the one that gets me [is] summarizing large amounts of time passing, because obviously you can’t show all of that or even most of it, or even a fraction of it sometimes if it’s a long time. But at the same time, I just can’t get away from the fact that people change over long periods of time, even if no single event is worth pointing out as a scene.

And so it feels really weird to me to summarize like several years passing because now it’s like, okay, the character should realistically be different now, but if they just act different from the reader’s perspective, it will seem like they changed for no reason.

Chris: I think that’s gonna be a lot easier if you do something to prepare readers for the jump.

If you have to do a several year time jump, the character will be like, all right, I guess I’m gonna be here for three years until the portal opens again. And then they start working on, I don’t know, building their hut in the wilderness or something and just start kind of grinding away. And then you jump forward and you see that they’re like, hut now, and they know how to live in this wilderness and they’re getting ready for the portal to open or something.

We kind of have a little bit of preparation for such a big time jump like that. Again, we’ve talked about the expected trend rule. It follows an expected trend. It can be summarized. Otherwise, it’s too important. I was talking about the three-year time jump. Ah, geez. I have to wait three years for this portal, and I guess I better set up my hut.

What you would expect from there on out is for the character to slowly kind of build up their life in this place and figure out how to patch their clothes or make the clothing they need, figure out their food. Make themselves [more] utensils. It’s expected that those things will happen, and so then therefore you can jump past them.

So next we got exposition.

Oren: Probably the most contentious one on the list, actually.

Chris: I did notice something recently among literary writers, which I think is really funny, and I hope at some point somebody can explain to me why this is. But I’ve noticed literary writers seem to have two modes, which is, one is like the no exposition ever, and the other mode is like all exposition and summary all the time, and it’s such a strange thing.

Are they like in two warring camps? I’m now fascinated and I want to know what’s going on here. But generally for the purposes of engaging readers, we want some exposition, but not too much exposition. Basically, exposition is kind of how you fill in the cracks when you need information that [you can] not work in, in other ways that are engaging, we should say, what is it?

Oren: Yeah. What is, who knows?

Chris: Well, maybe it’s the beginning of a story. I’m just kidding. There’s a stage, an exposition stage, that if you follow some story structures, like Freytag’s pyramid, they’ll be like, and it starts with exposition, and that’s probably where the name of this narration actually comes from.

It’s like the explaining part. But exposition is anything that is just unmoored from the current timeline of events.

Oren: It’s when the narration just tells you stuff that you need to know, or maybe you don’t need to know if it’s not good exposition.

Chris: For instance, summary we talked about sometimes some things aren’t really tied to a specific time, but at the same time, oh geez.

It’s not time to talk about time.

Oren: We don’t have the time.

Chris: We don’t have the time. That’s from First Contact, the best Star Trek movie in my opinion, but I’m sure Oren disagrees.

Oren: That’s a hot take. We’ll come back to that later.

Chris: Any case, at least with summary, we generally have like a time period that’s in the sequence of events of the story moving forward.

Exposition is not the story moving forward anymore, although otherwise it can look just like summary, but instead it’s gonna be maybe back in time, or it’s gonna be things like just plain facts that have no specific time, like the world is round, for instance. So it’s basically just extra information that does not otherwise fit into the story, the sequence of events.

And that means that’s a lot of different things and it’s very flexible and you will need that flexibility. But it’s also one of those things where a lot of times we wanna try to do stuff with other types of narration first and then use exposition where it is needed. And so that also means it takes a lot of skill to figure out when to use exposition and when not to.

Oren: Also, a big part of it is honestly trying to arrange the story so that you don’t need more than the optimal amount of exposition. I deal with authors all the time who are trying to figure out, my story needs all this exposition. How can I deliver it in such a way that it won’t be boring? And it’s like, well, you probably can’t.

Your story needs too much exposition. This concept is too complicated and it takes forever to explain, and it’s counterintuitive. There are better and worse ways to do exposition, but often you just need to control how much is necessary.

Chris: Making your story too complex, when you kind of exceed your complexity budget, what happens is that you need tons and tons of exposition to try to explain it all, and readers are confused anyway.

And there’s just no way of rescuing it at that point. It’s just gonna be too much. So that is why you just have to proactively simplify everything as you go and make sure that the story is only using what it needs. If you can combine two characters, you should, sometimes you need a minimum number for believability, but even then, if you have a whole ship crew, a lot of times you just try to make people blend into the background.

So they don’t take space. You have to simplify to avoid having way more exposition than readers can actually handle. And then also when you plan scenes, scene planning is really important. Scene design is absolutely vital. And knowing how to write a good scene, it means factoring in what readers need to know, but also not letting that override other concerns, making sure you still have a good conflict, that it moves the story forward and we’re not just there to stare at things, so we get information, especially ’cause exposition can often give information a lot faster than showing it in the scene.

We see some people who are kind of anti exposition purists and oh man, their stories feel so emotionally dead because you need information to react [to]  ’cause the reader needs to understand the context so that they can emotionally react to things happening. And when you take out too much of that information, metaphors can only do so much, okay?

Word craft can only do so much to bring out emotion. You need story and context. And without exposition, it’s not working.

Oren: I need to know what’s happening. Otherwise I can’t judge it and I can’t build any emotion around it.

Chris: So real quick, we have one more.

Oren: Yeah. The last one.

Chris: Internalization or internal narration.

Oren: Well, this one’s easy. We’ll just do it internally. No one has to listen.

Chris: This is thoughts and feelings of your viewpoint character or your main character. If you’re running an omniscient and you’re kind of following one character around and yeah, it’s emotionally important. You wanna understand that character to get to like them, you wanna know why they’re doing what they’re doing, what the plan is, and all of that without enough internalization, that’s gonna hurt emotion. And then messes with the viewpoint too. Like I’ve had some stories that just don’t have enough internalization and it is jarring whenever I find out who the viewpoint character is, because they kind of didn’t feel like the viewpoint character.

Oren: You don’t get to know them, you don’t understand how they think, which is like, I thought we were here to read a book about a character. Come on, show me the character, please.

Chris: Internalization is also usually a doorway into exposition. Like you start with the character thinking and then they’re reminded of something and then you kind of lead into exposition.

So if there is no internal narration, then usually exposition is also lacking, which is a problem as we mentioned.

Oren: I would recommend though, if you’re like me and you’re working on some kind of very close narrated story that has a lot of internalizing, maybe you’re using a first person retelling narrative or what have you, I would recommend reading Shield of Sparrows because it will be a wake up call for how you can have way too much of that.

Chris: If you write in first person, especially a first person, like a retelling, like a retrospective viewpoint where it’s a future first person looking back instead of staying in the moment. But Shield of Sparrows isn’t a retelling. It’s in the moment and it’s still too much. Anybody can be too verbose, but first person tends to get people in the mindset. It tends to encourage a casual conversational narration that tends to lead onto going on too long.

So find that book that is for you just too much.

Oren: I haven’t read that many authors who have had too much internalizing, but it does exist. It can happen. And Shield of Sparrows taught me that. It’s like, no, please, I don’t need another aside what you’re thinking right now. We’ve already had three of those in this scene.

No more, please.

Chris: The thing that gets me is during dialogue, because a lot of times authors really wanna explain not just what the viewpoint character is saying, but actually what other characters are saying. So this other character will say this subtle line, and then the viewpoint character will think like a translation of it for the reader.

Oh, that must mean, here’s a deep [hint] and flavors of meaning behind this one line. It’s like, oh, come on. I understand the impulse to do this, but it slows the dialogue way down and just ruins the pacing. And that’s just something you should be showing. Show it by describing their body language and what they say, instead of telling exactly what they mean all the time.

Oren: But what if the character that I am translating for is a really skilled actor who brings across their meaning so subtly that it can’t really be captured consciously. It’s just subconscious signals. Then can I do it?

Chris: Well, they can just look into each other’s eyes and read their mind.

Oren: Yes. Perfect. I’m glad we figured that out.

Chris: Or characters thinking about their response. Like somebody just straight up asks them a question and then they think about their response for like several paragraphs and it’s like, uh, that person is waiting for you to answer the question.

Oren: You could make that a thing. You could make them like, clear their throat, be like, yeah, are you okay?

And they’re like, oh, I’ve been thinking for quite a while. Oops.

Chris: Sometimes they do do that, but just be aware that any type of narration, when you put in more narration, it gives a reader a sense of passing time because well, reading it takes time. So time is passing for them. So the more narration you have, the more time passes, and so there’s this one scene in Crescent City where I think Bryce grabs a doorknob and is [about] to walk down into the stairs or through the hall or through a doorway or something, and there’s so much exposition at the beginning of Crescent City. She thinks about something and it goes in paragraphs of exposition, and then she still hasn’t crossed the doorway.

And I’m like, she is just hanging out in that doorway, thinking really hard for several paragraphs.

Oren: Yeah, she’s just hanging out. You’re trying to bust her for loitering. What are you, a cop? Well, with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: And if you found that informative, consider supporting us on Patreon.

Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want 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.

[outro music]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.