Writer's Workshop: Watson and Doyle

This Workshop ties pretty well to the last post I just talked about. It's also, admittedly, something I'm not very good at: establishing a narrator identity. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's talk about Watson and Doyle.

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Suppose you're watching a TV show, and all of a sudden, the characters get into a big argument and go their separate ways. You see this and ask, "Why did that happen?"

Your friend says, "Of course that happened. It's the end of Act IIB; you've gotta have a Dark Night of the Soul!"

But that doesn't make any sense. That's why the writers wrote that scene, but that's not why the characters did what they did. How can one question have two answers?

The truth is, it depends on who you ask. If you were reading a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the choice between asking John Watson and asking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Watsonian perspective considers the story solely from the details within the story world, while the Doylistic perspective considers the story based on what the writer was thinking. So it's Watson who sees what the characters were feeling and Doyle who sees the need for a Dark Night of the Soul at the end of Act IIB.

What does this have to do with writing narrators? I ask you this: who's telling the story, Watson or Doyle? Who is the narrator? You may think that's a deep philosophical question, but the correct answer is that the narrator is always Watson. Doyle does not exist in the story, so he can't be the one conveying it to the reader. Expanding this idea out some, this general concept is true even if there's no real "character" in the story to be Watson. The narrator is always a character, no matter what story you're telling.

I think, as authors, we forget this far too frequently. We talk about "telling" a story we want to "share," but the truth is, we're "crafting" the story, and the narrator character is the one telling it. We always need to keep this in mind. I'll show you why. Consider these two sections of my story, "Cutie Mark Mix-Up:"

Obediently, the other two Crusaders galloped their little hearts out. To their credit, Scootaloo did start to rise. A little bit. A little higher than she could hover, at least. Unfortunately, they'd planned for her to be cresting Fluttershy's cottage after 100 yards, which she most certainly was not doing.

“Yeah, yeah, I do know that one! The next line is... no, wait...” Apple Bloom hopped up and down, pulling on one of Fluttershy's back legs as she did so. “You've gotta teach me all the words, Fluttershy! It'd mean a lot to me!”

“Oh, well, if it'd mean so much to you, then I guess I can...”

Apple Bloom looked back to her friends. “Go 'head, you two. Ah might be here a while.”

“If you say so...” Sweetie Belle replied. The two of them shot off towards Ponyville, riding towards the afternoon sun. After a few moments of relative silence, Sweetie Belle brought up what was on both of their minds. “Have you ever seen Apple Bloom so excited about something before?”

In the first segment, I've created a narrator voice: eager, if a bit snarky and goofy. In the second, I've collapsed back to generic descriptions of actions. Essentially, I've forgotten my narrator persona. And because of that, the second snippet is a little more boring than the first.

This narrator persona is a lot easier to create in a comedy, because you can punctuate the narration with humor like I did. But lest you think that's the only kind of narrator persona available to you, here's an example of a dramatic persona from "The Queen Beckons:"

The night is cold. Equestria is at peace. The guardsponies who stand on the parapets are, essentially, a relic of older times. Where once stood dozens of stallions now stands but one. At the moment, his name is Bronze Plate: a shy guardspony, ill suited to real combat. It is fortuitous, then, that no nation seeks to destroy Equestria; at least, not at the moment.

Can you hear the stolid seriousness I've put in my narrator's voice? I could probably write it to sound like the voice in "Cutie Mark Mix-Up," but it wouldn't really match the tone of the story I'm going for, would it?

Bronze Plate stood up at his post, shivering his butt off. It was like negative fifty degrees out, and there was nothing to do but stare out in the distance and pretend a wave of griffons were coming to get you. But no, there hadn't been a griffon-pony war in centuries, so all Bronze Plate got to do was tromp around in his armor and play-act at being a soldier.

Lol, no. That really doesn't work at all.

All of the examples I've used so far have been third-person omniscient, or at least distant enough that I'm not actually portraying the mindset of one of the characters. Doing first-person, second-person, or third-person local doesn't change too much, though. There is the interesting quirk of making the future version of the character telling the story different from the present version of that same character, but other than that, generally you want your narrator voice and character voice to sound the same. Unless you're going for comedic effect, of course:

Oh, god, I thought to myself. She's coming over to talk to me. The hottest mare on the force, and she's coming to talk to me. Gotta come up with something friendly, something reasonable, something that doesn't sound like I'm currently a total spaz on the inside oh god she's almost here--

"Hey, baby, how you doin'?"

...Kill me.

So... yeah. That's that. As you write your narration, think about how it's not just the text in between the dialogue. Imagine a character speaking those lines. What kind of character is it? How do they prefer to speak? What kinds of figurative language do they use? What draws their attention? This consistency will make the narration much more interesting overall. What's more, it'll help with the dialogue stuff we talked about last time. With a consistent image of a narrator in your head, you'll know exactly what to put when.