Today’s post is a bit involved, but bear with me, because beginning a story with the wrong narrative voice can lead to that place where we just aren’t interested in our project anymore.
Three things combine to tell the story to the reader:
- Narrative point of view is the perspective, a personal or impersonal “lens” through which a story is communicated.
- Narrative voice is how a story is communicated, the author’s fingerprint.
- Narrative time, or what we call tense, affects our perception of character development.
- In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually shown by how we use the forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation The main tenses found in most languages include the past, present, and future.
Narrative time/tense shows us the event’s location in time. The author’s choice of verb tense shapes our perception of when the story happened in relation to the protagonist’s current state. That choice tells us when an event happened relative to another time, past or present.
Narrative voice affects a reader’s perception of characters in subtle ways. It should be an undercurrent that goes unnoticed after the first few paragraphs. It shapes the reader’s view of events subliminally.
I’ve used the following sentences as an example before: “I eat,” “I am eating,” “I have eaten,” and “I have been eating.”
All are in the present tense: eat, am, and have. Yet, they are different because each conveys unique information or points of view about how the action relates to the present.
Subjunctives are small verbs of existence, but just like adverbs, they are telling words. These words fall out of our heads and into our narrative in the first draft because we are just trying to get the story down. In the second draft, they are signals telling us what needs to be reworded.
Subjunctives are hard to spot. Forms of “to be” can be found in subordinate clauses where something is mandated or required:
- I demand the prisoner be fed the same as anyone else.
BUT how does this relate to the topic at hand?
What if my characters are stranded in a desert? Should I write, “They were hot and thirsty“?
A sentence like that leaves nothing to the reader’s imagination. “Were“ is a subjunctive. The reader is on the outside, looking in.
This is where our choice of narrative time/tense comes into play.
Our job is to take that experience of thirst and make it immediate. No matter what narrative point of view we’re writing in, strong verbs affect narrative time and change everything.
Which sentence feels stronger, more pressing?
- They trudged on with dry, cracked lips, yearning for a drop of water.
- I walk toward the oasis with dry, cracked lips and parched tongue.
Each sentence says the same thing, but we get a different story when we change the narrative tense, point of view, and verb choice.
Narrative voice, verb tense/time, and expanded imagery combine to change how we perceive the characters in that moment.
Strong verbs best describe our characters’ actions and emotions. They connect the reader to the immediate situation our characters find themselves in.
For my short story, View from the Bottom of a Lake, the narrative tense that worked best was a past tense, close third person.
Peggy Jayne smiled. Beneath the green-glittering gaze, her toothsome smile flayed her daughter, leaving Sarah breathless, panicking and longing for her lake.
Sometimes the only way you can get into a character’s head is to write them in the first-person present tense, which happened to me with Thorn Girl. I struggled with her story for nearly six months until a member of my writing group suggested changing the narrative tense and point of view.
Once I did that, the story fell out of my head the way I had envisioned but couldn’t articulate, and I wrote it in one evening.
My first instinct is to shake my head and back away.
But I don’t. Long ago, my Lady told me that in every life, a time will come when you arrive at a precipice. You must either leap the chasm or fall to your death.
I stand at that place now.
That switch made that particular short story so much easier to write. Remember, in a traditional first-person point-of-view story, the protagonist is the narrator. No one ever has complete knowledge of anything, so the first-person narrator cannot be omnipotent. Her lack of knowledge is the story.
It is crucial for authors to write short stories as well as longer pieces. They force us to tell our stories from different points of view and encourage us to experiment with using a different narrative tense than we normally gravitate to.
Every story is unique, and some work best in the past tense, while others need to be in the present. Regardless of the narrative tense, your voice is unique. Your habitual word choices are unique.
That is why only you can tell your stories.
Credits and Attributions:
Quote from View from the Bottom of a Lake, © 2020 Connie J. Jasperson. Story first appeared in the anthology Escape, published by the Northwest Independent Writers Association and edited by Lee French.
Quote from Thorn Girl, © 2019 Connie J. Jasperson. Story first appeared in the anthology Swords, Sorcery, and Self-rescuing Damsels, edited by Lee French and Sara Craft.
Prose, plot, transitions, pacing, theme, characterization, dialogue, and mechanics (grammar/punctuation).
I use this function rather than reading it aloud myself, as I tend to see and read aloud what I think should be there rather than what is.
This phase is where I find my punctuation errors most often. I look for and correct punctuation and make notes for any other improvements that must be made. Usually, I cut entire sections, as they are riffs on ideas that have been presented before. Sometimes they are outright repetitions, which don’t leap out when viewed on the computer screen.
Passive phrasing does the job with little effort on the part of the author, which is why the first drafts of my work are littered with it. Active phrasing takes more effort because it involves visualizing a scene and showing it to the reader.
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