Seven Tools for Delivering the Narrative in Your Novel
Every novelist possesses a toolkit of seven fundamental techniques to shape and deliver their story. These tools operate at the granular level of plot, influencing the unfolding narrative paragraph by paragraph. While the frequency of their use varies based on authorial style and genre, all seven contribute significantly to the overall impact of a novel.
Let’s explore these essential elements:
Action: The dynamic pulse of your story.
Dialogue: Characters' voices, revealing their personalities and relationships.
Interior Monologue: A window into a character's mind, sharing their thoughts and perspectives.
Interior Emotion: Conveying characters' feelings without explicit narration.
Description: Painting vivid scenes and creating atmosphere.
Flashback: Offering context and depth to the present narrative.
Narrative Summary: Providing efficient overviews of events.
By skillfully combining these tools, authors can captivate readers and bring their stories to life.
Action is the lifeblood of fiction, capturing the immediacy of events. It’s what happens now, not yesterday, tomorrow, or over an extended period. Even when narrated in the past tense, the action should unfold moment by moment, allowing readers to experience the story as it unfolds.
To truly engage readers, action must be sensory. It should be something that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or felt. Imagine capturing it on camera – that’s the kind of immediacy you're aiming for.
Editors often advise writers to "show, don't tell." This is especially crucial when it comes to action. Avoid summarizing past events or future possibilities. Instead, ground your readers in the present moment through vivid, sensory details.
While showing every detail can slow the pace, it's essential to balance this with narrative summary (discussed later). By carefully selecting what to show and when, you can maintain reader engagement and propel your story forward.
Dialogue is a dynamic form of action—characters speaking in the moment. Readers crave the authenticity of real-time conversation, unfiltered by authorial interpretation.
Every word should be presented directly, as if the reader is a silent witness. When editors criticize dialogue as "telling," they usually mean the author is summarizing speech rather than quoting it verbatim. While summarizing can be useful for conveying information swiftly, it’s not dialogue. This technique belongs in the realm of narrative summary, a tool we'll explore later.
Effective dialogue immerses the reader in the conversation, allowing them to hear the characters' voices and understand their relationships.
Dialogue helps the reader connect with the character. The human voice (or any other intelligent being!) is primal. The reader can hear each character’s voice and feel its power.
Novelists possess a unique advantage over screenwriters: the ability to directly access a character's thoughts. Unlike filmmakers who rely on facial expressions or often-maligned voiceovers, writers can delve deep into a character's mind.
Interior monologue offers a profound connection between reader and character. There are several approaches to this technique:
Direct Quotation: Presenting thoughts verbatim, capturing the raw essence of the character's mind.
Summary: Providing a condensed overview of a character's thought process.
Implied Thoughts: Conveying the general tone or feeling of a character's thoughts without explicit detail.
The choice of method depends on the desired effect and the story's pacing. All approaches are valid and can be employed effectively.
Interior monologue is an intimate tool that allows readers to experience a story from a character's perspective. By granting access to a character's inner world, you create a deeper level of engagement and understanding.
Interior emotion is a powerful tool that transports readers directly into a character's emotional landscape. Unlike screenwriters, novelists have the luxury of revealing these feelings explicitly.
There are two primary methods for conveying interior emotion:
Physiological Response: Delving into the character's physical sensations—racing heart, sweaty palms, tense muscles—can create an immersive and visceral experience. However, this technique is potent and should be used sparingly to maximize its impact.
Direct Emotion: Naming the emotion outright can be effective, but overuse can diminish its power. By carefully selecting when to explicitly state a character's feelings, you can enhance emotional resonance without overwhelming the reader.
The key lies in balance. By skillfully combining these approaches, you can create complex and relatable characters who evoke a deep emotional response.
Description is the art of transporting readers into the sensory world of your characters. Through vivid imagery, you invite them to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the environment as your characters do.
It's essential to distinguish between detailed description and summary. While summarizing can be useful in certain contexts, it's not the focus here. True description places the reader within the scene, allowing them to experience it firsthand through the character's perspective.
Avoid generic, detached descriptions. Instead, ground your descriptions in the character's experience, making the reader feel as if they are living the scene through the character's eyes.
A flashback is a narrative device that abruptly transports the reader to a specific moment in a character's past. Within this temporal shift, all the narrative tools—action, dialogue, interior monologue, emotion, and description—can be employed as they would in the present timeline.
Effectively using flashbacks requires careful attention to transitions. Clearly signaling the shift to the past is crucial. This can be achieved through various techniques, such as a distinct change in setting, a character's memory triggering the flashback, or a simple narrative statement. Conversely, returning to the present storyline demands a similarly clear marker to avoid disorienting the reader.
Once the flashback commences, the narrative unfolds as if the past were the present. This immersion in the past allows for deeper character exploration and plot development. However, it's essential to ensure that the flashback serves a clear purpose in advancing the story and enriching the reader's understanding of the characters or plot.
Narrative summary is the art of condensing information. It efficiently conveys events that occur outside the immediate moment, whether in the past, future, or present but extended over time. Unlike the vivid immediacy of other tools, narrative summary is concise and direct.
While it might seem less engaging than scene-based writing, narrative summary is invaluable for pacing your story and providing necessary context. It’s particularly useful for bridging gaps in the timeline, establishing background information, or summarizing less emotionally charged events.
However, overuse can lead to a flat and uninteresting narrative. Striking a balance is crucial. Prioritize narrative summary for less emotionally impactful elements and reserve the more dynamic tools—action, dialogue, interior monologue, emotion, and description—for scenes that demand heightened engagement.
Remember, the adage "show, don't tell" is a guideline, not a rigid rule. Narrative summary is the essential glue that binds your story together, allowing you to efficiently convey information while maintaining reader interest.