552 – Critical Types of Narration
Description
No matter your book’s plot or genre, a lot of its words will be spent on narration. Rather than treating narration as an amorphous blob, it’s important to understand the different elements that make it up. That way, you’ll understand whether the story has too much description relative to action or when you need to add a bit of exposition. This week, we’re discussing what makes the different types of narration tick and also apparently referring to the Hugos as something that will still happen in the future. That’s just the nature of recording your episodes ahead of time!
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 gre
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