Inadvertent Narrative Intrusion (I said INADVERTENT!)

Discussion in 'Revision and Editing' started by Wreybies, Feb 27, 2015.

  1. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    Knew it.
     
  2. Feo Takahari

    Feo Takahari Senior Member

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    That gets me thinking: what's the difference between how Martin writes and how Jack London writes? Take "To Build a Fire":

    This is definitely a case where the narrative intrudes into the story, with very different thought processes and a different style of speaking from the plain-spoken, pragmatic main character. To me, it works and makes for an interesting story. Does London do something differently than Martin, or is it just a matter of personal taste?
     
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  3. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    One question, in the OP, Wrey, you mention using a character as a "mouthpiece." I have to say, first how can you know which characters the author agrees with exactly? And secondly, why is it problem? Couldn't you say the same thing when a character asserts common decency or corrects some logic? Please explain.:unsure:
     
  4. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    I would say it's a matter of degrees, for me. I hate that I keep caveating my opinion, but again, I'm aware that my opinion is easily argued against. Martin crosses a line for me with an inconsistent use of archaisms and quaint modes of speech that London does not. When the narrative starts to include t'was and hither and yon and prithee and the kind of archaic syntactic constructions one expects to find with that kind of vocabulary, it becomes an annoyance. For me, it doesn't aid in the "coloring in" of the world because it drowns the voices of the actual characters who speak that way because, well, they live in Westeros. The narrator is mugging the camera, and inconsistently.
     
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  5. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    Inconsistent? Okay, that's definitely a concern. Is there any possible good reason at all? That sounds very odd.
     
  6. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    Firstly, at least on this one, you're taking it down to too small a scale. If you have a character that thinks little old ladies should be helped across the street as they struggle with groceries, and you feel exactly the same about that, this is not what we are talking about. We're talking about creating a character pretty much solely to serve as a megaphone for a particular POV that you the writer have on a topic in real life.

    Some would argue that it's not a problem. Some would argue that it's the whole point of writing a story: to say something with that story. I'm one of the people who make that argument. I think a story should have something to say, or better yet, to ask of the reader. A mindless bit of fun and adventure is all well and good, but I prefer for a story to have a little meat to it.

    But have something to say is not the same as having a polemic mouthpiece in a story. A polemic mouthpiece stands out. Especially today when we have such close access to writers who tweet their thoughts and we can follow them and get their opinions first hand. It becomes a problem for readers like me who don't want to be preached at or sermonized. And remember, the entire point of this thread is to discuss inadvertent instances of these writing phenomena. There are perfectly purposeful examples of almost all of this as well. Atlas Shrugged is one mega-giant polemic serving as Rand's mouthpiece as regards her opinions on economy and politics.
     
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  7. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    In Fantasy, you can hold up Tolkien as an example of a good deal of narrative intrusion, though of course it wasn't inadvertent in his case.
     
  8. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    His was also in omniscient mode, and old enough as a work that it falls into that period of time when the Opinionated Narrator was ubiquitous.
     
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  9. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    Yes, he was. I remember him switching to the POV of a fox or something, briefly, at one point. I think people who use omniscient today often hope to capture a kind of myth or fairy tale quality reminiscent of those older works.
     
  10. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    And yet I sometimes wonder - and this may simply be an artifact of the kinds of things I like to read - if the opinionated narrator was a way, back then, to write about something that was touchy/taboo/controversial while giving the writer the (rather cowardly) option to let the reader know "I'm going to write about a couple of gay fellows, but you must understand that I do not approve in the slightest and would never find myself alone in their company. With that said, on to the steamy scene in the Regency Style drawing room...." :)
     
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  11. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    I think you're on target there. The opinionated narrator certain creates a false persona, definitely not the writer (no, never that!), who can say things and hold views that might not be accepted in polite society.
     
  12. Feo Takahari

    Feo Takahari Senior Member

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    This is easiest to tell with fanfiction, since the characters already have established viewpoints. It's possible to change a character through new experiences, but if they start contradicting their canon views without enough development for that to make sense, something's up.

    Original characters are harder to judge because they lack a baseline, but to some extent you can consider the character's background and experiences and what that would probably translate to. I once read a book where King Arthur came back and ran for mayor of New York. I was interested to see how Dark Age political views would translate to the modern day, but in each case, what I got was a rationalization for how they would perfectly translate to the views of a liberal Democrat. After several blatant Democratic talking points reframed in Dark Age language, it started to feel way too convenient.

    There's also the matter of how other characters react. You can sometimes tell a polemic when one character speechifies for a very long time without any other character arguing or interrupting, especially in situations where interruption would be likely. Other times, characters with demonstrated strong beliefs rapidly change those beliefs with very little persuasion.

    In all honesty, I've never seen an accidental polemic. Authors who go into blatant rant mode know what they're doing.
     
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  13. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    Hehehe, King Arthur would be a truly violent bigot. And a literal feudalist, so elitist too.
     
  14. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    Yes, I do suppose the creation of a polemic mouthpiece character would be hard to rationalize as inadvertent.
     
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  15. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    Seems to me a major cause of inadvertent narrative intrusion is the author's uncertain grasp on POV. Going from a lot of the free novels I've been reading on Kindle, omniscient POV is still the go-to viewpoint for tyro fiction writers. At the same time, they/we "know" we're supposed to get into the heads of our characters. So we focus in like good boys and girls and forget that we can't be zoomed out and see the big picture at the same time. Trying to do both, we get our characters knowing or saying things they couldn't possibly know or say, or thinking thoughts that could never be theirs. A classic example of this is the narrator (who's supposed to be the same as the POV character) telling us readers within the scene how the character "never noticed" how cold it was, how upset another person was, or that an assassin was sneaking around the corner behind him.

    My WIP was originally written in omniscient POV, but for the rewrite I took it into close third. It had been one thing for my omniscient narrator to look down occasionally and make fun of my characters, but in close third, they themselves would not. IMO, that narrative snark made for some of my best lines. Too bad: it was intrusion and had to go.
     
    Last edited: Apr 23, 2016
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  16. Feo Takahari

    Feo Takahari Senior Member

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    Possible counterargument: if the story is in past tense, then even if the character didn't know at the time an assassin was sneaking up on him, he probably knows now.
     
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  17. Catrin Lewis

    Catrin Lewis Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Community Volunteer

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    Yes, this would be true for first person past tense, but in third person, it'd still have to be the narrator who's pointing these unnoticed things out. Unless, maybe, the narration goes, "It wasn't until later that he learned that . . . " And even that is a violation of close third person, it seems to me.
     
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  18. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    POV seems to be a fiddly subject when it comes to what works. And it already has the ever-present looseness of writing rules in general.
     

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