The Soul Writes Fiction
Narrative Mood, Voice--and Soul
The Soul Writes Fiction
But while someone who wanted to learn about cars would have no trouble finding a manual, there is no comparable work for the student of literature.
Jonathan Culler, from the forward to Genette’s Narrative Discourse
Could it have ever been that we lacked for a manual to tell us how literature works, whether for its reading or writing? They number in the thousands.
Of course, such books already existed. The same forward mentions The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth, but Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method by Gérard Genette was foundational in its approach to the structures and techniques of storytelling. He introduced the concept of metalepsis, which we covered in another essay, but he also examined how narratives are constructed, breaking them into five components: order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice.
It’s an academic work, not something for a quick read to pick up a few points. For that, we turn to Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, or Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. Yet, Discourse laid the groundwork on which others have built.
Book Clubs and Paperback Giveaway
We’re going to read a book together every month! And for the first book, to celebrate, I’m giving away ten paperbacks!
June: Empire’s Daughter by
July: Mud Valley by
August: RUOK? by
Now, let’s continue with
Mood and Voice
Don’t let anyone tell you what a story is, what it needs to include or what form it must take.
—Charlie Kaufman
When we define genres or any other part of storytelling, there is a compulsion to look back at what stories have been not forward to what they could be. We limit ourselves to our experience of stories consumed, like the beta reader who changed my present-tense story to past tense because “the story is being told; it has to have happened in the past.” When we do this, we lose possibilities.
Storytelling is more than a record of paths taken. Stories can express the soul, where it’s been, where it’s going, and all the various paths it might have taken under different circumstances. Storytelling captures who we are, and that requires a breadth of possibility. The various potential narrators reflect that, as do the wild range of prose techniques available to us.
“...the way in which the narrating itself is implicated in the narrative”
—Gérard Genette
Genette’s study of narrative break down into five concepts which can be grouped as narrative time (order, duration, and frequency) and narrative mode (mood and voice). I’ll save time for another… well… time. Under mode, voice pertains to who1 is telling the story and from where2 within the narrative structure they’re positioned.
Voice also includes the narrator’s temporal relationship to the story, whether he’s recounting events as they happen or reflecting on them retrospectively. It also includes reliabilities, with the infamous unreliable narrator, like Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
Mood, on the other hand, refers to the distance between the narrator and the story. This is what we literally mean when we say point of view. It’s the narrator’s perception of the story, how much information they can share and how they share it.
Mood determines whether the narrator is omniscient (zero focalization) or internally or externally focused. It affects the story’s emotional impact upon the reader. We can feel removed from the events, or it can be very intimate.
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I’ve put the denser material into the footnotes, and for a more detailed understanding of the work, make sure you take a look. For now, material like this begs the question: what’s the point? For Genette, the point was a comprehensive study of narratives, for us, I believe the point is the range of possibilities open to us.
I’m beginning to understand the merit in a snarky meme I saw some time ago. It said something like this: I don’t have a favorite book, a favorite color, or a favorite movie. You know who has favorites? Children have favorites—because they’ve had fewer experiences.
Where I identify with this is in an approach to story where people identify with their favorite POV and happily explain why other choices are stinky doodoo heads. Or their favorite tense. Or their favorite… whatever.
It’s easy to fall into a rut, sure. I’d been having fun with first person, present tense, and I had to make an effort to write Such was the Epiphany of Theordore Beasley in third person, past tense. I just don’t believe in narrowing ourselves unnecessarily. It restricts the kinds of stories we can tell.
I had a problem in setting out to write Steampunk Cleopatra. (Available through the bookstore.) Cleopatra was Greek, and I wanted to write a story about Imperialism and race and the way indigenous resources (and genius) are stolen. So, I wanted my main character to be an Egyptian companion of Cleopatra. (Outside of the fantasy aspects of my story, this was one non-historical bit. She had companions, but they were Greek.) Having an Egyptian main character where the story was about her people’s identity was another problem. I’m a white guy. Amani remained my main character, but I made their eunuch tutor (who was also Greek) the viewpoint character.
The story is told in first person, but there are many events where he’s not present but still narrating, now in third person. He’s a intradiegetic narrator (see the footnotes) who becomes an extradiagetic narrator for sections of the novel.
The narrator’s present is Jerusalem, years after the death of Cleopatra, and those passages are told in present tense. The story is set Egypt, Rome, and elsewhere, from Cleopatra’s childhood to early adulthood, and those passages are in past tense. Playing with the options available to us became part of the joy in telling the story.
I would like to see us exploring the options and imagining the options, rather than clinging to favorites.
World Anvil Bible for our Open-World project
The Franklin Fictionstack, created and kept by
, is our place to collect the lore of Franklin, as our writers build it.I’ve held this in my drafts longer than most and was only able to complete it by removing two of the three intended parts. We’ll get to those another time. The possibilities are endless, but communicating ideas—and stories—requires narrowing our focus. Today, that focus is viewing the work of Genette as a foundation for expansion.
— Thaddeus Thomas
Weekly Flash Fiction for Paid Subscribers—these won’t be emailed to you, but you’ll find the link in my regular posts. Here’s the first two chapters of a flash serial:
The extradiegetic narrator exists outside the story they’re telling, such as with the omniscient narrator in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The intradiegetic narrator exists within the story, like Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The metadiegetic narrator is a character within the story who tells another embedded narrative.
There is the story and then there is the world of the story. The first three distinctions speak about the relation to the story, but the heterodiegetic narrator is not even part of the world in which the story takes place. Either the extradietic or metadiegtic narrators can hold this distinction, but not the intradiegetic narrator, unless you can imagine some way for the narrator to exist within the story but not within the world of the story. I don’t think “he’s from another planet” cuts it.
The homodeigetic narrator exists within the story world. With intradiegetic narrator, this is clear. For extradiegesis, the narrator exists within the storyworld but not within the story, except as the teller of the tale. With metadeigesis, a character is telling a story about events within his storyworld, and this raises a question. Can a metadiagetic narrator also be considered extradiegetic or intradiegetic from the viewpoint of the story he’s telling? I don’t know Genette’s answer, but we’re not answering test questions, we’re pondering the possibilities of how a narration can be handled. The labels aren’t the point; those possibilities are.
This read like someone actually thinking—not just explaining. That made it land way harder than most of the theory-heavy stuff I’ve seen. You didn’t just walk through Genette—you tested him. Poked the edges. Let the questions stay open where they needed to.
“The labels aren’t the point; those possibilities are.”
That’s the line I kept coming back to. It felt like permission. To play. To break. To get weird with structure and voice without having to justify it through precedent.
I walked away from this thinking less about definitions and more about what kind of narrator could exist in the world I’m building next. That’s a gift. Appreciate you putting it out there.
I have a friend writing a novel in which there are several characters, though only two main ones. The others are all on a spaceship together and these guys and gals are stuck together for years, maybe forever. He writes from many different points of view, though we can tell the story is chiefly about a pre-journey conflict between two of the characters and how it will play out on this journey of collaboration and risk. Ideological differences were what created the rift between these two former lovers and best friends. Anyway, I'm of the view that once the POV shifts don't create confusion for the reader, and there's consistency within scenes as to whose point of view it is, that's all fine. If 'omniscient' includes knowing what's in the various characters heads, then I'm tempted to say he's writing omniscient. Trouble is, we both know UK lit agents generally advise new writers not to do this. I do feel sorry for him, as I feel his novels work as they are - with the varying points of view and sometimes the sense that we're getting a scene where it's not clear who's point of view we've got but these aren't intimate scenes so it doesn't matter. The secondary characters are important enough as plot-drivers to appear in scenes which add to the overall story but these aren't always scenes where the main characters are needed. Often they are logistic: what's happening with the space ship and what strategic approach is needed or psychosocial - how is this small community coping?