Higher Writing Folio: Creative Writing 2 Narrative Method How you tell your story has an impact on what you can write in your story and its style. There

Higher Writing Folio: Creative Writing 2

Narrative MethodNarrative Method

• How you tell your story has an impact on what you can write in your story and its style. There are 4 ways to tell a story: 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person and Stream of Consciousness. A 1st person narrator will tell the story in a more limited and personal way than a 3rd person narrator

First Person Narrative First Person Narrative

• The first person narrator is when a character in the story tells the story. This means that the word 'I' is constantly being used. Many stories are written using this method.


The advantages are:the reader has a more direct, engaged relationship with a character

the reader has more access to feelings and thoughts of a character

the experience of the story is more genuine


The disadvantages are:limited to one character's point of view (and their opinions)

limited in time and space (a reader knows what a character knows)

the story will be told from one point of view


• I had woken-up and did not know the time. I looked at my clock. It was blank. There had been a power cut. 'Oh great!' I thought to myself. I felt a sense of sickness. I was to be interviewed for a job I really wanted and I had no idea whether I was late or early. The sun was coming strong through the window which meant it was either late morning and I'd missed the interview or it was a really nice day outside.

Effective First Person Effective First Person NarrativeNarrative

• An effective 1st person narrator engages the audience. This builds a relationship between narrator and reader.

• One way of doing this is by addressing the reader directly and describing some of the details as can be seen in the following extract from Dickens' David Copperfield.


• WHETHER I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.


In J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye the narrator, Holden Caulfield, tells a story of his recent past. Salinger manages to create a character who has engaged millions of readers as the voice of angry, alienated teenagers the world over, as they search for…something. Caulfield is very concerned about himself and the use of 1st person conveys his thoughts about himself and his self-consciousness, as well as building a relationship with the reader directly.

Effective First Person Effective First Person NarrativeNarrativeIf you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to

know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all--I'm not saying that--but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every weekend. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour.


you can see in both examples that there is a serious attempt by the narrator to engage with the reader by talking about themselves

the aim is not only to reveal information about the narrator as a character, but to build a relationship

the personality of the narrator is conveyed by use of language and techniques

The Third Person The Third Person

• The third person narrator is when the narrator tells the story about the characters, but is not part of the story. With third person narrator, the characters are referred to by the narrator as "he", "she", "it", or "they".

• It is by far the most popular way of telling the story as it offers the most flexibility.


The advantages are:

the 3rd person narrator can know everything

the 3rd person narrator can go to any place

the 3rd person narrator can move around in time


The disadvantages are:

there is a distance between the characters and the reader

some of the subtlety is lost as many points are explained


The path through the forest was covered in pine needles and provided a soft carpet underfoot; broken sunlight danced on the forest floor and the sound of a wood pigeon could be heard echoing dreamily amongst the trees, while a warm breeze stirred the trees. The wood pigeon stood absolutely still on its branch between calls, thoughtfully gazing on the greenery surrounding it.


David and Rachel had brought their picnic to eat on the hill's crest which lay at the end of this path through the wood. The sun was bright; it was still morning, but there was a heat that promised a radiant day. In an hour's time they would be there, and later, David would surprise Rachel with strawberries, cream and champagne, all secretly bought and packed (he had said he was going to a DIY store). 'What a beautiful day!' thought Rachel, a smile slowly spreading across her face.


The day before, Rachel's friend Becky had thought the same thing, but her mood was not so cheerful. It was more given to anxiety. She had, by sheer coincidence, come to the same spot to be alone and think: she had been given her university offers for next year. She now wanted to think in the sunshine about what she should choose and the consequences of that choice. She lay on the short grass imagining herself at each of the places she'd visited, hoping, in her relaxed state, to be firm in herself what she should choose.


The ability to move around from character to character (or animal), from place to place, or in time so easily is one of the strengths of third person.


Third person narrator can be divided into four types:

1.the personal narrator.

2.the subjective narrator.

3.the impersonal narrator.

4.the objective narrator.


• The personal narrator will often have a very strong personal voice as they tell the story and will give their opinions about many things.

• The subjective narrator will write about the thoughts and feelings of characters, entering into their inner world.


• The impersonal narrator may be like the personal narrator in giving their own thoughts and feelings, but they do not give the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

• The objective narrator will focus on what is happening, without emotion and often in detail, telling the story as you imagine a scientist would.


Often writers will mix narrator types so that the objective narrator may describe his characters in detail and without emotion, but will give their own opinions and feelings too. It is up to you: your choice of narrator depends on your purpose.

Hooking the readerHooking the reader

The opening words of your story are important. It is important to provide an effective "hook" to capture the interest of the reader.

Your hook can be used to introduce:


Character


Part of the plot


Setting


Atmosphere


Theme


Opening with

Dialogue


Opening to introduce character:Now, awoken by the thin light of dawn streaming through the windows of the rented holiday cottage, Jack clambered excitedly out of bed. He yawned and walked into the kitchen, hoping to see his father, Oliver - his father to whom he owed everything. Oliver, was sitting at the table eating a plateful of local bacon, one eye on an old magazine. Looking up, he smiled. Together, the previous night, they had talked incessantly about the day's trip to an island they had seen while fishing from the shore.


Opening to introduce plot:Jack sat there at the edge of the cliff, staring out into the open, grey sea. One particular mass of rock caught his gaze as he stared down with solemn eyes. He thought back to all those years before when that little island had been a place of solitude for him and his father, Oliver. He remembered the holiday they had spent there together. Some good memories lay at the back of his mind but one dreadful one in particular would not go away.

(The reader wants to know what could have happened years ago that was so dreadful.)


Opening to introduce setting:From a shore five miles distant, Jack and Oliver sat on a great boulder staring at the perfect yellow sphere sinking slowly behind the island. Earlier in the day the island's riches had been on full display. From the same vantage point they had seen the playful rays of the sun magnificently highlight the rich green splendour of the towering forest trees. They had seen long arcs of pure sand, created over eons, each arc deserted, and each one a magnet to their desire to be there. They were desperate to feel that sand between their white toes, to swim in the blue, blue water. Tomorrow could not come soon enough.


Opening to introduce setting:

Providing setting details in your hook allows the reader to visualise where and when the events take place. The hook on the previous slide presents the setting of the island as attractive and the reader wants to read on to enjoy more description.


Opening to introduce atmosphere:The violence of a storm creates an atmosphere of tension, danger and fear. (This opening also introduces aspects of plot. The reader wants to know the circumstances which have brought the characters to this situation and if the characters will survive the threat that the storm poses.)


Opening to introduce atmosphere:The storm sneaked up on them from behind, their joyous laughter wiped away in an instant by the storm's command. It grew angry at their little boat, the one they had so bravely navigated to the island just a few hours earlier. It whipped their fearful faces mercilessly with its well sharpened spears of rain. The force of its wind pushed them towards the "needles" - the rocks of death so well known by mariners who sailed these waters. It roared, "You will never come back to my kingdom again."


Opening to introduce theme:

The following opening focuses on the main theme the story the relationship between the son and father. The reader wants to know how the relationship develops in the story.


Opening to introduce theme:Map, compass, wellington boots, lifejacket, waterproofs, rubber-soled shoes. "He'll love this trip," Oliver thought as he put the final pieces of equipment into the ample boot of his Land Rover. Jack stood looking up at his father's smile. Oliver looked down, smiling, too. This was only the second time they had been away themselves together and Jack hadn't been able to wait.

"My dad's got his own boat and knows everything about the sea," he'd boasted to his school friends, and even to his teachers. Oliver had told his colleagues at work that despite his wife getting custody of Jack he was determined to pass on to Jack his own love of the sea.


Opening to introduce dialogue:

Dialogue interests people. Characters speaking is a very good way of gaining and holding attention. You can start in anyway you choose with dialogue - humorous, flirting, confrontational, or dramatic like the example below.


Opening to introduce dialogue:"Listen to that thunder, dad!" Jack shouted but already his words were drowned out.

"Get the sails in!" shouted Oliver, Jack's father.

"What?"

"The sails! Get the sails in or we'll get pulled over!"

Jack started to lower the sails of the dinghy, but something was wrong. "Dad! Dad, it's jammed," he cried, "They're not coming down! Dad!"

Creating SettingCreating Setting

• The setting is an important element of fiction. This refers to time and place against which the events of your story are set.

• Setting is a picture in words.

• Time of day; weather; country; a fictional place.


Effective creation of setting focuses on details. By using details you can create a mood/atmosphere that can hold the interest of the reader. You may also start to 'write the senses': this means that your description may include not only what is seen, but also what is heard, what is smelled, what might be felt and what is tasted.

Creating SettingCreating Setting• We came over the hill and saw the castle perching on

the next hill. Its dark towers, decorated with gargoyles and hellish beasts, rose into the night sky beneath the white moon and the silver-tinted, black clouds. A chill night air blew across us. The high walls and battlements of the castle looked old and broken. Neglected by the local people who were too afraid to go near them. As we approached, we saw that wooden gallows protruded from the walls with rope nooses dangling in the whispering night breeze. This must have been where rebels were mercilessly hanged by the Count's ancestors, their wives and children too, when they raised their banners of revolt against the ancient Transylvanian family.


• In the opening paragraphs in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World a setting quite strange to his readers is created. It portrays a very bleak future world of science and management. The attention to details and the literary techniques used, such as word choice, give an empty backdrop and a melancholy feeling to the novel.

Creating SettingCreating Setting• A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main

entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.


• The following example includes all of the senses and tries to vividly portray to Forster's readers a place with which they are likely to be completely unfamiliar. The themes are dark and the setting provides a backdrop that keeps in step with those themes.

Creating SettingCreating SettingExcept for the Marabar Cavesi - and they are twenty miles off - the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely and which smells so putrid in the uncomfortable heat, and which creates a dry, unpleasant taste in the back of the throat to the visitor. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the dark brown stream. The streets are noisy, mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth and rotting odours deter all but the invited guest.

Creating SettingCreating Setting• Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two

hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting and fetid, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.

Creating SettingCreating Setting• In the extract below the senses of sight, hearing,

touch and smell are referenced by George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss. By personifying the setting she also re-creates the positive feelings of a landscape that cares for the narrator and which the narrator, in turn, cares for. The landscape becomes a living being capable of returning affections. This use of personification emphasise(s) these positive feelings and sets the tone for a world that Eliot's readers will find familiar and comforting.

Creating SettingCreating Setting• A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on

between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. On this mighty tide the black ships - laden with the fresh-scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal - are borne along to the town of St. Ogg's, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river-brink, tingeing the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun. Far away on each hand stretch the rich pastures, and the patches of dark earth made ready for the seed of broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with the tint of the tender-bladed autumn-

Creating SettingCreating Setting• sown corn. There is a remnant still of last year's

golden clusters of beehive-ricks rising at intervals beyond the hedgerows; and everywhere the hedgerows are studded with trees; the distant ships seem to be lifting their masts and stretching their red-brown sails close among the branches of the spreading ash. Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss. How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving.


• The author here pays attention to detail and uses literary techniques, adding similes and metaphors to create a world that lives and responds as a human being might.

• Colour will also be important.

Creating CharacterCreating Character

• A good story will portray memorable characters who are convincing. We should feel something for a character if he/she has been depicted in a credible manner. Our hearts should be touched by them and their situation.(sympathy, curiosity, dislike)

• Characters may be based on living people.


• You should try to use the physical appearance of a character to give insight into the character. Small details become revealing about sides of the personality. If you are very skilful, even the setting in which the character is described can be used to reveal aspects of the character.


• This extract is taken from Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield. The narrator and main character, David Copperfield, still a boy, is being taken to meet his new teacher, Dr Strong.

• The description of Dr Strong's surroundings and the details of his clothes and manner give you some ideas about his personality.


Doctor Strong looked almost as rusty, to my thinking, as the tall iron rails and gates outside the house; and almost as stiff and heavy as the great stone urns that flanked them, and were set up, on the top of the red-brick wall, at regular distances all round the court, like sublimated skittles, for Time to play at. He was in his library (I mean Doctor Strong was), with his clothes not particularly well brushed, and his hair not particularly well combed; his knee-smalls unbraced; his long black gaiters unbuttoned; and his shoes yawning like two caverns on the hearth-rug. Turning upon me a lustreless eye, that reminded me of a long-forgotten blind old horse who once used to crop the grass, and tumble over the graves, in Blunderstone churchyard, he said he was glad to see me: and then he gave me his hand; which I didn't know what to do with, as it did nothing for itself.

Creating Character through Creating Character through actionaction

How a character acts in certain situations can add to the picture a writer paints of that character. If, in a particular situation, a character does a kind act then the reader sees that kindness is a part of that character. If, in a particular situation, a character does a brave act then we see that courage is part of that character.

Creating Character through Creating Character through actionaction

It came to me that I was upon this dark common, helpless, unprotected, and alone. Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came-fear.

With an effort I turned and began a stumbling run through the heather.For my own part, I remember nothing of my flight except the stress of blundering against trees and stumbling through the heather. All about me gathered the invisible terrors of the Martians; that pitiless sword of heat seemed whirling to and fro, flourishing overhead before it descended and smote me out of life. I came into the road between the crossroads and Horsell, and ran along this to the crossroads.

At last I could go no further; I was exhausted with the violence of my emotion and of my flight, and I staggered and fell by the wayside. That was near the bridge that crosses the canal by the gasworks. I fell and lay still.

I must have remained there some time.

Creating Character through Creating Character through ActionAction

• This an extract from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Martians have landed on Earth. In this part of the novel the narrator has run from the Martians after witnessing the effects of their heat-ray weapon on some of the people around him.

• The actions - turning and running, hiding - of the narrator suggest the power fear has over him and give an insight into his character.

Character and DialogueCharacter and Dialogue

• The reader discovers more about characters by what they say. What characters say and how they say it is revealing.

• How a character speaks is important for establishing that character and making them believeable. An army soldier is likely to speak differently to an army officer than to his fellow soldiers. People from different class backgrounds, different regions and different countries speak differently, and your writing should try to reflect that, unless you are have a different purpose, for example, a humorous purpose.


• What a character says and how a character says it is a huge part of developing your character(s).

• An extract is from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. It is set in 1930s United States, in California during the Great Depression. Nearly all the characters are men who drift around looking for work and have little formal education. In this conversation a ranch hand, Slim, is asking George, a travelling worker, about his travelling companion and co-worker, Lennie.

Character and DialogueCharacter and Dialogue• "Funny how you an' him string along together." It was Slim's

calm invitation to confidence.• "What's funny about it?" George demanded defensively.• "Oh, I dunno. Hardly none of the guys ever travel together. I

hardly never seen two guys travel together. You know how the hands are, they just come in and get their bunk and work a month, and then they quit and go out alone. Never seem to give a damn about nobody. It jus' seems kinda funny a cuckoo like him and a smart little guy like you travelin' together."

• "He ain't no cuckoo," said George. "He's dumb as hell, but he ain't crazy. An' I ain't so bright neither, or I wouldn't be buckin' barley for my fifty and found. If I was bright, if I was even a little bit smart, I'd have my own little place, an' I'd be bringin' in my own crops, 'stead of doin' all the work and not getting what comes up outa the ground."


You can see the way the words are spelled, the different terms and the imperfect grammar conveys the likely background of the men.

COMMON MISTAKES

• Over complicated plots.

• “borrowing” from TV/films.

• Writing about something you know nothing about.

• Clichéd characters.

Good Advice

• Keep it simple!

• Your story should take place over a short period of time.

• You should have no more than two main characters.

• You should keep to one setting.

• Dialogue should be used sparingly.

Documents

Higher Writing Folio: Creative Writing 2 Narrative Method How you tell your story has an impact on what you can write in your story and its style. There