Carving Your Story by Julia Keefer, Ph.D.
Part Four: Narrative Voice and Sequencing Sauces and Seasoning. Sequencing in Time and Space-How to arrange the food on the table How you color your story. Point of View

Chapter Nineteen: Voice

Point of View

What are the differences and similarities between narrative voice in fiction and sequencing in screenwriting? The camera decides who it likes and dislikes depending on actors but does the screenwriter control any of this?

In fiction, a story can be told in the first person, rarely the second person but it happens in some chapters of Soul Mountain by Gao Xi Jiang, third person limited, over the eyes of the main character, or third person omniscient, mimicking God, so to speak. Western readers are used to having one narrator for an entire work and often confuse the author with the narrator, while other cultures, particularly Islamic and Arabic ones, feel comfortable with multiple narrators, whose combined visions, present a rich tapestry of story. American writers often think their narrators are "objective," like scientists, allowing the story to speak for itself, but every time a story is told, there is always a point of view, even if it takes a while to decipher it.

Most of the innovative structure in timespace center on theme more than CDQ. I have explored everything but interactivity, chance and game theory. Most of the recommendations in this book assume that the writer is making choices and designing paradigms. But as with music and choreography, it is also possible to design art by the throw of the dice, so to speak, or games that engage interaction between reader and writer. These techniques surprise the writer as much as the reader, and are good ways to overcome writer's block.

Chapter Twenty: Time, When to serve, how long each course, Rhythm

If you stay too long eating this pesto pasta, you won't be able to eat anything else!

TIME and REALITY

The oral storyteller weaves his yarn about events that happened in the past in front of an audience, enchanting them with elements of fantasy injected into the people and places with which they are familiar, as in Arabian Nights.

The play takes place in the present even though the characters may talk about the past or future. Novels do all kinds of things with time-think of the complexity of French grammar. There is a difference between the past imperfect and the past simple, the repetition of a habit or an event worth noting. Some novelists write in the present, the past imperfect, the past simple, the conditional or subjunctive in lyric modes.

Television adheres to a meticulous, repetitive schedule of present tense narrative. Film uses present tense with flashback narrative and while it plays out in the present, can rewind or fast forward the story as in experimental films. Both TV and film can use recursive, flashback, tandem or tandem competitive as well as linear narrative. The Internet destroys time-it doesn't matter. The user enjoys or creates the story any time she wants.

For example, Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams describes so many ways

of living time as if it were one day, going backwards, rushing to Apocalypse, turned into space, or torn between biological and mechanical time.

Chapter Twenty-One: Space-locations, close-up or wide-angle or aerial

Some desserts look better wrapped, or from a distance. A close-up can make something unappetizing at times, a bit like multi-colored vomit..

Chapter Twenty-Two: Dynamics-soft, hard. Shrimp versus lambIf you begin with seafood salad, end with fruit salad.

Varying the scene order

Lyrical versus Percussive

Chapter Twenty-Three: Transitions-Order of presentation. Do you really want to eat all that pasta before the tabouli, or vice versa?

While dramatic structure relates to central dramatic question, narrative structure relates to theme, the author's attitude towards the material. Narrative structure is described by the voice of the narrator-omniscient, limited, first or third person, non-human, personified or human, distance from the story; the sequence of events in time-linear, recursive or other kinds of flashback, superimposed time or tandem competitive, past imperfect or repetition, out of time in some kinds of expository, lyrical or descriptive writing which may include the emotional subjunctive, conditional or future time expressed in the possibilities of branching narratives and indeterminate endings; and a spatial existence that can be real, imaginary, in the head, superimposed space or disembodied.

RECURSIVE: The present is relatively static and the past is used to solve a problem in the present, even if that is to recapture lost time as in Proust, or to stop the plague in Ancient Greece in Oedipus Rex. While the climax of the play occurs when Oedipus plucks out his eyes, the present action up until then has been mainly conversation about dramatic events in the past. When the past is plucked, it is not replayed in a realistic, linear fashion, but filtered through the lens of the present. At the end the digs into the past cause the present to change somewhat. This is often told in first person or through the eyes of a main character. Flashback films and written memoirs, static plays like Oedipus are its forms. How do these forms differ and how do they translate into each other? Recursive is the basis of psychoanalysis where patient and psychiatrist sit in a static present using events in the past to trigger feelings to be catharsized and analyzed in order to solve problems for better action in the future. Oedipus Rex only won second prize in the playwriting competition in Ancient Greece, so some feel this kind of storytelling isn't dramatic enough. This is the basis of reflection, of the thinking we do in memoirs or at the end of the day. But it doesn't work well with multiple narrators or a huge sociological vision or a lot of action. It is for sensory recall, problem solving.

Thwarted dream, case history, life changing event. Ivan Ilyich. Rewind.

TANDEM COMPETITIVE: Stories can be in tandem without competing-sharing the same space or the same time or the same characters with some different factor. In my novel, similar characters appear in different space. It seems as if they are in the same time because they occupy the same novel, but one is in the active, impressionistic, dreamlike present and one the past imperfect, one in the eternal present of dreams and one in a specific period in society and history. They compete when they rival each other for truth from the Reader's POV. There must be a reason why stories are told in tandem. In real life, two versions of the same story are constantly competing in our minds, a phenomenon which reaches its extreme state in bipolar illness where the same state of events can be interpreted as depressing or uplifting, depending on the mood, or actions are constructed to reap those same results, depending on the mood. In other words, something exists before the story because the story is simply how specific people engage in certain events in a specific time and place. Therefore, their objectives, moods, abilities and proclivities as well as social conditions are set before the story occurs. Hence different moods and objectives can actually create somewhat different stories. We sometimes see scenes on split screen or split stage or alternating chapters of narrators in a novel. This narrative style is particularly disturbing as we don't know what kind of truth to accept and our mood is constantly jarred by the constant switches. Yet this is exactly what happens in psychosis.

LINEAR: Linear is the most common kind of storytelling in which a beginning, middle and end follows similar linearity in time and space. However, in dreams, linear storytelling does not necessarily have a cause-effect as is commonly understood. In Hollywood screenplays, script doctors are brought in to make sure there is a causal relationship to the scenes. Usually linear storytelling is told by one narrator, whether first, third or the camera, but in pass the ball linear narrative, multiple narrators carry the same story in sequence, the way storytellers passed tales through the desert from oasis to oasis through different caravans. They tried hard to be true to the story, but each storyteller obviously colored the tale based on his perceptions and values. In my second novel I chose 18 nonhuman narrators or human extensions, as McLuhan would say, to carry the story. This is a technique still used today by writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf al Qa'id in War in the Land of Egypt and Orhan Pamuk in My Name is Red. You can have multiple narrators without a linear story as in Akhenaten and some of Faulkner's work, but pass the ball linear is like the game broken telephone where narrators try to pace their addition to the story embedded in sequence within its entire history. This gives tremendous importance to the story but protects it from the fallacies of omniscient narrators like those of Tolstoi. Pass the ball linear doesn't lend itself that well to film although it is possible it could be done-something as disciplined as War in the Land of Egypt might work well. My second novel would be hard to film and keep all those narrators. Some things are too difficult to visualize in this narrative. Films and plays take place in a linear fashion but they can refer to events that occur out of sequence in time.

CONGLOMERATE:It seems that in conglomerate narrative, there must be an active throughline in the present that covers winter to winter -one year which is the surface of the rock. Then the layers are the back stories. How does this differ from recursive narrative? Recursive features the past to solve a problem in the present like Oedipus Rex; while conglomerate has a hard active linear present that covers layers of secrets, lies, and history in the past. Conglomerate is neither tandem nor competitive, nor does it deal with the future. The past is not imperfect past but singular events that influence the present. Is conglomerate the right word? The idea is that there is a superficial story with deeper stories underneath, some of which may be too disgusting, disappointing, depressing or disarming for the Reader or Viewer to stomach. For example, soap operas skim the surface of narrative, idealizing characters and romanticizing situations by avoiding depressing details. How many people lie dying with perfect hair and make-up? In a hypertext story there can be the top layer of narrative for everyone, then layers underneath which symbolize gossip, pettiness, uncomfortable facts, and finally those things that are usually censored. This would be one way to deal with Internet censorship. This is different from the usual hypertext story of branching narratives where different future outcomes are envisioned.

Repetitive structures aren't the same as descriptive films. Groundhog Day and Run Lola Run repeat. There are some changes with the different versions.

Parallel structures like The Hours are not sub-plots. The danger here is to be choppy if the sequencing isn't right and there aren't enough similarities or differences between the stories. It is like comparison and contrast in literary criticism. Choppy, flowing, choppy, flowing. But if the narrators argue, if the stories bleed into each other for a reason, it gives the whole script more depth. The Matrix has a number of parallel structures.

Instead of repetition, it might be good to spiral the action so that when characters revisit the scene they attack the problem in a different way. Sometimes the event is seen in flashback. Perhaps I could use the rape scene in I as my spiral.

The Unraveling-mystery structure is used with whodunits. The skill involves laying clues throughout the film and then learning the truth in the third act.

In Memento the whole film is a flashback so that it is a reverse structure. The trick is to keep the audience asking a central dramatic question. There must always be a puzzle for the audience to solve. In a circular structure there must still be linear parts. Pulp fiction has a looping structure of beginning-end-middle and more.

Non-linear stories require more structure than usual so that don't break up, dissolve or fly into different directions.

Good drama combusts time. Even with different time periods like The Hours, it is possible to carry objects like the flowers and book from one setting to the next.

It mustn't feel like a string of stories pieced together from disparate places, similar to a bad research paper without a central thesis.

A good sequencing technique is to imply an action in a that is carried out or frustrated or somehow commented upon in b. Or cut from an object in one to a similar one in the other.

Or the setup of a joke is one scene and the punchline in the next.

Just as dance routines can be choppy if the movements aren't connected, scenes can be choppy if they have no relationship to each other.

Aural Links

Visual Links

Chapter Twenty-Four: Theme-author's attitude towards materialBy the way this is prepared, cooked, and presented, we have a good idea about how the cook feels about pumpkins, or the author about her material.

Levels of Didacticism

The Teacher

The Mother

The Entertainer

Entertainment