Ye old Storyteller...

[Velka]

I think using a storyteller can be a powerful tool, if used correctly. A storyteller can give the tale a sense of urgency from the beginning, as the reader will ask why do they feel it is important to tell this story right now. It can also bring subtlety and uncertainty into play as the storyteller needs to rely on memory, and are telling it through the lens of hindsight. It can also make the reader ask if the storyteller is being honest about the events, either due to the failings of memory, the desire to change what 'actually' happened so they are seen in a different light, or the bias of which they experienced the events.

It can also give the writer more room to play with chronology, as memories rarely happen in a perfect sequence. A storyteller can act as a glue that holds events, either separated by time or distance, together.

Heart of Darkness is one of my favourite examples of post-modern storytelling (followed closely by The Great Gatsby). Three unreliable narrators, all searching for their own understanding of "the truth", and even though Marlow tells the story again and again, he never gets any closer to it.

The Usual Suspects is another great use of a storyteller. How Verbal uses story to twist events and hide his identity is truly amazing. Also, a great example of using a storyteller to shake-up traditional chronology.

The Princess Bride uses a storyteller in an equally masterful way. Sometimes drawing attention to a storyteller you can break immersion, and create distance between the audience and the story, but the grandfather's comments and conversation with his grandson only enhance the fairy tale qualities of the story.

I've also been thinking about giving Name of the Wind another chance, reading it with a more keen eye as to how Kvothe acts as the storyteller when he talks about his past. I read it yeeeeaaaars ago, and while I found it enjoyable, but long-winded and a bit absurd in parts, I'm thinking that seeing it as an exercise in creating one's history, and telling it with years of life and reflection between the events and the telling, I may enjoy it in a different way.

 

[FifthView]

And yes, FifthView I agree 100% with you like usual The best narratives (for me) are the ones that have something to say… that have on opinion on what is happening. Whether it is a description of an article of clothing, or a description of the battle, what is the opinion on it? What is the perspective that is new and interesting and different?

Sometimes it's not just what is said, or at least not direct opinion, but also how it is said. This can be quite subtle. But thought patterns, the way the exposition is delivered–sentence structure, patterning, unusual word use, and so forth–can suggest a person behind the narrative and give us a sense of there being a storyteller with a real personality.

I also will have to disagree with Russ a little bit. There are storytellers, and there are storytellers. Even in 3rd-P limited, there is a narrator; it's just that decisions are made to hide that teller as much as possible, to allow the character POV to shine. This might be another reason that some of the telling may seem bland, flat, matter-of-fact. So on one side you might have the overt narrator–the kind I think Russ means when he talks about a narrator stepping between reader and character/story–and then on the other side you might have the "hidden" or nondescript (?) narrator, and in between there may be many different levels. Plus, I think it's worth keeping in mind that 3rd-person omniscient can also "get in the head" of characters and even trend toward seeming like 3rd limited in some respects.

 

[kennyc]

Just to throw in the mix here, Edgar Rice Burroughs - "At the Earth's Core" (and Pellucidar...I suppose the others in the series) is from 'as told to me' perspective.

From the prologue:

"In the first place please bear in mind that I do not expect you to believe this story. Nor could you wonder had you witnessed a recent experience of mine when, in the armor of blissful and stupendous ignorance, I gaily narrated the gist of it to a Fellow of the Royal Geological Society on the occasion of my last trip to London.
You would surely have thought that I had been detected in no less a heinous crime than the purloining of the Crown Jewels from the Tower, or putting poison in the coffee of His Majesty the King.
The erudite gentleman in whom I confided congealed before I was half through!—it is all that saved him from exploding—and my dreams of an Honorary Fellowship, gold medals, and a niche in the Hall of Fame faded into the thin, cold air of his arctic atmosphere.
But I believe the story, and so would you, and so would the learned Fellow of the Royal Geological Society, had you and he heard it from the lips of the man who told it to me. Had you seen, as I did, the fire of truth in those gray eyes; had you felt the ring of sincerity in that quiet voice; had you realized the pathos of it all—you, too, would believe. You would not have needed the final ocular proof that I had—the weird rhamphorhynchus-like creature which he had brought back with him from the inner world.
....
"Ten years!" he murmured, at last. "Ten years, and I thought that at the most it could be scarce more than one!" That night he told me his story—the story that I give you here as nearly in his own words as I can recall them.

...."

 

[Ben]

Do you think that the feel you are describing is simply a matter of having an omniscient 3rd person narrator, which is less common in modern fiction?

Or do you think it's possible to give the same sense of a storyteller while using a more limited 3rd?

I do feel like in most 1st person narratives I do get a strong sense of being "told" the story, and it's part of what I like about reading 1st person. 3 rd person omniscient feels a bit stilted and archaic to me when I read it now.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Do you think that the feel you are describing is simply a matter of having an omniscient 3rd person narrator, which is less common in modern fiction?

Or do you think it's possible to give the same sense of a storyteller while using a more limited 3rd?

I do feel like in most 1st person narratives I do get a strong sense of being "told" the story, and it's part of what I like about reading 1st person. 3 rd person omniscient feels a bit stilted and archaic to me when I read it now.

Me and my beers will jump in here, LOL. Although this is knee jerk, without serious thought... I'd say it's more than simply POV. POV plays a role, but some of it is purely in the style of writing across time. I don't think there's anything inherently archaic or stilted about 3rd Om. Any POV can be great. My opinion of 1st is "meh". I'd rather read 3rd Om than 1st. Doesn't mean 1st can't be good, just typically I find it isn't, for me. Different stories demand different POV's.

 

[Chessie]

I actually passed up what looked to be a fantastic book (girl who works elemental magic falls into a snowglobe) because it's written in first person present. I just can't. Honestly though, I wish that first didn't bother me so much because there must be so many good stories I'm missing out on.

3rd Om isn't archaic...it's just another storytelling tool. Writers have their prefered styles and readers have their tastes. This doesn't make one approach better or worse than another.

 

[kennyc]

and if you really want to rock your point of view and tense world read Ted Chaing's The Story of Your Life.

 

[vaiyt]

The Harry Potter books are framed like mystery novels, and that's where they take the third person non-omniscient POV from. JKR wanted to omit the full truth until the reveal, but first person narration would already prime the reader to expect an incomplete and partisan narrative. She explicitly does NOT want you to see it as Harry retelling the story, so the tone is fairly impersonal.

I'm among those who doesn't quite like 1st person narration. On the other hand, I can't imagine The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas written from any other POV, and I love that book to bits. Now THAT is a storyteller. The person telling you the story is unmistakably a person, and every bit of exposition oozes personality.

With that said, I expired at two o'clock on a Friday afternoon in the month of August, 1869, at my beautiful suburban place in Catumbi. I was sixty-four intense and prosperous years old, I was a bachelor, I had wealth of around three hundred contos, and I was accompanied to the cemetery by eleven friends. Eleven friends! The fact is, there hadn't been any cards or announcements. On top of that it was raining--drizzling--a thin, sad, constant rain, so constant and so sad that it led one of those last-minute faithful friends to insert this ingenious idea into the speech he was making at the edge of my grave: "You who knew him, gentlemen, can say with me that nature appears to be weeping over the irreparable loss of one of the finest characters humanity has been honored with. This somber air, these drops from heaven, those dark clouds that cover the blue like funeral crepe, all of it is the cruel and terrible grief that gnaws at nature and at my deepest insides; all that is sublime praise for our illustrious deceased.

Good and faithful friend! No, I don't regret the twenty bonds I left you. And that was how I reached the closure of my days. That was how I set out for Hamlet's undiscovered country without the anxieties or doubts of the young prince, but, rather, slow and lumbering, like someone leaving the spectacle late. Late and bored.

 

[Steerpike]

L

I actually passed up what looked to be a fantastic book (girl who works elemental magic falls into a snowglobe) because it's written in first person present. I just can't. Honestly though, I wish that first didn't bother me so much because there must be so many good stories I'm missing out on.

3rd Om isn't archaic...it's just another storytelling tool. Writers have their prefered styles and readers have their tastes. This doesn't make one approach better or worse than another.

Why do you think that is? I'm curious because it is one if those things I couldn't care less about. If the story is good, I don't care if it is first person, second, third, past tense, present tense, or whatever.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I'm going to bang my own drum a little. Some of you will have heard this a few times already, but in my previous project, Emma's Story, I used to different kinds of narration. One very distant and fairy-tale inspired (I guess that's omniscient 3rd or something?) and one more closely related to the regular everyday storyteller voice.

A lot of the distant parts were very over the top and flowery in their descriptions, and I used them to tie together the sections of the story told in the serious storyteller voice. Let's say I had two conversations with a bit of a time gap in between them. I'd then write the conversations in the serious voice, and a shorter passage in the fairy-tale style to explain what happened in between.

I had great fun with it, and I feel like it worked out very well for that particular story. I'm trying it again with my current story, but it's not working out as well this time around. I think it may be a case of finding the right voice for it though, and I'll keep tinkering with it and hopefully I'll find the right track eventually.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that using a distinct narrative voice can work out really well if you just give it a go. You don't have to be a famous published author of classical works to pull it off. You can do it yourself too.

...and even if you may not pull it off, you can still have fun, experiment, and learn from it.

 

[kennyc]

L

Why do you think that is? I'm curious because it is one if those things I couldn't care less about. If the story is good, I don't care if it is first person, second, third, past tense, present tense, or whatever.

Yep, my thoughts as well but I personally think a first person story can be more realistic and impactful.

 

[FifthView]

It's difficult for me to discuss different POV or narration strategies, simply because I don't have many solid examples handy at the top of my mind although I do have vague memories of experiencing all the different flavorings. For example, Harry Potter has been raised in this thread, and although the POV typically follows HP, the opening to the first book is more in the vein of omniscient—but with a twist:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.

The Dursleys had everything they wanted, but they also had a secret, and their greatest fear was that somebody would discover it. They didn't think they could bear it if anyone found out about the Potters. Mrs. Potter was Mrs. Dursley's sister, but they hadn't met for several years; in fact, Mrs. Dursley pretended she didn't have a sister, because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as it was possible to be. The Dursleys shuddered to think what the neighbors would say if the Potters arrived in the street. The Dursleys knew that the Potters had a small son, too, but they had never even seen him. This boy was another good reason for keeping the Potters away; they didn't want Dudley mixing with a child like that.​

This is rather omniscient; but even so, the "storyteller voice" circles around the voices of the Dursleys:

• they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
• they just didn't hold with such nonsense
• her sister and her good-for-nothing husband
• they didn't want Dudley mixing with a child like that

So the storyteller is giving omniscient value judgments (or implying them) and observations about the Dursleys—e.g., when discussing Mrs. Dursley's spying on her neighbors, her husband's big and beefy appearance and thick neck—but in these phrases, she uses description/judgments (bolded) that are from the Dursley's POV, in the Durselys' voice. For me, there's the suggestion that this omniscient storyteller is mimicking or mocking the Dursleys, in the way a person at the office might assume the character traits and voice of someone we impersonate while making fun of them. At least, there's a duality in the voice, where storyteller and Dursleys blend or intertwine while not erasing one another; both storyteller and Dursleys remain and are separate.

Incidentally, this first chapter has the feel of a prologue, and I wonder if many otherwise 3rd-person limited examples exist in which the body of the book is 3rd limited but the prologue takes a more omniscient 3rd route (or at least not as tight a 3rd limited approach as the rest of the book.) My vague recollection is, yes; but I'd have to do a search through my library to verify.

Very quickly in the first chapter of Sorcerer's Stone, the POV shifts to Mr. Dursley's and is fairly tight for quite a length. But then it shifts again:

The Dursleys got into bed. Mrs. Dursley fell asleep quickly but Mr. Dursley lay awake, turning it all over in his mind. His last, comforting thought before he fell asleep was that even if the Potters were involved, there was no reason for them to come near him and Mrs. Dursley. The Potters knew very well what he and Petunia thought about them and their kind. . . .He couldn't see how he and Petunia could get mixed up in anything that might be going on — he yawned and turned over — it couldn't affect them. . . .

How very wrong he was.

Mr. Dursley might have been drifting into an uneasy sleep, but the cat on the wall outside was showing no sign of sleepiness...​

Here it shifts into obvious omniscience until Dumbledore's appearance. Even after Dumbledore and McGonagall begin their dialogue, there are tricks limiting the omniscience and suggesting POV impressions, as Rowling uses "seems" and other tentative description strategies:

• She threw a sharp, sideways glance at Dumbledore here, as though hoping he was going to tell her something, but he didn't, so she went on.
  
• "No, thank you," said Professor McGonagall coldy, as though she didn't think this was the moment for lemon drops.
  
• Professor McGonagall flinched, but Dumbledore, who was unsticking two lemon drops, seemed not to notice.
  
• It seemed that Professor McGonagall had reached the point she was most anxious to discuss....
  
• [Speaking of D.'s odd watch.] It must have made sense to Dumbledore, though, because he put it back in his pocket and said....

Seems...to whom? On the one hand, this might be an example of "getting in the head" of each viewing the other, or of at least trying to give the impression that each of the two wizards has a limited perspective or knowledge of the other's state of being/intention. On the other, this could be addressing a generic "you," and the storyteller may be omniscient but isn't wanting to reveal all details to the reader. I.e., it's almost as if you, dear reader, are an invisible person standing there with these two, watching them, and you can only make guesses about them. On the third hand, it could be this storyteller, this narrator, wants the reader to fall into the trap of believing that she, the storyteller, is not omniscient.

So there are all these questions that come to my mind when thinking about this first chapter of the first Harry Potter book. It's always fascinated me.

My general impression, on this topic of voices/POV/narration, is that there is only 3rd-person—omniscient and limited are only two variations on the same thing. And there may be a continuum between the two approaches. Omniscient isn't always omniscient, and limited isn't always limited. Either can dip into the heads of characters and follow a single character for a significant length of time, hewing close to that one POV. And storytellers can use various tricks to show themselves or hide themselves, and to be more or less reliable narrators.

 

[Chessie]

@ Steerpike: I just don't like it. Present tense feels lazy and forced to me. I read FPOV a lot as I was growing up but as an adult I'll immediately put a book down. It's just not the way I like my marshmallows roasted, I guess.

 

[Chessie]

Yep, my thoughts as well but I personally think a first person story can be more realistic and impactful.

Uh...whether a story is realistic and impactful depends on a lot of other elements besides just POV.

With Omn and 3rd, the reader gets a broader perspective of what's happening vs a limited and often skewed view of things with the first person narrator. It also doesn't feel like someone is telling me a story. That's really important to me when I sit down to read a book. It's not chat time with so-and-so it's storytime. First person ruins it for me,

 

[kennyc]

Uh...whether a story is realistic and impactful depends on a lot of other elements besides just POV.

With Omn and 3rd, the reader gets a broader perspective of what's happening vs a limited and often skewed view of things with the first person narrator. It also doesn't feel like someone is telling me a story. That's really important to me when I sit down to read a book. It's not chat time with so-and-so it's storytime. First person ruins it for me,

You're welcome to believe whatever you like. Read what you prefer, but you're completely wrong about first person ruining stories else there wouldn't be any. You just have a preference.

And btw I never once said realism and impact depended solely on POV. So stop twisting my words.

 

[kennyc]

BTW first person can certainly be more intimate and thus as I said more impactful and realistic to the reader, that doesn't mean any other POV can't be as well, but it is much more difficult to create an intimate story in third person.

There's a good post by Tara K. Harper here discussing POV: First Person or Third Person? - Narrative Forms - Tara K. Harper, Writer's Workshop

and a summary from Writer's Digest here: http://www.writersdigest.com/writin...at-point-of-view-should-you-use-in-your-novel

 

[Chessie]

I never said FPOV ruins stories in general...I said it ruins them for me. Also, I said a story needs more than just POV to make it work. It's one of many tools in a writer's box. Geesh.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Certain types of stories lend themselves well to 1st person POV. Others, not so much.

For a long time I had an aversion to 1st POV. After a time, and several positive experiences from recommendations, I discovered that my POV prejudices came about from early stories, written in that style, that I simply didn't enjoy.

There are many things you can't do in 3rd. Other limitations come from the use of 1st. Heck, some stories switch between 1st & 3rd.

Now my preference is only for good storytelling, without a preconceived notion. As writers though, thinking seriously about the tale we wish to tell, & what POV style best aids that effort, is an important decision. All choices have inherent strengths and weaknesses. Employing the right method makes our story stronger.

Example:
Imagine Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov written in 3rd person. The magic of that story came from the in-depth insights into a diseased mind that the reader shares throughout the journey.

I highly doubt that story would've been even remotely as engaging if he chose not to write in 1st person.

 

[Chessie]

See, that's the thing. I would like to change my prejudices and I agree with your points, T. Allen. Maybe I just need to force myself and read that snowglobe book after all.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

See, that's the thing. I would like to change my prejudices and I agree with your points, T. Allen. Maybe I just need to force myself and read that snowglobe book after all.

In that case, I'd suggest starting with a story that utilizes the deep 1st person POV to full effect.