I’ve moved the blog to its own dedicated space on what will eventually become my personal website. Consequently, this blog here will no longer be updated, so visit the Star Chamber at it’s new location now:

thestarchamber.mattkeefe.com

Nice and easy to remember, isn’t it? Good. Go there. The first new post is already up, with more to come soon.

Adios!

Matt

I’ve just finished reading Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. Like many of you reading this, I thought I was familiar with the story – I remember reading the book when I was at school, and in any case so much of the book has entered the common, collective memory that it’s virtually impossible not to have heard of Lilliput, its diminutive inhabitants or the Little Ender and Big Ender factions they divide themselves into.

In truth, however, the book presented a great deal I was completely unfamiliar with. In hindsight, I think I must previously have read only the first two parts (where Gulliver encounters the tiny Lilliputians, and then the giant Brobdingnagians) and it was approached very much as a children’s book. In actual fact, the book contains four parts, and I thought that the third of those – Gulliver’s voyage to a floating island populated by a bizarre astronomer-elite – was far and away the best part. Whether you think you’re familiar with Gulliver’s Travels or not, if you haven’t read it within the last few years – and if you can’t, for example, recall the difference between a Struldbrug and a Laputan – read it. It almost certainly contains more than you remember.

Of particular interest to me on this reading, though, was its narrative style. Three points stand out in particular:

• It has no real plot as such.
• It has almost no dialogue, perhaps two or three lines in the entire book.
• The narrator (Gulliver) ‘tells’ us everything, while the author ’shows’ almost nothing.

Strictly speaking, Gulliver’s Travels is a satire, and as such could be considered as distinct from a novel, but either way the point stands – it doesn’t have a conventional narrative, and doesn’t adhere to the form of what we’d call a novel in the modern sense. And yet, it’s one of the best-known written works there is. When I type ‘Lilliputian’, the spellchecker doesn’t underline it as an error, because the word has entered the dictionary (worryingly, it does however underline the word spellchecker). The word Yahoo is also taken from Gulliver’s Travels. The story is so well known that many more people are familiar with it than have actually read the book (doubtless in part thanks to the various adaptations for film and television over the years, as well as various derivative works, but also due simply to the extent to which the book has permeated the cultural fabric). An unconventional format, then, is certainly no barrier to success, or to popularity.

Furthermore, Gulliver’s Travels actually serves as an example when this kind of disregard for supposed ‘rules’ of good writing – such as ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ – is highly desirable. Everything about the story’s characters, setting and events is told to us in an incredibly plain fashion. Indeed the contents pages contain short summaries, repeated at the head of each chapter, which invariably spell out events before we even read about them. There’s certainly no attempt to construct an unfolding plot. The narrator’s stated mission in most cases is simply to describe to us factually the places and peoples he has met. All this is ‘telling’ of the very most blatant kind, but what it does it ’show’ us something else – something about ourselves, something about the folly of our ways, the preposterousness of our pretend logic, the dubiousness of many of our long-standing arguments, the inaccuracy of our assumptions, the misguidedness of our prejudices, the irrationality of our beliefs and the failings of our institutions.

It seems to me that the theory of ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ is prevaricated upon the notion that the only thing a book is trying to ’show’ us is the story. That’s just not the case. Books can show us a lot more than that, and if they tell us something along, there’s certainly no crime in that.

Matt

Haven’t blogged in a while, so what I intend to do – if I can get my arse in gear – is write a few short(er) blogs over the next few days touching on a few topics.

First off, theme.

Gav Thorpe recently posted a blog on the subject, and it’s something I’ve talked to various people about (Gav included) at length in the past. I don’t really want to go into a huge amount of detail on the specific subject of theme – read Gav’s excellent blog for that – but what I do want to do is use theme as an example of what I would describe as a forgotten element of composition.

When preparing to write a novel, everyone knows they need to come up with an idea for their story (the plot), and work out who their characters will be. They also know that when actually writing it, they’ll need to use a good standard of English (or whatever language they’re writing in). That’s all well and good as a starting point.

Looking a little deeper, writers may look to the various books, and increasingly websites, on the subject of writing for advice. This, too, is all well and good, except that in a great many cases the advice given there is really only concerned with those immediate and obvious facets of novel-writing: the story and the characters. Well-regarded sources like the Turkey City Lexicon do contain a great deal of useful advice, but almost all of it regards plots and characters, or the actual writing as it relates to those things (i.e., writing as a way to move the story along or develop characters). What you won’t find in places like that is a great a deal of advice on how to introduce themes – and themes aren’t the only area of writing which I feel are overlooked by those offering this kind advice.

Stories don’t appeal, and certainly don’t endure, on face value alone. It’s the deeper, hidden elements – the theme, the tone, the style – that speak to us and appeal to us, even if they’re not explicitly described. If you like, you can think of a novel as composed of two parts: it’s described elements (the plot, characters and setting), and it’s implied elements (its theme, its tone, its meaning). In most of the advice you’ll read about writing, plenty of attention is paid to the described elements, much less so to the implied elements, yet to my mind they are of equal merit – both are required for a great novel.

I’m not suggesting you throw out the kind of advice you find in the Turkey City Lexicon or books like Character and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card. What I’m suggesting is that you view such advice in context – as advice specifically concerning certain, very obvious aspects of writing – and bear it in mind alongside considerations of theme, tone and the other less obvious, but equally important elements.

There is a mantra I try to remind myself of when writing to avoid forgetting these other, subtler elements. Here it is:

Character, not biography.
Theme, not subject.
Tone, not setting.

None of this is to say that your book won’t contain biography, won’t have a subject and won’t have setting – of course it will, but these are products, end results created by the other stages of composition. They are not requisite parts in the way that character, theme and tone are, hence my distinction between them. I’ll go into a little detail on these comparisons.

The fact that John was born on the 11th of December 1957 is biography. The fact that John is cautious is character. The difference should be obvious.

Likewise, you can describe your setting in all the detail you want, but nothing will immerse the reader in your book anywhere near as well as the proper tone will. You can spend as long as you like building a world, but it’s the evocation of surroundings as familiar as, say, a fog-bound street at night which will really make your reader feel like they know exactly where the story is taking place.

Tone pervades everything – not just the scenery, but the characters’ dialogue (old-fashioned, formal speech if your story is set in the past, for example), your choice of words, particularly your number and use of adjectives and adverbs; it influences your characters’ names, their appearance, perhaps even the length and number of your chapters. Tone is the shade in which you paint the story you have created – it needs to be the right one. The tone itself is only implied, but it is the tone in which everything else is described. Without tone, even good writing will have no colour (or no darkness, if that’s what you’re aiming for).

This started with a discussion of theme as one overlooked aspect of composition, and I’ve mentioned a few more. The above, though, is certainly not exhaustive. You can break the writing process – more accurately, composition – down into as many parts as you want, and someone else will always think of some more. That’s fine, there’s no exhaustive list (and anyone trying to create one would likely be on a hiding to nothing) but the point remains this: there is, when composing a novel, a great deal more to be borne in mind than it might at first appear. Even following all the usual advice there is, I’d argue, still more to think about.

Matt

Online now (and somewhat later than promised – sorry!) is my interview with author, Stephen Donaldson.

I interviewed Stephen shortly before the release of Fatal Revenant, the latest book in his Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series, and the interview touches on both this and his many other works, as well as writing and literature in general. The interview originally appeared in issue 10 of Death Ray magazine, but the version now online contains some material not included in the magazine due to space constraints. The complete interview, as well as an overview of Stephen’s work, and a fact file on the author are online now in the Articles section of this website.

Matt

Following on from the recent frenzy of blog-ranting on the subject of narrative styles, I thought I’d post a few examples of some novels which I think demonstrate clever use of the omniscient narrator. Note that I’m focusing specifically on books about the legendary/historical characters that my earlier blog posts centred on – I think we’ve covered that plenty enough already, and besides which I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the use of narrative mode more generally. These then, are simply three books which spring to mind as good examples of narrative modes other than the most common third-person limited narrator. All three also employ other noteworthy techniques as we shall see…

You can use the comments thread below to leave your own recommendations, and read on to see mine…

The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis // 1950 // Various Editions Available

I haven’t read this in about, oh, 20 years, but it was brought to my attention in discussion with my friend, Andy Hall, on the subject of my earlier post. As Andy pointed out, having recently read the book to his young daughter, C.S. Lewis uses an interesting variation on the third-person omniscient narrator, which I shall call the Storyteller Mode. The Storyteller is an omniscient narrator who not only describes the story, but also communicates it directly to the reader, as though there in the room with them, speaking it aloud as an old-fashioned storyteller might. The Storyteller refers to the story itself (and sometimes even the book) as though viewing it externally, as can be seen from the following excerpt:

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs Macready and three servants. (Their names were Ivy, Margaret and Betty, but they do not come into the story much.)

The Storyteller Mode raises the question of what the narrator really represents – is it the author’s own voice, or simply a role to be assumed by the reader? It also ‘breaks the fourth wall’ in that is suggests the narrator as a character in our own world, rather than some abstracted, disembodied figure within the world of the story. He remains omniscient, but his omniscience is that of a knowing reader, who has heard the story before. The style can be overly quaint and avuncular, though that hasn’t prevented it proving popular with generations of children. The Storyteller Mode’s usefulness is perhaps limited, but it does raise one important question – that of the relationship between the narrator and the reader (as opposed to that between the narrator and the story, or the reader and the story) – which is worthy of consideration when writing any story, in any narrative style.

The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe on Amazon

Elric of Melniboné
Michael Moorcock // 1972 // Gollancz

Chronologically the earliest of Elric’s adventures, though not the first to be written, the eponymous volume introduces the albino Emperor and the island Kingdom of Melniboné. Separating the narrative are what are essentially numerous prologues, and the tale is told in truly omniscient fashion – neither of which would generally be considered good form today. Elric of Melniboné is, however, to my mind an example of how the omniscient narrator can be used incredibly well, without becoming a crutch for the lazy, without becoming a too greatly convenient means of storytelling and without leaving the reader lacking a connection to the characters. Of particular note is the first chapter which, unusually is written in the present tense:

It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows from below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each arm of a seat which has been carved from a single massive ruby.

Later in the chapter, we’re made privy to the nature of Elric’s Kingdom:

These are the people of Melniboné, the Dragon Isle, which ruled the world for ten thousand years and has ceased to rule it for less than five hundred years. And they are cruel and clever and to them ‘morality’ means little more than a proper respect for the traditions of a hundred centuries.

…and Elric’s own tenuous place within it:

So, alone, the emperor broods. He mourns that his father, Sadric the Eighty-Sixth, did not sire more children, for then a more suitable monarch might have been available to take his place on the ruby throne.

For anyone who read my previous post, this is pathos, if not characterisation or empathy-building in the rather dull, straightforward sense of most modern novels. This presentation of the character – with pathos – is, for a character like Elric, a far superior choice. In fact, the writing style is incredibly well-chosen throughout, perfectly matched to its subject, and clever literary devices, like the use of present tense, only enhance that. To my mind it’s a perfect example of why narrative mode (and, in this case, tense) are so important, and ought be given just as much consideration as the story itself, and the choice of them not merely surrendered to habit or assumption.

Elric of Melnibone on Amazon

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke // 2004 // Bloomsbury

A very modern novel in a very classic style. Jonathan Strange is narrated omnisciently in a way considered terribly unfashionable today, and yet proved hugely popular with readers and critics alike upon its release – all of which would seem to me to be heartening evidence that trends in publishing are not based upon what the public wants or enjoys, but merely upon what the publishers feel comfortable offering them. When new novels offering something other than the drably conventional form of storytelling arrive, they can and do succeed, which ought to be a lesson to readers, writers and publishers alike.

Of particular interest in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the use of footnotes, another interesting variation on the omniscient narrator. Here we’re are left with the implication of a narrator who serves not only a storytelling purpose, but who has also compiled the book and its many references. This raises similar questions to those posed by the use of the storyteller mode, and is again a subtle distortion of the omniscient narrator’s usual role. All very clever, and a good read too (now if only I could get to the end…).

Here’s the obligatory excerpt:

Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.

They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed anyone by magic – nor ever done anyone the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon anyone’s head. But, with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlemen in Yorkshire.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell on Amazon

Gav Thorpe has posted some thoughts on the use of different forms of narrative over on his (we)blog, Mechanical Hamster. As part of the ongoing debate, the question has arisen as to why storytelling styles change over time…

In large part, I think, it’s simply changing fashions. Tastes change over time and commercial publishing compounds that as publishers focus on what is currently popular. Writers aiming for publication follow suit and implement those styles in their own writing. Fashions continue to change, of course, and will change again. How quickly and how likely that change is to come about is of course down to how broadly followed the fashion is, which is one of the principal reasons I argue for the use of a greater variety of storytelling techniques.

In the particular case of the omniscient narrator, I suspect one reason for its decline in popularity is the separation of fact and fiction. The words ‘story’ and ‘history’ share a clearly observable common root and once upon a time the two words meant the same thing. Look at any work of literature from the middle ages or earlier and it’s clear to see that it contains elements of both what we would now call fact and fiction; history and story. Indeed, this was the case as recently as the 17th century; it was only the application of Enlightenment era thought to the arts and humanities that produced the idea of history as a discipline where factuality was paramount, and separate from fiction.

With that distinction made, the narrative forms used for fictional and factual writing diverged – journalistic forms of writing, for instance, developed around this time, with the subsequent emergence of the first daily newspapers. The omniscient narrator mode – with its seemingly boundless knowledge and a voice clearly external to the story – has many similarities to those styles used in factual writing, and may for that reason have become unpopular amongst writers (and readers) of fiction.

For the most part, the choice of the limited mode for narration of modern novels is a wise one. That’s not to say, though, that it suits all subjects or all kinds of stories, and to return to the original subject of this discussion, the historic, mythic and epic are stories to which, it seems to me, the third-person limited narrator is particularly ill-suited, and I really think its for the simple reason of the nature of those stories and the characters they contain.All reading, and therefore all writing, is ultimately an experience shared by the reader and the characters in the story; a connection between the two, you might say. Most beloved of the modern novel in achieving this is a sense of empathy, and it’s for that reason that the third-person limited perspective is so favoured. Empathy, though, is in itself a sign of modernity…

Empathy

In the modern day, we’re increasingly aware of the harm that can be caused by division and the misunderstanding, fear and mutual suspicion that brings. We’ve become both more aware and less accepting of divides – race, class, sex – and empathy is a way of crossing them. For the kinds of stories we tell in the modern age, that is essential – we tell stories of all sorts of people, from all kinds of backgrounds quite unlike our own. Perhaps the first author to do this, and the author who essentially began the era of the modern novel, is Charles Dickens. Prior to Dickens, empathy simply did not exist between the kinds of people who formed his readership and the kinds of people who featured as characters in his books; the class divide between them was simply too great, yet the empathy created by Dickens’ writing overcame it.

This tradition continues today in the modern novel, with empathy central to ensuring that anybody, from anywhere in the world, can read a story about somebody from anywhere else in the world, and still feel some kind of connection. This is admirable, and empathy is undoubtedly modern literature’s contribution to mankind as a whole, but that’s not to say that empathy is the be all and end of all of literature itself.

Empathy is one way of understanding others, but it’s not the only one. Empathy as we know it today hasn’t always existed. Empathy is closely related to morality, and like morality it changes over time, to the point where the morality of the past and the morality of the present may seem contradictory and unrecognisable to one another. The same is true of empathy. It simply isn’t always possible to empathise with the past, but that’s not to say we can’t feel a connection to it.

Speaking of the past, Aristotle said that there were three means of persuasion: logos (the logical part of the argument), ethos (the act of establishing one’s rightness to make the argument) and pathos (the emotional part of the argument). Now, when reading a novel, we’re not necessarily looking to be persuaded of anything in particular, but we are looking for a connection, and I think the methods of achieving that are very similar. Logos can be thought of as the realism we look for in the characters, the setting and the story, while ethos is already an expression commonly used when describing the success or otherwise of attempts to create a cohesive whole in the writing. Most significant to this particular discussion, though, is the third part – pathos.

Pathos

One of the word’s meanings is the general passion with which emotional aspects of a story or argument are delivered. Pathos, then, is quite different to empathy but is undoubtedly capable of producing a connection between reader and subject just as powerful and just as compelling. In circumstances where empathy is not possible, or inadequate, pathos instead provides the emotional connection. Delivering pathos is where the omniscient mode of narration excels.

Some of you will be thinking that my argument is flawed for the simple reason that empathy between very distant past and present is possible. Well, I simply don’t think it is. Understanding, yes; empathy, no. When it comes to the past, empathy actually hinders understanding. The search for empathy leads us to attribute to historical characters aspects of the human condition – such as modern morality – which they simply did not possess, concepts which were as alien to them then as the notion of a flat earth is to us today. This doesn’t create empathy with those characters – it simply transforms one character we can’t empathise with into another with which we can, and what’s the point of that? You might as well have started off with some other character altogether.

‘Because I really want to empathise with Alexander the Great?’ I can hear some of you saying. I really have to dispute this – you might want to understand him and form some connection, but it isn’t empathy. That’s just the word being used too broadly. When telling stories about characters as historic or as legendary as Achilles or King Arthur, I honestly don’t believe that empathy is what the readers are looking for (though they may mistakenly express it as such). It’s not even just a question of the great divide of time – there are just some people, and hence some characters, for whom we have no empathy, who are by their very nature so different from us that we simply cannot form it, but there’s still a value to be had in gaining some understanding of, or connection, to them. There are other ways than empathy to achieve that, and pathos is one of them.

There is some similarity here to a point I make in my article on Tolkien, about the use of fate. Fate is another device seldom used in storytelling nowadays, which is nonetheless able to create a connection between reader and subject. Fate has been largely replaced by characterisation, though it isn’t simply an antecedent of it, it’s an alternative (much as pathos is to empathy). Fate is the depiction of an outcome inevitable or unavoidable to a particular individual, and how that individual is so affected by it, whereas characterisation is the depiction of that individual’s particular nature. The two can coexist (as can empathy and pathos) but which of the two holds the upper hand really defines the nature of the story. Fate is an older, and perhaps less subtle, concept than those embodied by the modern art of characterisation, but fate still has a relevance. Why? Simply because we all on occasion experience the feeling that events are predestined for us. Sod’s law, bloody typical; fate. Witnessing a character also prey to such inescapable fate creates a connection for us, no matter that we may know little of their nature, or that the ‘characterisation’ may be lacking.

The broader point here is this: all stories are designed to create a connection between the writer, the reader and the characters. Inherent in the nature of some stories are needs that make certain forms of storytelling inadequate – the use of the third-person limited narrative to depict Alexander the Great, for instance.

This doesn’t make any one mode superior to the others, it’s just a reminder that narrative mode, as with all questions of style, should be chosen on the basis of what kind of characters and what kind of story a writer wishes to create; not on the basis of fashion or habit. Doing otherwise will simply lead to characters to whom the reader feels no connection, or, as is perhaps more common, characters who are not at all who they are supposed to be.

And what does it matter that they’ve changed? Well, changes in names and dates and deeds don’t matter a thing, but a change in nature does. When the nature of such stories and such characters is altered, the very reason for retelling them in the first place is lost. In changing – in modernising – something as minor as the narrative mode, we need to be careful we don’t change something fundamental, too.

Matt

An amusing observation on what it would be like if there was no punctuation…

Matt

As noted in my previous post, my friend and one-time (strictly speaking, two-time) colleague, Gav Thorpe, has recently started his own blog. He’s even put gone to the effort of writing an interesting post. The post in question is this one, and what particularly interested me was his discussion of the difficulties of writing a novel about what might loosely be termed ‘fabled’ characters.

In Gav’s case, this means Malekith, the Witch King of the Dark Elves in the mythology of the Warhammer World. Malekith is an invention of not more than about twenty years vintage, but given that the character is portrayed as an ancient figure from the pseudo-mythology of a tabletop wargame, I think it’s fair to say that many of the difficulties that apply to writing a novel about Malekith also apply to novels about Alexander the Great, King Arthur or Robin Hood.

There are a great many such novels; novels which attempt to chronicle the life of some great figure from history, or depict some great episode of our past, or further embellish some ancient legend or other. There are lots of these books, more are being released all the time. They seem to be quite popular. I’ll start off by saying that they’re almost universally cack.

I think this, principally, because they are cack. No, sorry, that’s not what I meant to say. My main objection to them is that for the most part they singularly fail to capture the ethos of their subject, or to tell the story in the manner such tales deserve. They take individuals like Achilles and Alexander the Great, whose names echo down the centuries, and churn out either the kind of melodrama that makes them look like characters in a particularly bad run of Eastenders, or the kind of bloated, completely witless action shite that makes them look like Steven Seagal characters. So many of these books just lack any of the pathos or profundity such stories and such characters simply demand.

This acute failure to produce worthwhile tellings of our oldest stories is, I think, peculiar to novels. I could have put it down to the fact that any fictionalised telling of history is doomed to failure, but I don’t think that’s true. In the modern age, cinema has succeeded admirably many times. Why do novels fail so badly so often to achieve the same? I don’t think it’s that the medium of the novel is inferior or inadequate, I think it’s more a case of how it’s used.

(My) Point of View…

In almost all modern novels (no matter how long ago the events depicted may have occurred) you have the viewpoint character. An equivalent does not exist in cinema. In cinema, we are seeing the film through nobody’s eyes but our own, and we know full well we are looking upon it as if through a window – we are seeing a scene of which we are not a part. This is different to the novel where, to at least some extent, the viewpoint character is the reader. Even if it’s not quite as literal as that, we are in fact relying exclusively on the viewpoint character to inform us and describe for us all that is proceeding in the story. That creates a very unique relationship between the reader and the viewpoint character, and it’s this which makes the use of established characters or historical figures in novels so problematic…

Before I go on, I should clarify that by viewpoint I do not mean point-of-view or perspective in the grammatical sense. Whether written using first-person or third-person perspective, a story has a viewpoint character.

I didn’t think it was a very good idea…

…is first-person.

Arthur didn’t think it was a very good idea…

…is third-person. Both are using Arthur as the viewpoint character. So, not perspective: viewpoint.

Not all novels have a viewpoint character, of course, but the overwhelming majority of those written and published today do (indeed, it’s now often considered ‘wrong’ not to have one). Few writers will undertake a novel without a clearly identified viewpoint character, and assuming this to be the case, the first question is, of course, who is the viewpoint character going to be?

The first option, of course, is using the principle subject themselves as the viewpoint character. When your principle subject is, say, Genghis Khan, this is, frankly, more than a little silly. An author is entitled to enter the minds of characters they have created, and to assume that they know them as well as they know themselves, but to say the same of a figure long-established in history (or, of course, in mythology or other works of fiction) is nonsense.

An actor in a film is able to give their rendition of an established character with a certain degree of impunity due to the simple fact that they are depicting that one character and that one alone, and to an extent sacrificing themselves to do so – not like a novelist, who is at the same time depicting all the other characters in the book as well. An actor in a film pretending to be King Arthur is a necessity of the medium; an author of a novel pretending to be King Arthur is just self-indulgence. Such self-indulgence does not for good writing make.

Novels that use an established character as the viewpoint character are actually relatively few (mercifully). The alternative is, of course, to have a viewpoint character external to the story’s principle subject. There are plenty of works of fiction in which a very well-known central (even titular) character’s story is told by a different viewpoint character: Dracula, for instance. Could you do this with an already established, titular character? Possibly, but I’m dubious.

In something like Dracula, the aim of the story is very different to that found in the kind of tie-in or historical fiction where the story’s central purpose is to chronicle an established character. The story is about who (and what) Dracula actually is. Discovering this through the eyes of another viewpoint character (actually several of them) is therefore perfectly sensible. The reader makes these discoveries along with the viewpoint characters.

The difficulty in doing the same thing with an established character is choosing the viewpoint character through whose eyes the reader will meet the fabled subject of the story itself. At first glance this might seem easy, and there are a number of obvious choices, all of which have probably been used – one of Alexander’s Companions, one of Caesar’s bodyguards, one of Xerxes’ palace eunuchs. Ostensibly, these provide characters sufficiently close to the subject to observe them in detail, but who are themselves sufficiently vague that fictions can be constructed around them. The question is, though, why are these characters in the book at all – other than the fluke of their being witness to some great legend or other, what makes them interesting enough to stand as characters in their own right?

In Dracula, this isn’t a problem – Mina Harker, Jonathan Stoker and Professor Abraham Van Helsing are all characters as significant to the work as Dracula himself, and are his equals in the sense that all were created specifically for it. Saying the same of a fictitious bodyguard invented to narrate Caesar’s tale is frankly ludicrous. He’s a nobody. Such a character just isn’t as important or as interesting in Caesar and it begs the question why the bodyguard’s story is being told at all. Some might try to correct this with a particularly involved and developed story for the viewpoint character himself, but then who is the story really about? Caesar or the bodyguard? A story about a Roman bodyguard is all well and good, but I’m talking specifically here about the kind of novels which set out to depict an established character, such as Caesar. This won’t be achieved in a book about a Roman bodyguard. In essence, a strong viewpoint character is in competition with, not complementary to, the telling of the principle subject’s story.

There is, of course, the option of using various different viewpoint characters throughout the novel (Dracula does this, in fact). This, I’d argue, simply presents the same problems as does using any external viewpoint character, with the same difficulties of each character’s own significance now faced many times over.

A Problem of Omniscience

Viewpoint characters, of the kind typical today, are, by and large, a feature of the limited form of narration. This form of narration is nearly universally preferred today.

Third-person limited, for instance, tells the story using only events and information which could be known to the viewpoint character (hence, it’s ‘limited’). First-person narratives are by their very nature almost exclusively of the limited kind* – they are told using only what is known to the ‘speaker’. Within both these narrative types, viewpoint characters sit well.

There is, however, a much lesser used style of narrative: the omniscient. This is a story told by an all-knowing narrator. It is characterised by the use of phrases such as

Unbeknownst to them all, there was a traitor in their midst…

or

Little did they know their conversation was being recorded…

which, by their very nature, could not feature in stories told from a limited perspective. Omniscient narration makes it almost impossible to identify a specific viewpoint character – who could that character be who knows so much? God is telling us stories? Well, okay, there’s a couple of books based around that idea, but in general, an omniscient narrator is an unidentified storyteller. He is specifically not one of the characters appearing in the book and hence, to all intents and purposes there is no viewpoint character.

Not many books nowadays use the omniscient style of narration, and that’s in large part due to its lack of viewpoint characters. Some people say that the use of viewpoint characters just suits modern tastes more than an all-knowing, nameless storyteller does, and that omniscient narration is prone to pomposity, not at all suited to a cynical age. Personally, I think it’s down to laziness. The use of phrases like:

…he’s lying, Gordon thought to himself…

or

Tony knew there couldn’t really be anything there to worry about…

…which can only appear in the limited style of narration, allow the author to make apparent important knowledge or sentiment which they have failed to subtly intimate or imply in the way that really good writing does.

Whatever the reason, omniscient narration is very rarely used these days. Historically, though, it was by far the most popular form of narration and is evident in everything from Homer’s Iliad to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. I do not pick these examples at random, of course. These are stories of characters already well-known by the time of their telling. Where faced with the same task – as are any seeking to write a novel about Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar or Robin Hood – we’d do well to take note and tell such stories as Homer and Malory told them: omnisciently. Play God, it’s better than pretending to be King Arthur. Legends about men such as Achilles weren’t written in third-person limited narrative the first time. If they had been, I doubt we’d have thought them worth telling continuously for the 3,000 years since. Why would we think it works telling them that way now? That’s a judgement on the stories of our time, of our day – that they’re best told in less than omniscient form – but it’s wilful arrogance to suggest tales whose nature (if not their fact) long predates us should be told the same way.

Limited Success

There’s a reason I foisted the example of Dracula into this post. It was so I could make it much longer. Suffer.

No, not really. Dracula is an archetypal literary figure as well known as Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar – and his tale has been retold as frequently and as badly as has either of theirs, too. More significantly, though, he is a character that would seem to draw influence from at least one genuine historical figure. No one really knows for certain to what extent Dracula was based upon Vlad Dracul, but it’s certainly fair to say there are obvious similarities, not least the name. Dracula, though, is set more than 400 years after Vlad Dracul’s death and has no actual cast-iron connection to the historical figure. It is, in short, a complete and unabashed fiction, yet one which, it would seem, allowed its author to indulge at least a little of his own historical fascination and to show off at least a little of what he knew.

That is the same motivation which I’ve always suspected drives people to fashion piss-arse retellings of the life of Alexander the Great, or whatever. Their own fascination with some particular aspect of the tale creates in them the feeling that ‘this story must be told’, and so they do. Badly. I’ve already argued that such stories can be improved by a change in the mode of storytelling, but in some cases, people will just really, really want to write in that oh-so-modern third-person limited kind of a way, while also wanting to indulge their own peculiar historical or mythological fascination, whatever it may be. Well, that’s fair enough, but in most cases when examined in detail, that fascination isn’t nearly so encompassing as an entire story or an entire life – it’s a fascination with one particular aspect within. It’s not a fascination with Achilles, say; it’s a fascination with fatal weakness.

Rather than indulging oneself with a complete (and completely unnecessary) retelling of the tale of Achilles in eighteen volumes, surely much better to take that first kernel of interest it and use it as inspiration for something else – something completely apart, something as suited to its author and its influence as it is to its audience. If you really want people to know where you got the idea from, if you really want to show off just how much you know or how cool it is, you can always name the titular character after whoever or whatever it was. With an ‘a’ on the end, of course.

Matt

*As an aside, omniscience can actually be used in first-person.

In my grandfather’s time, a son was born to Philip of Macedon…

for example, though in such cases the narrator’s importance to the story will be somewhat less than is normally the case when using first-person, and it will not seem classically ‘first-person’ (indeed, the reader may even forget that it is, and the perspective may even change – this is no bad thing stylistically).

I haven’t updated this blog in ages. And after promising to do so as well! Tut tut. How awful. Really, I will try harder.

In the meantime, my friend and one-time (strictly speaking, two-time) colleague Gav Thorpe has started a blog. That’s not what he calls it, but I’ll let his first post explain that. Visit Mechanical Hamster to read this and other posts – one of which I will be responding to very shortly on this very blog. Honest.

Matt

This month’s issue of Death Ray (issue 10) features my interview with Stephen Donaldson, as you may have noticed from the post below.

As is inevitably the case with these things, a few answers had to be trimmed a little and a few others had to be missed out altogether to fit the space available in the magazine, so there’s a few outtakes and a few extended highlights which I will be posting on this blog over the coming days. For now, however, you can read the full interview in Death Ray magazine, and below is a small excerpt from one of the questions we were forced to cut for reasons of space.

In the interview, Stephen talks about his decision not to write The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – a story he conceived at the same time as The Second Chronicles – immediately after completing the two earlier trilogies, because of his feeling that he needed first to improve as a writer. I asked Stephen if the stories he wrote in the meantime were specifically chosen to help him develop his abilities in certain ways, and here’s what he had to say:

“This question comes up most often in the form of: ‘Do you know what you’re going to write next? What are you gonna do after you’ve finished The Last Chronicles. The truth is I’ve no earthly idea, but I never had had an idea. I don’t try to answer that question until I’ve finished the story that’s right in front of me. Once it’s done then I say ‘oh, ok, now what will I write next?’. And the same has been true for the past twenty years. I haven’t searched for ideas that would help me prepare for Covenant, I’ve just searched for ideas that felt like they were so exciting it felt absolute necessary to write them.”

Read the interview in issue 10 of Death Ray (on sale now) and check back here for more outtakes soon.