Entertaining by Narrating

 

One major purpose of writing is to entertain - to bring insight, surprise, or delight to the reader. Language as art - literature - can inform and persuade, but its real purpose is to entertain, to bring enjoyment by a simulating the imagination. Literature, like informative and persuasive writing, stresses what is said. But literature also places great emphasis on how something is said. It demands that the writer find just the right words and express them in just the right order.

Much of literature - stories, plays, and poetry - is fiction. It includes facts about real people and actual experiences but really depends upon the writer’s unique imagination. Fiction also uses special devices, such as figurative language and dialogue. Some literature - like the future article - is nonfiction. Such literature demands that the writer present real-life situations in an interesting, entertaining way. Whether fiction or nonfiction, each literary form is unique. But all literary forms have the same basic goal - to entertain the reader through the artistic, creative use of language.

 

The Story

 

Writing a good story either in first and third person means describing a sequence of events in an interesting, lively way. A good story should consist of:

An interesting beginning to catch the reader’s attention and make him/her want to go on reading your story.

Good development in the main body. To develop your story you should use appropriate tenses, especially past ones, e. g. Past Simple to describe the main events, Past Continuous to set the scene, Past Perfect to talk about events which happened before the main events, etc.

A good ending, if possible an unexpected or unpredictable one, to surprise the reader and create a long-lasting impression of your peace. (Evans V. /Dooley J.43-44)

There were stories even before there was writing. And they were preserved orally and passed from one generation to the next. Even though there was fiction, they sprang from the experiences of the people who told them and listened to them. They reflected the people’s lives and values. Over the years many of the stories were lost.

The term function is applied to stories that tell about invented happening and people, not real ones. The problem with this term is that for many people it implies that such stories deal in the false and the untrue, that they have no connection with real life. But fiction, good fiction, while not a factual record of real life, is grounded in real life. Similarly, the stories you invent should grow out of your life - your experience, observations, the people and things you value. This is not to say that you can take an incident directly from life and record it without change. You have to let your imagination reshape your experiences. Change some details, add some detail, and subtract others. Rework your ideas until your story says exactly what you want it to say.

What is a story? Without attempting a formal definition we may say that a story is a coherent account of a significant emotional experience, or a series of related experiences organized into a perfect whole. The fiction writer re-creates human events, which might be external or mental, imagined or real, and are emotional experiences for the people involved in them. In more dramatic terms, a story is the imitation of an action - an action, complete in itself. By a complete action - at least in fiction - we do not necessarily mean the final answer to the emotional problem or the resolution of a conflict. But the action should be complete enough to reveal the underlying truth in the story, and what is important is this revelation. When we look upon fiction, as an art of revelations we may readily admit that the real story is the meaning of the event.

The disorder of life may be part of some supreme order and in a novel and short story, and in a play or poem too, it does become order: thus the writer overcomes in a measure the imperfections and limitations of mortality. The reader imaginatively enjoys these re-created events, which may have actually happened, and in this sense a story is a history, though not necessarily in its historic order. Or they might happen, and it is the pretended history, though not an improbable one, it should be convincing. Or the story may be a mixture of the two, the actual and the possible, or the probable, as it so often even in the most realistic fiction today. The perceptive writer searches for hidden meaning in human events and builds the stories around them. This freedom of imagination enjoyed by the writer is one of the characteristics of fiction - as distinguished from history - but in a good story imagination does no violence to reality and is based on reality. It is not reckless invention. (Surmelian 21)

From disorder to order (plot), from multiplicity to unity, from the particular to the general (theme), and back to the particular (through concrete correlates), from matter to form - this, briefly, seems to be the creative process in fiction. A good story represents a larger reality than itself, if it is, for instance, the struggle of a man and woman for happiness, or for sheer survival, the writer finds universal meaning in their struggle, and the moment he does that he has a story. The meaning of a story varies for each reader; it does not wholly lie in the story itself. Probably no work of fiction is exactly the same story for two readers. Each sees something different in it, what he himself is capable of seeing. These variations in reader response may be so great that a story becomes meaningless for one person, and highly significant for another. (Surmelian 1-4)

There are two ways of writing a story: scene and summary. Scene is the dramatic and summary the narrative method. Fiction is dramatic narration, neither wholly scene nor wholly summary, but scene-and-summary. If it were all scene, it would be a play, if all summary, more of a synopsis than a story.

 

The Setting

 

A story must happen somewhere - it must have a setting. Perhaps your idea for a story will start with an interesting place you know. What stories of interesting incidents could occur in such a place? Perhaps, instead, your story idea concerns some exciting action. In that case, you will have to supply a setting completely appropriate to and supportive of that action. In describing your setting, you should do so as quickly and vividly as you can. Long-winded place descriptions tend to clog the flow of a story and bore readers.

How you select the details will depend partly on your purpose. If you are trying to convey the feeling that a city apartment is a wonderful place to live, you might use such details as “a panoramic view of sleek gray skyscrapers,” “the cheerful laughter of children playing below,” “parsley and rosemary growing in small red pots in a sunny kitchen window." If the feeling you are trying to convey is that city apartments are unpleasant, you might use such negative details as “a view of dirty brick building," “children wailing and screaming in the next apartment,” “a small, cramped kitchen with a stained sink and a dripping faucet." Details of setting create a specific atmosphere in which the characters and their actions appear convincing and realistic. (Karls J. / Szmanski R.171-172)

The Plot

 

Something must happen in the story - a story must have a plot. But plot is more than a string of events. For example, a new article about a hotel fire deals with a string of events, but it has not plot because there is no conflict. To have a plot there must be conflict, problems that the characters must face and solve or fail to solve. Thus, the sequence of events making up the plot must be planned and arranged to present incidents that

introduce the conflict

build toward a climax - the point where a solution to the conflict is unavoidable

present the solution or resolution, of the conflict

There are many types of conflict you could use as plot starters. One type of conflict is the physical opposition of two characters - for example, the cowboy hero in a shoot-out with the villain. Does the hero win or lose? Why? On a more realistic level, you might have two students as finalists for a scholarship that only one could win. What happens?

Another type of conflict involves making an important decision. For example, a girl sees her best friend shoplifting - she must decide between loyalty and honesty. What does she do? Or a boy’s has been rejected by a group they both belong to, for a reason he consider unfair. He must decide if he should support his friend at the risk of also being rejected by the group.

Another kind of conflict involves solving a problem or overcoming a handicap. For example, a boy whose parents are very poor needs to buy new clothes for a job interview. Or a young athlete has been crippled in an accident and must learn how to live a meaningful life. Real life is full of conflicts that can form the bases for story plots. It provides writers with a never-ending supply of material. You might also get ideas for conflict from magazine and newspaper stories. But remember to keep the conflict - and the plot - reasonably close to your own experience. (Karls J. / Szmanski R.172-173)

The Scene

 

The scene is a specific act, a single event that occurs at a certain time and place and lasts as long as there is no charge of place and no break in the continuity of time. It is an incident acted out by the characters, a single episode or situation, vivid and immediate. The scene is the dramatic or plays element in fiction and a continuous of a present action while it lasts. The scene reproduces the movement of life, and life is action, motion. As a moving picture the scene is a closer imitation of what of what happens in life than a summary of it would be. The pictorial quality of a story and its authority depends partly on scene, and the reader’s participation is greater in the scene. Seeing is more realistic and convincing. It shows the action. The reader can share an emotional experience more readily. We live “scenically". Life itself is dramatic in method. (Surmelian 1-2)

Ernest Hemingway in “The Sun Also Rises" introduces Robert Cohn with a few paragraphs of summary, followed by a scene.

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him. He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife, and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter… We had several fines after the coffee, and I said I must be going. Cohn had been talking about the two of us going off somewhere on a weekend trip. He wanted to get out of town and get in a good walk. I suggested we fly to Strasbourg and walk up to Saint Audile, or somewhere or other in Alsace. “I know a girl in Strasbourg who can show us the town," I said. Somebody kicked me under the table. I thought it was accidental and went on: “She’s been there three years and knows everything there is to know about the town. She’s a swell girl". (Surmelian 25)

I was kicked again under the table and, looking, saw Frances, Robert’s lady, her chin lifting and her face hardening…

The scene reproduces realistically the very process of living, and each individual scene gives us a close-up of a particular act. It is a single specific moment in the plot, a single dramatic picture, and these single acts together give us the movement of the whole action. The modern tendency is to write the story as a series of single acts, scene by scene, and to give a dramatic or cinematographic imitation of life. The scene shows us the actors in action, but some narration is usually mixed up in it, and we hear the narrator’s voice also as he describes the gestures of the speakers and gives other stage directions which in a play would guide and inform the actors and not form part of the dialogue. In its pure form, with no stage directions, no commentary, the scene eliminates the narrator’s voice and is, as in an acted play, only character voice, and this heightens the illusion of reality. In the scene the burden of narration is shifted to the characters themselves and they do the work, they carry the ball.

In the scene the reader is taken through the process by which the result is obtained. The scene gives the story recentness or immediacy. We cannot narrate events that have not taken place, but the writer can give the impression that it is happening now, as though for the first time, and it is a unique event that means that you can start your story at a specified time, then go back in time and set the previous scene using the Past Perfect. Continue your story using normal past tenses, leading your readers up to the specified time, then go on to the end of your story. Using the flashback technique makes your story more exciting. (Surmelian 5-10)

The scene shouldn’t be cluttered with information, comment, biography, psychological analysis, description of the setting - the author introducing in third person. At its best it is somewhat stark, unfurnished. Ideally and by its nature the scene is action pure and simple, and should be freed of those elements in the story that do not quite belong to it, though necessary for the total picture. Much may be smuggled into a scene, especially if it is a long one, in small doses, a little there, and the reader will take it in with the action without pausing to distinguish the narrator’s voice from the character voices. There are few pure scenes in fiction, but the writer should clear the decks before he gets to the action and make it carry, if possible, the final punch. A good scene requires preparation and is the crest of the waves in the story line.

 

The Summary

 

Not everything can, or need, be shown in fiction. The writer can also tell a story. Summary needs a teller and this is admittedly a weakness, it does not have the seemingly spontaneous movement of the scene, it is not something acted out before the eyes of the reader, who is listening to somebody tell him about it. But summary has its rightful place in the structure of the story and can be extremely useful. Summary brings in the author, or his alter ego, his spokesman, unless it is summary by character, in which case it becomes dramatic. There is a change in voice from scene to summary and from summary to scene, and the reader unconsciously prefers a character voice, because it means more mimetic writing. When the writer speaks through his own voice the all-important element of mimesis is definitely less and the reader’s interest decreases. Hearing is substituted for seeing and the ear is weaker than the eye in the creation in mental images. Nevertheless, no matter how scenic, a story requires a narrator. Omniscience may be eliminated, but not the narrator’s voice. We still hear it.

Summary, unlike scene, does not individualize characters through their actions and speech. It throws the whole burden of narration on the shoulders of the author or his narrator. It gives us experience secondhand. Scene is self-explanatory, in summary the narrator explains. Summary tends to be abstract, discursive, with something fanciful and “literary" clinging to it, in contrast to the concrete specific act of the scene. Scene at its best has the impact of life. In it, the characters are on their own; in summary they lack this independence. In scene, the reader also is on his own, judging the action for himself and interpreting it in his own way, in summary, the reader is guided by the narrator, who speaks in his own voice, whether or not the reader is directly addressed. Something is happening in the scene, in summary it has already happened. (Surmelian 16-18)

Summary makes for distance. It does not give us a close-up of the action as it occurs, it is along short. We no longer have the words spoken by the characters to others or to themselves. Summary may reveal the characters, describe their actions and thoughts and feelings, but it is not a close re-creation as in the scene. It does not have the power of dramatic imitation, and the reader is deprived of the pleasure of viewing the event for himself. Summary lacks the vividness of the scene, the immediacy, the recentness of the action acted out by the actors.

Yet summary does many important things in a story. It links the scenes together and gives the story continuity and unity. If we consider scenes the main building blocks, summaries are the cement in creative construction. The summaries that link scenes also disconnect them. Summary means a break in the action, a lapse in the continuity of time, or a change of place, but if it does not happen too often, the story keeps moving despite, and because of, these breaks. An extended summary, as when the author inserts an essay or biography or a long description in the story, would break the continuity of the action. It may be done in a novel.

Conclusion

 

Having studied the recent achievements of the theory of narration, its point of types and functions we have come to the following conclusions.

Narration is an act of telling a story. It is not just telling a story, but it also telling a story of a sequence of real or fictional events - which seems to be more natural activity for most people than, say, giving directions or describing a scene. Narration is the kind of writing that answers the question, “What happened? ”

Some narratives are based on actual experience, some are entirely fictitious and others use a mixture of truth and fiction. Some narratives are meant to amuse, others inform or convey a message to readers.

The using techniques of narrative writing:

Select and refine the topic so that a main idea is stated clearly in the topic sentence. In narratives, the main idea will probably deal with conflict or emotional response to conflict.

Select appropriate, vivid supporting details. In narratives, the details will tell about time, place, actions, and people’s motives and reactions.

Organize the information so that readers will be able to understand and follow the story. In narratives, chronological arrangement is normal. Any shifts in time or place must be read clear to the reader.

There are two major functions of narrative writing: informing by narrating (fiction) and informing by entertaining (non-fiction). In the case of informing by narrating two types of narratives are singled out: personal narratives and objective narratives. The story is used as a main subtype, when applying informing by entertaining. The story consists of the setting, the plot, the scene and the summary.

Bibliography

 

1. Brown and others. English. Boston, 1990

2. Evans V. / Dooley J. Course Book Enterprise. Longman, 2001

3. Karls J. / Szmanski R. The Writer’s Handbook, Laidlaw Brothers, Publishers A Division of Doubleday and Company, Inc. USA, 1975

4. Kharatyan M. / Vardanyan L. Develop your writing skills. Yerevan, 2006

5. Soars S. / Headway L. Student’s Book, Advanced. Oxford, 1995

6. Surmelian L. Techniques of Fiction Writing Doubleday and Company, Inc. Garden City. New York, 1988.