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ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUES NarrativeMaking sure everything in a piece of writing is connected and possesses internal logic and flow is vital if you want to engage readers, argues James McCreet e sometimes say of the greatest authors that we’d read anything they wrote – even a shopping list. What makes them so good? It’s true that Terry Pratchett or Stephen King or Hilary Mantel approach their subjects with a unique sensibility and voice, but it’s more than that. The DNA of all good writing is narrative. Hold on, though . . . Isn’t narrative a very basic element? We know about it. How does it qualify as an ‘advanced’ technique? Let’s start with what it is. My dictionary says narrative is a story, or an account of a series of events in the order in which they occur. This is clearly inadequate and even wrong. We all know that stories don’t have to be told in order. Moreover, a narrative needn’t have a story, which is just one element of narrative. Narrative is intuitive connectivity: everything connecting to everything else seamlessly, flawlessly and invisibly. Narrative is the essence of what makes any text readable. Instructions have a narrative. Reports have a narrative. Product descriptions and letters have narratives. It sounds so simple but it’s difficult to grasp because the better it is, the more subtle and obvious it seems. We read right over it. Which is the point. Narrative in microcosm Advanced writers understand that narrative touches every part of their writing from the single sentence to the finished novel. It’s all about flow. Consider this sentence: ‘Broken only by the occasional creak of oak floorboards, silence saturated the hall, now experiencing its fifteenth decade of patchy maintenance.’ You can pick the meaning out of it, but the flow is halting and the focus is convoluted thanks to the number and position of clauses. All narrative begins with the question of what the reader needs to know followed by why they need to know it and how they should feel about it. So what is the reader’s focus here? The creaks? The not-quite-silence? The building’s age? The state of maintenance? Maybe you’re thinking it can be all of those things. Why not? But if every sentence in a paragraph and on the page has this level of convolution, the reader will soon tire of having to unpick what should be effortlessly obvious. How about, ‘The silence of the Victorian hall was broken only by oak floorboards creaking occasionally.’ I’d argue that any reader would sweep through that in an instant and receive the same information. Yes, it’s sometimes necessary to slow the prose or trip up the reader with artfully constructed clauses, but these are exceptions to the narrative rule, whose primary intention is to invisibly carry the reader forwards. Note how the second sentence uses Victorian as allusive shorthand. The exact age of the hall isn’t relevant. Narrative by page We assume that story is what keeps readers interested, but what about texts without a story? I’m a copywriter by trade, producing websites, articles, adverts, scripts and many other things. All need to be eminently readable to achieve their specific goals. Often, the target reader doesn’t even want to see them! In such cases, narrative provides the lure, the flow. A title must provoke a thought. The next sentence should expand or continue that thought. The next and the next must create compelling momentum until that thought slowly and intuitively transforms into the next. And so on. It sounds simple enough but it very rarely works outside the hands of a professional. It’s not only the sense and subject that creates momentum. It’s also sentence length, paragraph length, connections between paragraphs and internal references to other parts of the same piece. Cohesion must be flawless. Have you ever read an article and wondered at some point, ‘OK, but what about . . . ?’ and the writer addresses your question in the very next line? The writer put that question in your head. Narrative made you think it. Some novels – usually the literary ones – have very little story but remain (mostly) readable. How? We read novels from page to page. If the page holds our attention, we read the next. If three or four pages bore us, we may never finish the book – no matter how good 4 NOVEMBER 2024 www.writers-online.co.uk
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ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUES it gets later. One key to narrative is understanding that every page must do its work. For this reason, Raymond Chandler wrote his novels on A6 filing cards. Something had to happen on each card. It could be anything. Take Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer – a novel with no story. It’s readable because each page has something to hold the reader: a thought, a description, an anecdote, the continuation of something mentioned ten pages back. You may not be going anywhere, but you’re interested in where you are right now – on the page. This means that no piece of description should be too long or too short. No dialogue should be needlessly interrupted by the author. No irrelevant character should be given too much time. No paragraph should continue if breaking it will accelerate or clarify the meaning. Any digression must have its specific interest. You can expect a lot from your reader, but you can’t expect them to continue from page to page if every part is not connected to every other part with the same level of seamless engagement. The bigger picture It’s one thing to write an article or a letter. A 90,000word novel is a different beast. Narrative becomes very complex when you introduce storylines, characters, themes, timelines, locations and the rest. It’s a huge jigsaw puzzle. A common misconception is that novels simply flow from start to finish. Nope. The reader should be engaged with what’s happening on the present pages while thinking of what has passed and predicting/guessing what’s about to come. This doesn’t happen by accident. The author structures a novel to provide prompts for these things. A clue in chapter three is explained in chapter twelve. An event in chapter twenty-three has its roots in chapter four, six, eight etc. A set piece in chapter fifteen may have very little to do with the storyline but nevertheless explores the novel’s overall theme. Isn’t this something we already know? Apparently not. The primary reason for apprentice novels failing is that the narrative breaks down. Pace is lost. Characters fade out of relevance. Chapters pass without meaningful incident. Incidents are irrelevant to overall story. The story steps are inconsistently distributed throughout the word count. The book doesn’t get going quickly enough or reaches its climax too soon and then fizzles. All are narrative problems. Narrative is organic. Its parts should seem inseparable to the reader. The intuitive bit is that what happens has to happen. Some writers who ‘pants’ their novels (writing without a plan to see what happens) tend to write as readers rather than writers. Their narrative is partially blind. They can’t add elements in chapter five related to chapter twenty-five because they have no idea where the book is going. Invariably, such first drafts are unreadable. Pantsed novels can be fixed in successive drafts, but success requires a solid understanding of narrative. Making it organic is much more difficult when you have to piece everything together retroactively. It’s possible, certainly. But it’s a long and frustrating way to learn narrative. The best narrative is the one that considers the entire shape of the novel – the journey the reader is going to take. If you know in chapter one what’s going to happen in the final chapter (even in a loose sense) then everything you write will lead inevitably to it. Tacked-on endings are another common flaw in apprentice novels. The magic of narrative I said at the start that a master of narrative could make a shopping list readable. Someone once challenged me on this point and I took it as an exercise. Could we use these ideas to give a humble shopping list a narrative? Vladimir Nabokov did it with Lolita’s class list in the eponymous novel. Can you see a narrative here? Tomatoes Le uce Antiseptic gel Bread Cat food Bin bags (heavy duty) Bleach Boning knife Fish fingers Cheddar Bleach Spade Tickets Champagne It’s just a list of separate items but did you see a story emerging? Narrative introduces patterns, which cohere to create more patterns. Soon, you’re connecting things that might not even have a connection. Why cat food? Is the cheddar part of it? Narrative is not only what we see on the page – it’s the reader-response that the author has coded into the text: steering and suggesting, coaxing and teasing. Narrative is an equilibrium of statements and implicit questions. This particular shopper wants antiseptic gel. Why? What happened previously? Why? What happens next? Why? Whenever I’ve done this exercise with students, they’ve all been able to reconstruct a story from this shopping list and supply their own ideas of why. They’ve even included the items that are supposed to be random red herrings because that’s the power of narrative. It sucks everything into its holistic flow. www.writers-online.co.uk NOVEMBER 2024 5

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ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING TECHNIQUES

NarrativeMaking sure everything in a piece of writing is connected and possesses internal logic and flow is vital if you want to engage readers, argues James McCreet e sometimes say of the greatest authors that we’d read anything they wrote – even a shopping list. What makes them so good? It’s true that Terry Pratchett or

Stephen King or Hilary Mantel approach their subjects with a unique sensibility and voice, but it’s more than that. The DNA of all good writing is narrative. Hold on, though . . . Isn’t narrative a very basic element? We know about it. How does it qualify as an ‘advanced’ technique? Let’s start with what it is. My dictionary says narrative is a story, or an account of a series of events in the order in which they occur. This is clearly inadequate and even wrong. We all know that stories don’t have to be told in order. Moreover, a narrative needn’t have a story, which is just one element of narrative. Narrative is intuitive connectivity: everything connecting to everything else seamlessly, flawlessly and invisibly. Narrative is the essence of what makes any text readable. Instructions have a narrative. Reports have a narrative. Product descriptions and letters have narratives. It sounds so simple but it’s difficult to grasp because the better it is, the more subtle and obvious it seems. We read right over it. Which is the point. Narrative in microcosm Advanced writers understand that narrative touches every part of their writing from the single sentence to the finished novel. It’s all about flow. Consider this sentence: ‘Broken only by the occasional creak of oak floorboards, silence saturated the hall, now experiencing its fifteenth decade of patchy maintenance.’

You can pick the meaning out of it, but the flow is halting and the focus is convoluted thanks to the number and position of clauses. All narrative begins with the question of what the reader needs to know followed by why they need to know it and how they should feel about it. So what is the reader’s focus here? The creaks? The not-quite-silence? The building’s age? The state of maintenance?

Maybe you’re thinking it can be all of those things. Why not? But if every sentence in a paragraph and on the page has this level of convolution, the reader will soon tire of having to unpick what should be effortlessly obvious. How about, ‘The silence of the Victorian hall was broken only by oak floorboards creaking occasionally.’ I’d argue that any reader would sweep through that in an instant and receive the same information.

Yes, it’s sometimes necessary to slow the prose or trip up the reader with artfully constructed clauses, but these are exceptions to the narrative rule, whose primary intention is to invisibly carry the reader forwards. Note how the second sentence uses Victorian as allusive shorthand. The exact age of the hall isn’t relevant. Narrative by page We assume that story is what keeps readers interested, but what about texts without a story? I’m a copywriter by trade, producing websites, articles, adverts, scripts and many other things. All need to be eminently readable to achieve their specific goals. Often, the target reader doesn’t even want to see them!

In such cases, narrative provides the lure, the flow. A title must provoke a thought. The next sentence should expand or continue that thought. The next and the next must create compelling momentum until that thought slowly and intuitively transforms into the next. And so on. It sounds simple enough but it very rarely works outside the hands of a professional.

It’s not only the sense and subject that creates momentum. It’s also sentence length, paragraph length, connections between paragraphs and internal references to other parts of the same piece. Cohesion must be flawless. Have you ever read an article and wondered at some point, ‘OK, but what about . . . ?’ and the writer addresses your question in the very next line? The writer put that question in your head. Narrative made you think it.

Some novels – usually the literary ones – have very little story but remain (mostly) readable. How? We read novels from page to page. If the page holds our attention, we read the next. If three or four pages bore us, we may never finish the book – no matter how good

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NOVEMBER 2024

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