Transcript
The following transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors in spelling and/or grammar. It is provided for assistance in note-taking and review.
Hello again, welcome to lesson two of Writing with the Bog Owl. We’re going to be talking about third person close narration in this lesson. I’m going to go through a quick review of the different kinds of narration. First person narration, third person omniscient narration, and third person limited narration. My most complete discussion of the styles of narration comes in the Writing Through the wardrobe course of this series. So if you want more narration, more discussion narration, you can go there. But I am going to do a quick review here. I’m borrowing some slides from the other lessons. First person narration, this is just where the narrator is a character in the story. So if you think about Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, she’s a first person narrator. was there, this is her story and now she’s going to tell it to you. This is a, you can only see what that first person narrator can see, you only know what she knows. Everything you hear and get in that story is filtered through that person’s attitudes, opinions, that sort of thing. So it’s almost like you get a free extra layer of storytelling because you’ve got the story itself and then you have this first person narrator’s opinions about how that story goes, right? So think about the ways in which Scout Finch’s limitations, her limited understanding of what’s going on around her shapes the way that story gets told, right? The example I like talking about is when she says, you know, “Our father was feeble, he almost 50 and he couldn’t do, he didn’t have a respectable job, he didn’t drive a dump truck, he didn’t, he wasn’t the sheriff, he just was a lawyer, you know. And so her understanding of her father’s standing in society is different from what normally people think about, you know, lawyers with respect to dump truck drivers as to which one is more, you know, respectable or more, you you know, connected to whatever.
Or think about Huck Finn, another first person narrator whose unique view of the things that are going on around him really shapes the way we experience that story.
That’s a first person narrator. That’s not what we have in The Bark of the Bog Owl. Third person omniscient narrator, this is what we saw in what you see in The Hobbit, what you see in all the Narnia books. We have this disembodied voice that narrates the story, and this voice is not a character in the story. It’s a person who knows everything, sees everything, has this godlike omniscience whereby they’re not limited by, you know, the omniscient also omnipresent. They can kind of jump around from different places, even simultaneously to tell the same, to tell different scenes from different, going on in different places.
can eavesdrop on any character’s thoughts and feelings and tell you directly what they’re up to. One of the hallmarks of third person omniscient narration is this narrator can tell you things about characters that the characters don’t know about themselves. A first person narrator by definition can’t tell you anything about himself that he doesn’t already know about himself. But a third person omniscient narrator can’t. Okay, so as I said, a third person omniscient narrator would be the narrator of the Narnia books, the narrator of the Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit.
Jane Austen tends to have third person omniscient narrators. It was a very common style of narration, maybe a little less common now than it used to be. Probably the most common kind of narration that is used these days, well, I don’t know I don’t know if it’s first person or third person limited, but third person limited narration is really more common these days than third person omniscient narration. And this is the idea, the narrator is a disembodied voice, so the narrator is not a character in the story. However, the narrator can only see and can only show us what some point of view character can see. In “The Bark of the Bog Owl,” we have a third person limited narrator. So a third person limited narrator and our point of view character is Aidan Arelson, the protagonist. So theoretically, we never see anything that Aidan didn’t see with his own eyes. So there’s, you know, when Aden is minding his own business in Civilizer world, the Feeches are doing whatever they’re doing off in the swamp, but we don’t know what they’re doing because Aden can’t see them. We only see what Aden sees. Now there is an exception to this in the Bark of the Bog Gal. In chapter two of the Bark of the Bog Gal, I just completely broke that, the rules for third-person limited narration and went off and told that whole chapter from another point of view besides Aidan’s. It’s the only place in the 70-whatever chapters of the Wilbur King trilogy that there was a chapter told in somebody else’s point of view. We’ll get to that, why I did that, later in this lesson. But that is the idea of third-person limited narration. So you only see what that one character can see. The narrator is not quite as, is not nearly as limited as a first person narrator, right? So we’re not getting, that narrator can step outside Aidan’s understanding of the world and kind of, while that narrator only shows us what Aidan can see, and by the way, if we know, if we know anything that Aidan wasn’t there to witness, we know about it because somebody is telling Aidan about it. Does that make sense? If it is, there are things, we do hear about things that have happened that Aidan wasn’t there for but it’s still filtered through another character kind of telling what happened. Alright? Another thing that’s interesting with third person limited narration, and I don’t do this a ton in The Barker and of the Boggall, but I do it a little bit. That is, the attitude of the point of view character is sort of like a planet with its own gravitational field where the third person limited narrator, because they see what this character can see, sometimes that character’s attitudes slip into the third person limited narration. Like I said, I don’t do this much. Lanier Conner does it all the time. A lot of times you’ll have this third person narrator who starts to make comments that you think that sounds more like the character talking than the narrator talking.
And so the third person limited narrator always has the freedom to eavesdrop on that one, that point of view character’s thoughts and tell us what that third person narrator, I’m I’m sorry, what that point of view character is thinking. But that third person limited narrator is not supposed to be looking at anybody else’s thoughts. So Dobro Turtlebane is a major character in the “Wilder King” trilogy, but we never get his thoughts directly. We never have the narrator telling us directly what Aiden– I’m sorry, what Dobro is thinking or feeling. We can only see what Aiden can see. And now, what Aidan can see is Dobro telling what he’s thinking sometimes, or Dobro behaving in certain ways where we can interpret what he’s thinking, but we don’t actually eavesdrop on anybody’s thoughts except Aidan’s. Now, you may go through this book and point out the places where I slipped up and did tell somebody else’s thoughts besides Aiden’s. But that’s a slip up. That’s an error. And we may run across a couple of places that I point out. But I may just let you find those for yourself. But you’re not supposed to. The whole idea of third-person limited narration is I am accepting the limitations of only telling things from one person’s point of view. And in doing that, I’m helping the reader feel that one character’s experience a little more fully. And that’s the advantage. You may ask, well, what’s the point in doing a limited third person narration if I get to be an omniscient narrator and tell whatever I want to tell?
Well, the advantage is that limitation, all right? So third person omniscient narration is nice because you get to sort of go all over the place and sort of hop from one person’s head to another if you want to. But when you do that, you lose the intimacy that we have by only seeing things from one person’s perspective. And so some of the reasons that we like first person narration, it feels a little more intimate. It feels more like the experience of the– the reader’s experience matches up with the point of view character’s experience in first person narration pretty nicely. Well, you get some of that in third person limited narration. And at the same time, you get some of the flexibility that the third-person omniscient narration gives you. So I like third-person limited narration a lot. I would say, if you’re not sure what point of view to write in for a story, start with third-person limited. You need to have a good reason to use first-person narration or third-person omniscient narration. And by the way, there are plenty of good reasons to do that. you know, don’t do it. I’m just saying if you don’t have a good reason to do either omniscient or first person narration, just start with third person limited. I find it a very flexible, a really useful point of view. And so all of the Wilbur King books are third person limited narration, but when it came time to write The Charlatan’s Boy, it felt really important to me to tell that as a first person story. So even though my My rule is by default go to third person limited narration. I say rule, it’s not much of a rule. But that’s kind of my, the way I think about it. Well, I had a really good reason to do first person narration in the “Charlatan’s Boy” and so I did not do third person limited. I went straight to the first person. that extra layer of story that you get from that first-person narrator was very helpful in that story, I think. Well, so third-person limited narration in The Bark of the Boggle, except for chapter 2, which we’re going to get to in just a minute. I also cheated a little bit and started this book with some first-person narration. And the trick I used to sneak that first-person narration in was a letter from Aidan to his king. that starts out, “My dearest King, you will be glad to know that I’m still available for any quest, adventure, or dangerous mission for which you might need a champion or knight errand.” Now, I want to talk a little bit about what I was doing, why I started out with these letters. There’s about four letters scattered throughout the book. About four chapters start with letters. I say four, maybe three, anyway. But the first chapter does start with this letter. And I–it was a little bit of having my cake and eating it too because I got to have–start at least on the first page with Aidan’s voice directly before we–but then I didn’t have to use his voice all the way through. But we got a little bit of Aidan’s voice right here at the beginning and in so doing I also was able to pack a whole lot of exposition in, in a very short amount of time.
And when I speak of exposition, I’m talking about explanation. So either providing, either explaining background information that the reader is going to need in order to get more out of the story. Sometimes exposition means explaining a theory or an idea that is important to the writer, the writer thinks the reader needs to understand. Storytelling is not about exposition. It’s not about giving information. It’s really about inviting the reader into an experience. So even in your exposition, even when you’re providing information to your reader that the reader needs, look for opportunities to, instead of just a narrator providing the information and saying, “Here, dear reader, here’s some things you need to know,” sometimes that’s what you end up having to do, by the way. But another way to do it is to find situations in which a character, in talking to another character reveals information that is important for the reader to know.
And that’s, I was sort of using that trick in these opening, in this opening letter. So my dearest King, you will be glad to learn that I’m still available for any quest, adventure, or dangerous mission for which you might need a champion or knight errant. I specialize in dragon slaying, but would be happy to fight pirates or invading barbarians if circumstances require. Well, okay, in those first couple of sentences, we don’t quite know how to take that information yet, do we? Because we don’t know what kind of story this is. A nice little trick that you might try yourself of actually delaying a little bit, letting your reader understand exactly what kind of world they’re in. So I like those two little sentences there, because we don’t yet know how literally to take this. Are we in some sort of fantasy world where there’s a king who actually does go looking for a knight’s errand? Is this a world where there actually are dragons to be slain? Or is this person writing this letter somebody who has a very vivid imagination? don’t know yet in the first two sentences. So, and again, is this when this person says, “I specialize in dragon slaying,” are they really that accomplished of an adventurer and knight-errant? Or is this or something else going on? We find out in the next sentence that probably this person is not an expert in dragon slaying. “I would even be willing to rescue a fair maiden imprisoned by evil relatives. That would not be my first choice since I am not of marrying age. Still, in peaceful and prosperous times like these, an adventurer takes whatever work he can find. We know that this person writing the letter is young, not marrying age yet, and that changes the way we read the whole letter, doesn’t it? Is this exposition? In one sense, we’ve got a little exposition here. We know, we understand some information about this letter writer, that he is young, that He has a pretty vivid imagination and that he longs for adventure.
One option for conveying that information is to have a narrator say, “Aidan Aronson was young and he had a big imagination and he longed for adventure.” And by the way, the narrator kind of does do that on the next page, but we’re also accomplishing it here through this letter. As always, I am at your service and eagerly await your reply. very sincerely, Aidan Arilson of Longleaf Manor. P.S. I have not yet received an answer to my last letter or to my fourteen letters before that. Mail service being what it is on the frontier, I assume your replies were lost. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve taken the liberty of writing again.” Alright, think about how much information is conveyed, especially in that little P.S. We know that this young person has written fifteen letters to the the king, has not heard back once. We know he lives on the frontier and so has doubtful mail service. And so we’re starting to get a little picture of what kind of world this is. I mean, we’re not getting a ton of information, but there’s some information conveyed here. This is exposition. But remember, exposition, that is delivery of information, while that is a goal of storytelling, the real goal is inviting the reader into an experience.
Now sometimes the reader needs some information in order to have the experience, but the experience is the most important thing. And so to the extent that you can find ways to convey the information in ways that still feel like an experience that the person might have in the real world, well that’s what you’re shooting for when it comes to exposition. Always warn writers, especially young writers, we tend to overestimate how much information the reader needs in order to enjoy a story. Inexperienced writers often give way too much information at the beginning. Here are some things you need to know. By the way, when you tell, when you’re at a party and you’re telling a funny story, we tend to do this too. We give a little too much information or more information than we would in a, than an experienced fiction teller would. say, “Hey, let me tell you a story that my cousin did.” Well, first you got to know some things about my cousin. And we have this habit in storytelling, in oral storytelling, of giving a lot of information, like 80% of information giving and then you finally get to the story for the last 20%.
That’s a habit that you have to break as a fiction writer. Remember, your reader doesn’t mind being a little confused at the beginning. It’s okay. If your reader doesn’t have all the information he or she needs, you just want to get them interested enough to go to the next paragraph or the next sentence really and the next sentence after that.
So I say all that to encourage you to cut down on the exposition. Look for ways to convey information naturally. And by the way, naturally, one thing that’s not natural is two characters talking to each other and giving each other information that they would know already, okay. When you are telling a story, you are putting a spell on somebody. You’re enchanting them. And whenever you have two characters exchanging information where it feels like these two characters aren’t really giving each other information, they’re giving information to the reader, well that’s the quickest way to disenchant your reader, to pull your reader out and to awaken them from the continuous dream that is your story.
So don’t overestimate how much information your reader needs to get the story. And also, the other question is, does your reader need this information immediately? Does your reader need it right at the beginning or can you kind of sprinkle that information throughout the story? Don’t be afraid to let your reader be a little confused. One thing I like about this little opening letter is that the reader can figure out quite a lot about Aidan and his situation. But the reader is having to do some of the work. The reader’s having to interpret what this person says. So there’s no narrator saying, poor Aidan. He wrote to the king 15 times. The king never wrote him back. What we get is a kid saying, hey, I wrote you 14 times, but I’m writing you one more time. That act, when you see a person doing that, you as a reader know what to do with that information. I don’t have to explain to you that here’s a kid who wants to be seen and he’s not being seen. I mean, when I put it that way, it sounds kind of– I don’t know what it sounds like. It doesn’t sound– it just sounds kind of– well, I don’t know what it sounds like. But you doing the work yourself of saying, oh, I kind of know what that must be like for that kid. You didn’t need that much exposition there. I mean, really, that’s not exposition. That’s just a kid talking. So as I said, I cheated a little bit with the first person– I got a little– I squeezed in a little first person narration by sticking that letter in there.
And I like the way that that letter lets Aidan introduce himself to us, even though Aidan’s not the narrator of the story. Now, what follows that letter is a page of show-enough exposition. The narrator just pulls all the way out of the scene and says, here’s some things you need to know about Aidan and his family. Besides being an avid letter writer, Aidan was a warrior and an adventurer. He lived to ride with King Darrow’s armies. At least that’s who he was on the inside. That is a narrator completely out of scene, giving you information. And then we get some information about his family. We get some information about Cornwall’s eastern frontier. And so that is just straight exposition. To tell you the truth, if I were to write this book again, 20 years after I wrote it the first time, I may cut down on some of that exposition.
I mean, I think maybe I’ve learned since then that you don’t need quite as much exposition as you might think. But I was a relatively inexperienced writer at the time. I’ve been writing another 20 years since then, and I’ve learned some things. And so while I like the way the little letter to the king lets us ascertain some information for ourselves, I wonder, I think if I did it again, I might, instead of another page of exposition, I might cut it down to about half a page if I had it to do over again.
And then if you’re in the paperback version, on page three, after that printer’s mark, we now go in scene for the first time. The first time Aidan heard the bark of the bog owl, he was tending sheep in the bottom pasture. And so at that point on page three, after the letter, after a page of just straight out of scene exposition, now we’re in scene. Now we are in the pasture with Aidan, seeing what Aidan sees. And that first page of exposition, let me just point out, you can’t really tell at that point if this is a third-person omniscient narrator or a third-person limited narrator. That kind of exposition sounds the same with either kind of narrator. But then after we go in scene, from that point on, it starts to become obvious that this is third-person limited narration. We’re going to see things from Aidan’s point of view from this point on. Let me just take a minute or two to talk about I’ve already mentioned that chapter two is the one chapter in the whole Wilder King trilogy, 70-something chapters, that is not told from Aidan’s point of view. Why did I do that? Well, one answer to the question is I wasn’t paying attention. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I was, I don’t I don’t think I thought too much about the point of view, to tell you the truth. And then in chapter 2, this is, chapter 2 is where we see Baird the truth speaker show up looking for Aidan, well, looking for the future Wilder King, who as we know was Aidan.
And so there’s that scene where he talks to the brothers and to Errol. And by definition, Aidan’s not there, right? That’s the whole point. Aidan’s off tending sheep. So I don’t think I was consciously saying, “Huh, I’m going to have to — if I want to tell this scene at all, I have to, you know, change my point of view.
” I don’t think I consciously was thinking that. Also, I’m not entirely sure that at this point I didn’t know whether I was going to have an omniscient narrator or a limited narrator. So I think I accidentally did it, to tell you the truth, and no editor pushed back on it for whatever reason. But let me also say that when I look back on that, I don’t think I would do it differently. Because when you break–so I totally broke the rule about a limited narrator. So there’s no–I just have to say that. It’s not that I somehow, there’s some technicality whereby I didn’t break the rule. I broke the rule. The question is, the rules aren’t really the rule. There’s no point of view police who’s going to fine you or put you in jail if you get it wrong. I would do it the same way again. I mean I thought about this quite a bit as I prepared for this lesson. What I realized is, yes, I would do it again because I think that scene is really important And there’s no way for Aiden to be present at a scene where the whole point is that Aiden’s not present, okay. And so when I broke that rule, I broke it as it turns out there was a good reason to. And so, you know, as you learn principles like, you know, how third person limited point of view works, I want you to understand those principles.
I want you to know that those are the rules, but I also want you to know that the rules, if you have a good reason to break the rule, break the rule.
That’s fine, okay? The rules are there because if you don’t have any reason to break them, follow the rules, okay? So you don’t want to accidentally go out of, you know, violate the rules of, once you’ve settled on a third-person limited point of view, You don’t want to just accidentally or casually write from another point of view. And as I said, I probably accidentally did it here, but I think it might have been some sort of narrative instinct that was correct.
Because if I had to do it over again, I would consciously break the rule instead of accidentally break the rule. So when you break the rule, when you break something like a rule of narrative, of narration. When you change over to somebody’s point of view when you’ve already committed to another point of view, that’s costing the reader something. The reader is having to– that jars the reader out of their, as I said, their sort of enchantment. And so if you’re going to do that to your reader, You better have a good reason to. So that’s my advice to you regarding rules like this. I want you to know the rules. I want you to follow the rules. But there are plenty of situations where it is a good idea to break the rules. I just want you to do it on purpose and not out of laziness or out of inattention or out of just sort of accidentally.
So know the rules, follow the rules, and once you understand those rules well enough, you can feel a little more comfortable in saying, “Yeah, I had a good reason for breaking the rule here.” And not just–and this is super important. Sometimes when I have a writing student breaking a rule, it turns out they’re breaking it for their own convenience, not to serve the reader. I slipped into passive voice in this sentence because it was just easier not to find a way to do this in active voice. Don’t do that. Don’t break the rules for your own convenience. Break the rules because it’s going to serve the reader. I have one more scene I want to talk about and that’s the very end, the last paragraph of chapter one. This is, remember you’ve got the scene where Aidan’s throwing the rocks up in the trees and the rocks aren’t coming back the right way, you know, and then this tree monster jumps out at him. Aidan managed to raise himself to a sitting position, but before he could get to his feet, the lower branches of the tree rustled again and a strange creature dropped to the ground only a few strides away.
Crouched on all fours, it appeared to be as big as Aidan himself. The creature was covered with large reptilian scales like an alligator’s. A long, thick ridged tail trailed behind. Its hard bony skull was covered with a dozen or more pyramid-shaped lumps.” I’ll just stop there since that’s where the screen stops. Remember, we talked about the idea that a third-person limited narrator sees what the point-of-view character sees. I want you to think in terms of, you know, literally, when we say point of view, think of it literally. It’s like what this person sees from their own eyeballs. So you can’t, they can’t see something that’s going on behind them, for instance. They can’t, they might be able to hear it, but they can’t see it. Think about in, at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird when Scout has that ham costume on, it really limits what she can see.
A point of view character has blinders on and can’t see much. Think in terms of literally what that person can see. But also, how does this kind of person, your point of view character, interpret what he or she sees? And so there’s some interpretation going on here. Our third person narrator– this is not a first person narrator. This is a third person narrator. But the third person narrator is a limited narrator. And therefore, that narrator’s way of interpreting kind of gets influenced by the way our point of view character interprets things. And I touched on this earlier in this lesson. It’s as if that point of view character has a gravitational pull that the narrator gets pulled into sometimes. And so in this case, this is a misleading paragraph Intentionally, right? So it’s misleading because it urges us to interpret the facts here the way that Aidan interprets the facts. And Aidan, his interpretation is wrong. So, “Crouch and all fours, it appeared to be as big as Aidan himself. The creature was covered with large reptilian scales like an alligator’s.” Well, that’s true, but the fact is this is not a creature with a scaly hide. It’s a boy wearing a tunic made out of an alligator hide. A long, thick ridged tail trailed behind? True, but it’s not his tail. So this is misleading, and it’s intentionally misleading. A hard bony skull was covered with a dozen or more pyramid-shaped lumps. Well, that’s not exactly true. It’s what it looks like to Aidan. And so in this moment, this sort of suspenseful moment, the narrator is really zooming in on Aidan’s point of view and letting the reader be confused in the same way that Aidan is confused. So it’s worth noting that a third person limited narrator isn’t always this closely affiliated with the point of view character’s point of view. Sometimes even a limited narrator can step back a little bit and give us a little perspective. But here that narrator doesn’t step back and give us perspective. narrator zooms in and lets us be confused in the way that Aidan is confused. So you as the writer always have that option to kind of sometimes give the reader a little more help in interpreting correctly and sometimes letting the reader be confused in the way that the character is confused.
And that’s a really important point. It’s not appropriate for your narrator to just confuse the reader in general. It’s certainly not okay for your narrator to confuse the reader accidentally. But what is okay and what is a lot of fun for the reader is when you let the reader be confused in the way that the character is confused, where the character’s limitations become the reader’s limitations. Now in other situations it’s kind of fun for the reader to understand things that the narrator doesn’t understand. So for instance, at the beginning of the chapter one, when we have Aidan writing the letter to the king, and he says, “I’d be glad to fight barbarians and pirates and that kind of stuff, but I’m too young to get married.” You as the reader go, “Huh.” You stand outside that, and you’re not really seeing things from his point of view. You’re kind of standing outside that and thinking, “This guy’s kind of a little confused and a little funny and a little bit overly imaginative. And then at the end where he says, “Maybe my 15 letters got lost,” you as the reader are going, “Yeah, I don’t think so, kid.” So sometimes you’re seeing things from that character’s perspective and sometimes you’re not. And there’s a lot of cool things you can do with that as a writer. That brings us to the end of lesson two. In lesson three, we’re going to talk about Baird, the goat man.