Who is telling your story?

Even in third-person writing, in both fiction and non-fiction, I believe there’s never a neutral narrator. The precise words always convey a stance, attitude, and vantage point. So we need to understand our narrator as thoroughly as any other character in the story. Here are some examples. The sentences are out of context, which I think makes them easier to parse.

That had many philosophical implications on whether disagreements can exist in paradise, but in reality, all of this bullshit only meant that the people with the Nice Houses were distracted enough that the fourth kid was killed easily, and without much fanfare.

This narrator is relaxed (a loose sentence), conversational, apparently unartful (I’m sure the author sweated over every sentence) but full of judgment: “paradise” juxtaposed with “bullshit” and “Nice Houses” (ironically capitalized). The sentence reads fast and would be flippant except for the underlying outrage expressed in the observation that the bullshit (an emotional word) caused a distraction that resulted in a child’s casual murder. This narrator is close to the reader, distant from events, and opinionated. [“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld Magazine.]

It seemed to be slipping out of his grasp — all that vital, magnificent, inexhaustible world which he had seen from the windows of his room, his first day on the world. It slipped out of his awkward, foreign hands, eluded him, and when he looked again he was holding something quite different, something he had not wanted at all, a kind of waste paper, wrappings, rubbish.

This narrator offers formal, self-possessed observations. The complex sentences and elevated vocabulary read slowly and evoke carefully contrasted images: a magnificent world turns into rubbish in awkward hands. This narrator is a bit distant from the reader but close to the protagonist, looking out of the window with him, then looking at his hands and sharing his sad befuddlement at a long, slow failure. This narrator is wise (shown by the cultivated writing), sympathizes with the protagonist, and willingly takes his side. [The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Chapter 5.]

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepared for the last war. They staked everything on decisive battle in the image of Hannibal, but even the ghost of Hannibal might have reminded Schlieffen that though Carthage won at Cannae, Rome won the war.

The narrator for this non-fiction book is erudite, capable of viewing events informed by the height two thousand years (we buy this author’s books to get a lively sweep of history). The reader is assumed to be well-versed enough to know who Hannibal was. The narrator thus offers comradery with the reader and shares opinions with confidence and style, in this case that the German military minds were brain-dead, and Hannibal’s fate foreshadows the outcome of the decisive battles. This narrator is incisive. [The Guns of August: The Outbreak of World War I by Barbara W. Tuchman, Chapter 2.]

His heart was hammering again with an aching terror as he hurtled upward and downward through the blind gangs of flak charging murderously into the sky at him, then sagging inertly.

The narrator is both reporting this wartime aerial battle and sharing the protagonist’s sensations and emotions, “hammering” heart and “aching terror” and flak rising “murderously.” The narrator’s sympathies are with the protagonist, up close and desperate. Notice the alliteration of words that start with “h” and the cadence like panting breath, and the implied helplessness of hurtling up and down to evade a blind opponent as we are made to experience events alongside the protagonist. This narrator has a dog in the fight. [Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Chapter 15.]

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Earlier this month I joined a Zoom meeting of Jack Knych’s Instagram Reading Group to discuss Semiosis. The hour-long discussion ranged from the choice of personalities for the plants to the origin of Stevland’s name to the Earth creature that gave origin to the Glassmakers. You can see it here or on YouTube.

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In February, I was a featured reader at the Deep Dish event at the Chicago science fiction convention Capricon 44. Deep Dish is a reading series organized by the Speculative Literature Foundation. You can watch my six-minute reading as well as the other participants here. I gave an abridged version of an essay “We Lost Control a Long Time Ago” that I wrote for the Asimov’s Magazine blog, From Earth to the Stars. You can read it here.

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Finally, enough about me. A NASA microgravity plant scientist describes his work in a five-minute video. Plants conquer space!