Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass

Author:Donald Maass [Maass, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2002-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Sidekicks and Narrators

It is hard, now, to imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby told from the point of view of Gatsby. The narrator, Nick Carraway, is indelibly a part of the story, though in truth the tale could have been told without him. (Yes, it could have. Objective third-person narration would have gotten the job done.)

Still, Nick Carraway proved to be a highly effective device. How do you know when you would be better off with a narrator? Are not objective narration, first-person and close third-person point of view the nearly universal choices for novels today?

The option to use a narrator is probably a personal one. A story may feel more natural to you told in the first person, but for one reason or another, you may not want to adopt the main character’s point of view. (Perhaps you want to keep him mysterious, or possibly he is going to die in the course of the story.) Whatever your reasons, I am less concerned about the option itself than about the choice of your particular narrator.

Who is the best narrator for your story? It would seem to be the person who is closest to your protagonist and the one therefore who is in the best position to witness the story’s key action.

But there is more to it than logistics. What is the quality of that relationship? Does the narrator have rich and varied feelings about your hero? I hope so, and if so consider this: The best narrator may not be the hero’s best friend or even a peer. Sometimes it can be a person removed a few steps from the hero. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is thought of as a coming-of-age novel, but in reality it is the story of an adult, Atticus Finch, filtered through the innocent eyes of his daughter, Scout. Scout does not understand everything that is happening to her father, but the plot events have all the more power for that. Scout’s awakening to the realities of prejudice make the pain of growing up more poignant than it would be from an adult’s point of view.

What I am getting at here is a pairing not of narrator and protagonist, but of narrator and theme. Who is in a position to learn most from the events of the story? Who will be the most changed by them? That character may be your best choice.

If you have not yet made the choice of narrator, consider charting out your cast and thinking about who, besides the protagonist, will be transformed the most in the course of the story. (That could be the antagonist, though there are obvious problems in working through that point of view.)

If you are already working with a narrator and it is too late to change, then give some thought to ways in which your narrator might be more affected by the hero’s story. If the answers do not come, consider working instead from objective or close third-person point of view. You may not need your narrator.

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