Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

Writing Meditations

Narrative Mode: #13 Beauty and the Beast

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I cannot say I saved the best for last, but I can say this is one of the most familiar of the narrative modes.  Everyone knows this story, but we love the ones we’re familiar with, so it is not one to ignore.  Beauty and the beast: a simple story of redemption, forgiveness and true love.  As familiar as it is, one cannot claim it is simple.  Look at the requirements.

  • A young beauty who gives without reserve and is appreciated by her parent but mistreated by others close to her.
  • A father who cannot fulfill the exterior needs of his children though he does supply that which none can live without: love
  • Difficulties which make the young beauty and her father falter and fear they may not survive economically, spiritually or physically if things go on.
  • Opportunity to gain what is needed either through outside pressure to agree to an unsatisfactory contract, one that involves the daughter as servant or companion to a person or creature recognized as dangerous, unrelenting, unforgiving and cruel or through being driven by need to apply for a position with those same characteristics.
  • Refusal and then acceptance when there is no other solution.  The young beauty must sacrifice her happiness to save her father.
  • She gets to know the monster who holds the power over her and her father’s chances for  survival.  And he gains understanding, even appreciation for her kindness, constant forgiveness and obvious personal strength.
  • He risks her denial of him as a worthwhile individual, while struggling for his own self-acceptance.  She guides him out of his imposed purgatory (self-projected or a judgement placed on him by another force).  He reveals the person he has been desiring to be: good, kind, worthy of love.
  • The other shoe drops: he is running out of time and she needs to return to a much greater obligation than being his companion.  
  • Another sacrifice: only this time it is his.  He must give up his chance for redemption to prove his love for her (unselfishly, and outside of her awareness) by releasing her from the agreement seemingly temporarily though he is aware that it is permanent if she leaves.
  • She leaves and realizes, perhaps too late, that he needs her for his own survival.
  • Acceptance, redemption, happiness.

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode: #12 Personal prose narrative

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When using this narrative style, it is important to understand the prose essay form first.  Once you have that clear, shifting it to a fiction story is fairly easy.  It is the first persona viewpoint taken to a new level. 

So first let’s examine the prose essay.

  • In this essay type, you write about several related topics and how they intersect in a highly internal and personal way.  So for example, you might write about your first car, focusing on facts, qualities and use of this vehicle.  
  • But wound among those facts and features will also be islands of personal experience and connection to what it means to have a first car. You would include both the moments that gave you great personal satisfaction as well as those moments that may have been frightening, the results of less than perfect driving or the imperfect reliability of a used vehicle.
  • These islands would draw the reader in to such a point that he or she might forget entirely what the original focus was, but that is the magic of the personal prose essay, for ultimately you must bring the reader back to the original line of examination: the carburetor or those new bucket seat covers.  And you must slide her out again into another personal moment.
  • In the end, the entire work should create an understanding, a journey of epiphany that the reader has taken with the writer. 

So how does this style work in fiction?  This is not a plot directed story, for it is bound up in the personal process of growth in the character.   The narrative voice must be strong, it must be willing or ultimately able to share its greatest fears and triumphs in the course of the life events the character reveals, and it must feel authentic.  Examples:  Heinlein did it with Podkayne of Mars, and Kathryn Stockett did it with The Help.

The personal prose narrative is more than first person.  It is a close writing that pulls the reader into a sort of Siamese twin connection with the speaker.  The reader doesn’t argue about how she would do things differently.  The reader understands every feature of it, the choices the character made, and sympathizes and laughs with her.  It is a very private way of writing where plot is less important than the scope of the experience shared.

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode: #11 Dream Vision

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The dream vision format can manage on just two characters:  the dreamer and the guide. This format has both an outside story (outside of the dream that is) and an inside story (which occurs inside the dream).  Seem familiar? This a variant of the frame narrative.

  • The dreamer starts out awake, though several authors who have used this have avoided the opening waking segment that is traditionally used. It is up to the writer to determine how long the dreamer is awake before he falls asleep and the means by which he falls asleep and therefore into his/her dream. Sleeping due to exhaustion, meditation, normal sleep pattern are common, and I suppose being knocked out would suffice as well.  The waking hours provide the laying of the outer story which is the difficulty that the awake dreamer is suffering. This can be the loss of a loved one (already quite famous in The Pearl by an unknown writer — the same believed to have written Sir Gawain and Green Knight).  This outer frame is useful because it supplies the drama needed to find the wake dreamer so unhappy that he seeks sleep to avoid it and finds his answer or solution in the dream to come.
  • Now we have the dreamer sleeping.  He finds himself in a landscape both familiar and unfamiliar (the nature of dreams, you know).  Soon in his wanderings, he comes across an individual (the guide) who challenges the dreamer to an examination of a philosophical nature.  Strangely, to the dreamer, this has nothing in common with the problem he is experiencing in the waking world.  But he gets drawn into the discussion.  In the various forms of this narrative mode, this can be provided by more than one individual: talking animals, plants, bright lights, etc.
  • It is common to the form to carry numerous motifs, repeating images and themes.  So this is a style of writing that calls for deep description, symbols and metaphors.
  • Over the time of the dream, the dreamer begins to gain an understanding of other issues of either greater or equal value.  He suffers a change, giving his support, emotional investment, and loyalty to this new ideal or understanding.  
  • When he awakens, what was once his greatest sorrow though unchanged or remedied is no longer his driving force.  He has found a new faith.  “The Dream of the Rood” follows the path of an unhappy man whose guide is the tree which later became the cross that Christ was crucified on.  It is a very short example of the form, but a very worthy one to examine.
  • Here’s the clincher:  the dream vision narrative is a poem and a very old format.  But no prose writer should let that stop him or her.  It has good bones and could be fleshed out in prose with some creativity and a strong muse.  

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode #10: Heinlein’s Three-stage character

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Though examining what Panshin coined as the Heinlein individual (see Heinlein in Dimension by Alexei Panshin) is largely a discussion of character development, the process of the development is a narrative mode that one can use to design a novel around.  So to start, I’ll list the features of this three-stage character of Heinlein’s.

  •  Young Innocent
  1. Stage one is the young but competent innocent. He doesn’t know his way around the situation he is in, but that is mere youth and inexperience.  He frequently is taken advantage of and abused before he gets angry enough to respond.  
  2. It is at that time that he meets his mentor, who is an elder who recognizes in this upstart a youthful version of himself.  So Young Innocent gains a mentor who is non-too-gentle in his teaching practices.  “Life is not patient, so why should I be?” is the philosophy.  And life isn’t patient, giving Young Innocent plenty of further knock and nicks which Mentor then trains him to respond to properly.  Young Innocent is known to ignore the early lessons but soon comes to appreciate the efforts of his taskmaster.
  3. Young innocent still has rather naive views, but he is learning and values Mentor’s guidance, even comes to depend, respect and love Mentor.
  • Grown up and sporting thick skin and questioning mind
  1. Stage 2 is the now experienced, ready-to-take-on-anything loner who has gotten over the loss of his mentor (everybody has to go sometime) though it nearly broke him when the loss was fresh.  But he is beyond that now, capable, quick in the moment, has the world by the string and is swinging it gaily while wrestling alligators and counting his loose change.  
  2. Most books end with this stage as the finished product.  Some let him grow old enough to find his own Young Innocent to foster.
  • The elder statesmen of the Heinlein Individual
  1. This is the quick-handed, quick-tempered elder we will see at the early part of the book as the mentor for Young Innocent.  
  2. He is highly knowledgeable, understands the society he lives in and how to manipulate it to fit his needs and has a world view that is highly cynical.  
  3. That world view alters when he finds the young innocent, an emotional connection he has managed to avoid for a long time.  But time is limited, and he needs entertainment for his remaining days, which have been rather charmed and therefore boring. 
  4. And so the circle is closed.

This now brings us to examples.  Heinlein’s Orphans in the Sky and Citizen of the Galaxy are good plots to examine.  But I am going to be quick about it. In Orphans Hugh Hoyland finds himself in the upper levels of a lost-in-space generation ship that has long ago also lost sight of its purpose, and he is now in the clutches of undesirables.  Hugh is our Young Innocent, and the main undesirable is Joe/Jim the soon to be Mentor for Hugh.  He teaches Hugh the truth behind the mysteries, in his very cynical way, and in time becomes attached to Hugh, which means he needs to stop playing king of the hill and nanny to Hugh and make change.  And the circle is closed (yup, don’t want to completely give away a good story).

As for Citizen, Thorby is Young Innocent, a slave boy that is purchased by a normally disinterested bystander who has been doing fine on his own for years, one Baslim the beggar.  On this new planet, Thorby has no protector, no experience and no value.  So Baslim provides these things, but at a cost: Thorby must accept training.  Baslim has now taken on not only the care and feeding of an innocent, but he no longer can just natter about with no concern about anyone but himself.  Then society gets itchy and …. the circle is closed.

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode #9: Shakespeare’s HAMLET as a narrative plot

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Following the Hamlet narrative brings a lot of tension and mystery to the piece.  The complex changes in the character make for a dramatic, dark plot line.

  • The main character (we’ll call him Fred) suffers the loss of someone important in his life and learns through unlikely or supernatural means that it was caused by someone close.  
  • Fred is conflicted by his loyalty to those close to him and the fact that he also blames them for the tragedy. This gives you plenty of room for contradictory qualities in the character because there is the constant question of madness.  
  • Fred’s desire for revenge, as well as making it public who is responsible, exacerbates his loss of control over his own life and injures others.  And he drops further into madness or perhaps it is all a ruse to flush out the perpetrator.
  • Anger and jealousy are driving forces. 
  • An innocent person suffers, and Fred is so involved in revenge, he considers the injury (mental anguish and later a possible suicide) just collateral damage, which supports the belief that he is going mad.
  • Death is an important feature: death of those important to Fred or who were the cause of the tragedy.  This could be modified to be death of a relationship, death of faith, or death of hope.  But destruction of Fred’s sense of right and fairness is essential.
  • With Hamlet, his efforts to get revenge ended in the death of his mother, his uncle (who killed his father), his girlfriend, her father and brother and Fred himself. 

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative mode: #8 The Christ Figure

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A traditional narrative plot is the Christ Figure.  It works well with stories which require a hero but follow the version where the hero does not survive the challenge he has to face.

  • There must be a social catastrophe in the making.  
  • Tension should lead up to it with the designated hero a known quantity: always reliable, always there to help others, and yet he will lack belief in himself though he always meets the demands that seem to feel likely to overwhelm him. That’s his role in life and he accepts it.
  • Alternate:  He can even be a recognized rogue who is thought of as less then worthy, but that is merely misunderstanding.  He has never met with a challenge that has caught him ethically or spiritually before. No one expects him to be of any use in the conflict that is building.  But something this time drags him in, inspires him.
  • In either case, now society needs someone to rise and meet the danger that is coming to the community. (This can be more personal: one character with a personal tragedy and one hero who doesn’t know he can make a difference.)
  • There needs to be subtle change and subtle challenge that will bring the hero into the bout of his life.  Whether he is the recognized do-gooder or the ne’er-do-well, he takes part in the effort to slow the arrival or stop it all together.  He even seems for the moment to have saved them all.
  • However, the challenge has greater complication than anticipated, greater danger.   Here is the greatest tension, for the hero must make a difficult decision.  Never has he had to give so much of himself, never had he expected to. But the hero chooses sacrifice to ensure that the community survives.
  • And survive it does, with the reciprocal challenge of being better than it was, worthy of his sacrifice.  The perfect hero is purer than imagined.  Or if the hero was the less-than-model citizen, then he is glorified, proving that everyone can rise to the finer self.

Tale of Two Cities by Dickens makes use of this narrative.  Sidney Carton, an excessive drinker, flawed to the extreme, faithless, presents himself as promised to be the saving grace for another human being should the need ever be called upon.  Neither his lifestyle nor his philosophy supports this promise.  But the condition he set forth does arrive, and he becomes a savior, giving his life so that another person, more worthy than himself, may live, and in the end, he gains worthiness and personal faith, and those he has sacrificed himself for reach the safe haven he hoped to give.

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.