Tag: story

Lost in the world of novel writing

I realised that it’s been a while since I posted on my personal blog. Things have been relatively quiet here. I haven’t entered many contests and there’s not been any new publications to update about. However, I did get the good news last week that I had received an honourable mention in the L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest for the second quarter of 2024. This is a well-known international contest, so being recognised for my work is a big confidence boost!

Otherwise, I have mostly been working away at completing my novel.

Tentatively titled “Battle Scars”, it’s the story of a woman named Rebecca Mason. She nearly died five years ago when a man named Rafe McKendrick brutally attacked her. His twin brother, Erik, saved her by turning her into a werewolf and Rafe was exiled from his pack. Rebecca struggles every day to reconcile her human life with the supernatural world. And then one day, Rafe comes back, and he’s threatening not just her but her new found pack and all of werewolf society. Does she have the strength to stand against the man who nearly killed her?

The novel is now written and one of my lovely fellow writers is reading it to give me feedback. There’s bound to still be plenty of editing to do but having a finished novel feels almost within reach!

On top of that, I’m also working on the sequel, which has a different point of view character. A gamble maybe, because I know people like having a single protagonist to follow, but it feels the right thing for the series I want to tell, so hopefully it works once it’s written! My aim for this book in terms of writing skills is to improve my efficiency, getting it written within a faster timescale by doing more planning at the beginning instead of just pantsing my way through it 🙈 If I can write faster, I’ll be able to get more books written in the long run so it’s definitely worth making myself more organised!

Look out for another Storytelling blog post, which I will try to get completed this week if I can pull my focus away from the novel writing 😊

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Let Me Tell You My Story: The First Person Narrative

For the last few posts I’ve been discussing the importance of the point of view that a story uses and how narrarive perspectives can impact the story. We’re now onto the last perspective that can be used in story telling, which is first person.

What is a First Person Narrative?

First person perspective is when the story is written with the narrator as the protagonist who has experienced or is experiencing the events of the narrative. It is an intimate perspective, designed to elicit the experience of the reader being told a first person account of a story, with access to the narrator’s thoughts and feelings throughout.

One mistake at the end of my life couldn’t erase all the times I had stood unmoved at the edge of the abyss and made snide remarks at its expense. They could kill me, but they couldn’t have me. I was my own.

Ghost Story – Jim Butcher

To imagine a book as a real life scenario, in first person narratives you are sitting down next to another person and that person is sharing a piece of their life story, including both the events and their own thoughts and feelings at the time.

Why use a first person perspective

The intimacy of connection

The most obvious advantage of this perspective over others is how closely connected you are with the narrator. This is a far more intimate perspective than even third person limited (which I discuss here) because the narrator has invited you in, they’re actively telling you their story and sharing their experiences. As a reader, you’re not just observing what happens: you’re being asked to share in it.

From a psychological perspective, humans are profoundly social species. Our brains are wired to  connect to others and experiencing that connection has been shown to activate brain areas associated with physical safety and warmth.

A first person narrative is an extreme in human connection. A person who is willing to share every little detail of their experience with you, right down to their personal thoughts and feelings. As a social animal, we’re likely to find this highly rewarding – provided we see something in the story that we’re interested in connecting with.

Detailed Character Development

First person narratives allow for a detailed exploration of the narrator’s character, in a way that no other perspective does.

There are several examples where the first person perspective exposes us to detailed elements of the narrator’s thinking style and personality that we wouldn’t really have access to otherwise.

One would be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which is narrated by an autistic teenager and gives unique insights into his perspective of the world around him.

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

The premise of the book stems in part from his own unique viewpoint – when he finds a dead dog, he sees it as a murder and sets out to investigate and find the killer.  Even the way in which the narrative is presented offers insight into the character that the reader might not otherwise have access to – such as the way that he describes his thoughts and experiences using diagrams.

Of course, the flip side of such a personal account is that it’s inherently biased and potentially unreliable. As far as our social brains are concerned, that’s part of the fun. We love puzzles and gain satisfaction from solving them. Solving social puzzles has the additional benefit of adding to our understanding of other people – so if we distrust an unreliable narrator, we feel rewarded to be proven right; or if they catch us out, we get the buzz from the shock of the surprise.

One well-known example of an unreliable narrator is Pi Patel from The Life of Pi, who recounts his fantastical story of surviving stranded at sea with a tiger named Richard Parker and then presents an alternative, more realistic but also more brutal, version of events and we as readers need to decide which we would prefer to be true.

I was giving up. I would have given up – if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said “I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine.

The Life of Pi – Yann Martel

Only in a first person narrative could a story be called into question to such a degree. Most other perspectives lead to an assumption that the story is being observed in some way by the reader, albeit with a potentially biased filter imposed by the narrator. Whereas in first person, we’re living in someone’s mind – and we all know how inaccurate our own perceptions can sometimes be!

Societal Issues at an Individual Level

Another powerful use of a first person narrative is to use the individual narrator as a  way to speak to a wider societal issue, either as a form of analysis or critique.

A wonderful example of this is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This book explores the lives of Kathy and her friends, who are clones created to be organ donors. In her world, they are seen as less than human. Kathy’s role is to care for and reduce the ‘agitation’ of fellow donors. She is never in a position where she can fight against her place in society but her own first person narrative does that for her – it humanises her and her friends, connecting the reader with them in a way that those in her world refuse to.

Or another example would be Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. An unnamed narrator, who feels disenfranchised from society and its definitions of manhood, turns to Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden starts a fight club and then a cult-like organisation, which engages in increasingly dangerous anti-consumerist attacks. At first, the narrator seems to be just another follower of Durden, until it emerges that he has dissociative identity disorder and he and Durden are the same person.

The first person perspective gives the reader a unique insight into the mind of the narrator, seeing the world as he convinces himself it is, rather than how it really is. We follow along with him, watching Durden grow increasingly out of control. Even once the narrator knows the truth, events have already moved beyond him, leaving him just as helpless in the face of Durden’s actions as he was in the face of the society that he struggled to fit in to.

What first person perspectives can’t do

By definition, this perspective is the story of one person. Everything that the reader sees has to have been seen by them. While events could be shared with them by other characters, if a lot of action happens away from the narrator then this can leave the reader feeling disconnected from the story.

This means that the narrative in a first person story is often narrower in focus than other perspectives. In third person limited, the camera might pick up on details that the protagonist misses. In third person omniscient the narrator can see anything that they need to for the sake of the story. Even second person can take on a more omniscient form when required.

One solution to this is to include multiple first person perspectives, like in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which relies heavily on both narrators being unreliable and obscuring the reality of the story. This can work well as a way to tell an immersive story from multiple angles, building a wider picture than with a single point of view. However, there is a risk of confusion for the reader in terms of who is speaking and when, which means that in many cases third person is often easier – allowing the narrative to follow the protagonists closely without any confusion around which character is the current focus.

More generally, some people can find a first person perspective to be too immersive and can be put off by the story as a result. They may not connect with the narrator or they may feel frustrated that they aren’t seeing aspects of the other characters’ stories. Therefore it has to be clear why those other aspects are less important to the themes of the story than the mind of the narrator itself, or people may struggle to join the narrator on their journey.

 

 About The Author

Caroline Ashley storytelling blog author

 Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She enjoys all forms of fantasy and is fascinated with the ways in which the fantastical can speak to our everyday lives. If Caroline had any spare time around work, writing and raising her two young children, she would spend it playing board games.

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Spillwords interview

Spillwords have published an interview with me that you are welcome to read on their website. They also published a shorter interview that I had completed before becoming author of the month, but which actually came out a week or so afterwards. I’m not really one for chatting much about myself, but I guess if I want to eventually sell my writing, part of that will involve sharing some of myself with my audience. Thank you to Spillwords for pushing me out of my comfort zone! 🙈

Globe Soup also announced the winners and finalists for their 2023 open contest at the beginning of the month. My story made it into a finalist place, which was amazing and another huge boost to my confidence as a writer, but also makes me feel a bit of a bridesmaid – when do I get to be the one who takes home the prize? 🤣 That said, the winners were very well written and their prizes well-deserved, so if you’re looking for something short to read, you can’t go wrong with checking them out 😊

In terms of my plan for the next few weeks, I should be posting my next Storytelling blog post within the week. Wish me luck!

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What is a story?

When I started thinking about this blog, I considered the ways in which a psychologist could contribute to our understanding of storytelling. My initial thought was that most topics would relate to characters and characterisation, after all, psychology is all about people, isn’t it? But then it occurred to me that the psychology of a reader may be just as important to a successful story as the story itself. A five year old would be unimpressed by a 100 000 word tome; an avid science fiction reader likely won’t find much to engage with in a chick lit novel.

I also realised that my first blog post started with the premise that everyone already understood what a story was. And perhaps we do. Perhaps we grow up so surrounded by stories that the concept doesn’t need to be explained. But consider the example of language fluency – it is possible to be fluent in English but to not understand the difference between past perfect and past continuous, and to not be able to put into words why it doesn’t sound right for someone to be wearing a “red, old, big coat”. You might know English, but you would perhaps struggle to teach its nuances to a class of English learners. So I thought I would share some thoughts about what stories are.

How do stories begin (and end)

Generally stories are a description of people and the events that happen to them, whether real or imaginary. Stories always have a purpose. Often they are told in order to share some understanding of the world we live in. Even stories that seem to have no strong purpose, light hearted and funny, tell us something about the storyteller or the characters within the story.

But none of this tells you anything really about what a story will look like. And the thing is, we do have expectations around the form that a story will take. Generally a reader (or listener) starts a story expecting it to contain a beginning, middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order, if the storyteller is feeling particularly avant garde.

We want to know who the main character is, what the setting is, and what problem the character is facing. And most of all, we want to know how they solve the problem. We want to be taken on a journey that gives the character resolution and teaches us something along the way.

When we start a story, if there’s no real conclusion, it generally feels like we’ve wasted our time. I’m sure many Netflix subscribers have grown used to that disappointment lately and started to turn away from them as a media source – because what’s the point if they never give you a completed story?

The importance of the ending

A story without an end is a story without meaning or purpose. How can we know what lesson we were supposed to take from a narrative if the writer doesn’t give us the ending? How can we better understand who the writer is if we don’t know how they wanted their story to go? Our lives are not as easily separated into discrete entities, but we expect the stories that we tell about these lives to be compartmentalised regardless. Because in doing so, our experiences become something that we can learn from, move on from, and then share as a warning to others who might follow the same path.  

The lack of ending, or lack of closure, is often a reason that people struggle after a negative life experience. We want there to be a reason. We want to know what the lesson is. We want to know how to avoid it happening again. We want our life to be a story, broken into neat chapters, each with its own purpose. The girl who’s father left her wants to be an independent woman who doesn’t need men to define her. The man who lost his job wants this to be an opportunity to build a new career. And if our lives can’t be as clearly delineated as that, the lives of our fictional protagonists should be.

Or, to think about it another way, perhaps we use these fictional narratives in order to work out how to compartmentalise the sections of our own lives. If the only narrative sense our lives really have is the one we make up in our own heads, then the more experience that we have with narratives, the better we will be at sustaining the one that defines us.

Story Archetypes

And that leads to another aspect of reader expectation – story archetypes. Literary theorist Christopher Booker posited seven story archetypes which appear across the history of human storytelling:

  • Rags to riches – the underdog gaining power or privilege temporarily, then finding a way to gain it back for good
  • The quest – a journey to obtain a certain outcome or object
  • Rebirth – the hero experiences an event that leads them to change their ways
  • Overcoming the monster – where the hero has to defeat the antagonist that threatens them
  • Comedy – a triumph over adverse circumstances, leading to a happy ending
  • Tragedy – the downfall of a hero who either has a character flaw or makes a mistake so large it leads to their undoing
  • Voyage and return – a journey to an unfamiliar land, where the hero learns something then comes home more knowledgeable than before

Not all stories fit neatly into these categories. Probably because trying to categorise the human experience of storytelling is akin to telling a story in itself.  We bring our own unique view points to our interpretation and may not come up with the same outcome. But, this theory highlights the important point that readers have expectations. If a hero goes on a quest, we expect to know how it ends – we would be pretty annoyed if he gave up halfway through and just went home. Unless of course we were reading a Rebirth story, where the protagonist sets off, determined to kill a monster, then realises killing isn’t for him. But if you don’t set the reader’s expectations towards the right archetype, they’re still going to be disappointed with how it plays out or may disengage from the story entirely.

Stories are conversations

This leads us to the most important part of what a story is. A story is a shared experience, one that means nothing without a reader or listener to appreciate it. We tell stories to teach lessons; we tell stories to warn of danger; we tell stories to share a piece of who we are with the people around us. But none of that means anything if our story isn’t entertaining enough for someone to listen to it in the first place.

A story, ultimately, is a conversation. It is an attempt by a writer to communicate something that they believe is important, to someone that they believe might benefit from what they have to say. Without a willing reader or listener, the story might as well be screamed into the void or tossed on a fire to burn. And in return, as a reader, we want to be exposed to the narratives we expect, that give us a sense of closure and help us to in some way make sense of our own journey through life. If we cannot in some way incorporate the meaning or structure of a story into our own experience, then what was the point of the story?

Of course, there are far more facets to storytelling than just this, that could be analysed at the micro and macro level. But none of those factors mean anything if you don’t have two people, the reader and the writer, willing to communicate with each other.

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If you’re interested in any previous Storytelling posts, you can find them here

Or why don’t you check out my young adult fantasy novel, George Square, or my published short fiction.

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Meet the author

Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She is a lover of fantasy in all forms and fascinated by the ways in which the fantasical can speak to our everyday lives.