Improving your narrative

Show don’t tell. You’ll have heard that phrase many times, so be sure you are acting upon it. Your story needs to engage the emotions. It’s no use simply saying that a character was feeling this way or that way; it’s no good saying they were feeling angry or feeling sad. It’s through the character’s actions, reactions, words and thoughts that you need to show them being angry or being sad – or any one of the many emotions people feel: misery, jealousy, grief, joy, sympathy, love, hate and so on.

There’s a fine line between showing and telling. You show what’s going on through the story narrative. It ends up as ‘telling’ when the narrative takes it a step too far; when the author chips in and blatantly tells the reader something they feel they need to know. It’s when you’re offering too much information.

If it’s that important, find some way of letting the characters impart this to the reader. The author should have the confidence in their characters to do so, and not feel the reader won’t understand unless they add their two-pennyworth. Words to watch out for that might indicate you’re about to tell, could include: because, for and as.

Use the senses

To bring a scene to life and allow the reader to experience the events in all their glory, write using all your senses  – taste, touch, smell, sound, sight – and not forgetting your sixth sense, that ability to just ‘know’ something.

Sight

Readers know what everyday objects look like, so pick out the unusual aspect or angle, or focus on something that has specific meaning to the character, perhaps something that brings back memories or affects their emotions in some way. To increase suspense, why not have normal everyday things suddenly appearing wrong. If you’ve seen the film ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’ you’ll remember the chilling effect those neatly stacked tins and folded towels created.

Little things associated with an unpleasant character can increase tension. Perhaps your villain smoked cigarettes, so the stub of one left on the heroine’s doorstep might heighten her fear. The sight of a footprint or a large paw print in the soft earth might add tension; or the sight of something just disappearing out of sight; or the glimpse of a shadow; or the glare of car headlights. Whatever you choose to mention in your narrative, let it be there for a reason.

Sound

Bring a scene to life by allowing your reader to hear the sounds that your character can hear. Think of the background noises whether your characters are in a factory, a supermarket, on a beach, in an aircraft or wherever. If there is a sound that is out of place in that situation, be sure to let the reader hear that. Let us hear the tone of someone’s voice when they speak and the way that is modulated depending who they are talking to.

When increasing tension, emotion and atmosphere, draw attention to sounds that may not have been noticed before. A quiet room can become even quieter if you can hear the ticking of a clock, or the soft popping of a gas fire, or the sound of their own breathing. You can heighten the suspense in a story by writing in the softest sounds – a whisper, a creak. The softest sounds are often the most effective.

Smell

We have all experienced how certain smells conjure up different memories and feelings. A certain smell can whisk you back decades.  Freshly baked bread, a particular perfume or aftershave, a fish and chip shop, a sea breeze, an oily garage, bacon and eggs cooking, lilies, roses, newly mown grass, freshly ground coffee. Use your sense of smell in your writing to bring a scene to life. And when you want to emphasise the mood even more strongly, focus your character’s attention on the smell of something specific and meaningful.

Taste

Your characters may taste lots of good and bad things throughout your story, but again use the ploy cleverly when you really want to arouse the emotions. Let them taste things other than food. How about the taste of their lover’s lips against theirs? Or taste rain on their tongue; or snowflakes or fog. At the other end of the scale, let them taste fear, let it be so tangible that they can taste it. Perhaps they are so sickened that they taste the bile burning in their throats. What if they are so wracked with misery that their favourite food tastes like wood shavings and sticks in their throat? As people know what certain things taste like, be selective in what you choose to write about – pick out the more unusual things to taste, or when things taste wrong for some reason.

Touch

This sense can portray so much. People in love want to touch each other constantly, to be close, holding hands, caressing, cuddling. Parents hug their children; people stroke their pets; strangers do not touch and if they do, there is embarrassment and apologies for invading the other person’s space. Acquaintances might shake hands. We touch and feel so many things, the silky fabric of a ball gown; the smooth surface of an expensive piece of furniture or ornament; we might touch a leather coat to feel its softness and suppleness. Let your reader feel your character’s world through the sensation of touch.       

                                                                                         

The sixth sense

Sense is all about awareness, of perception and recognition. That sixth sense is our extra sensory perception, which some people have more than others. It's a feeling of knowing something when really there's no evidence to support it. I'm a big believer in allowing my character to have that sixth sense – not in a constant mystical way, but just occasionally it can work wonders, when your character just senses that something is going to happen. Something bad was coming their way… Often it works a treat if you're aiming to send a shiver down the reader's spine.

Today’s Exercise:

Take your protagonist to a setting that’s new to them, narrate and describe through their emotions and senses, and really bring the scene to life.

Tomorrow:  When and how to use transitions and flashbacks.

Thank you Rob Tysall, Tysall's Photography for the image. This is of Coventry's ancient Charterhouse.

Creating atmosphere and mood

So, you have planned your story carefully, you know your characters so well they are practically your best friends, and it is all jogging along nicely. The thing is you don’t want your story to jog nicely along, you want it to bring tears to your reader’s eyes, or make them laugh out loud, or make them so involved they miss their bus stop, or read long into the night even though they know they will struggle to get up in the morning.

To keep the reader gripped and hanging on to your every word, you need to bring in changes to the pace and the atmosphere of your story.  Avoid keeping it on one straight level, let moods darken; let the atmosphere become more tense; let heartbeats quicken; bring the reader in even closer to what’s happening to your character.

Before you can do this, you need to create a character who the reader cares about. And the way you get a reader to care, is to let the reader in on your character, let the reader understand what’s going on in that character’s mind – reveal their inner worries and concerns; show that they are human by the things they do, say, think and feel. Strive to make the reader identify with them in some way.

Once you’ve hooked the reader in that way, when things become more difficult, or the mood darkens, then the reader will feel the tension and keep turning those pages.

Changing the atmosphere is down to your planning – you may have decided earlier that at a particular point in your story, something dramatic will happen; or that particular scene might just creep up on you unawares as you write. Whichever way it happens, when you have a scene that requires some change in atmosphere or mood, then work your magic on it to make it really effective.

I’m a firm believer in the calm before the storm. If the scene just before the dramatic moment is a complete opposite, then the contrast of calm/frantic, relaxed/tense, works really well. Then, once you get into the scene where tension rises, you keep on going, adding layer after layer of drama as the character’s situation becomes more and more precarious.

So, these layers, what exactly do they comprise of?

• Make the character’s senses heighten. Let them become more aware of things around them, smells, sounds, tastes, things they see are now more threatening.

• It’s more effective to show all this through the character’s perspective, rather than you simply narrating what’s going on around the character.

• Draw the reader closer so they experience everything that the character experiences.

• Tighten those sentences.

• Deliberately repeat a word to empathise a point.

• Physical changes to surroundings e.g. weather, light/dark, silence/noise, movement/stillness etc.

• Dialogue. What your character(s) say and how they say it.

Let your characters talk to each other

As you know, characters need to communicate with each other. Tension, conflict, anger, hatred, love, can all develop through characters talking to one another. Characters can reveal they are afraid or anxious or show the drama rising through their speech and what they say. Staccato dialogue shows their breathlessness. Maybe they don’t have time to speak at length, even the narration should come across in that same short sharp manner. Dialogue that is interrupted, or the speaker stops abruptly fearing they have said too much can all help to increase the tension; the occasional ellipsis can work wonders, if used sparingly.

Here’s a few examples of showing mood change through dialogue:

“Another coffee, dear?”

“Don't mind if...” Jane stopped in mid-sentence. Her nose wrinkled. “What's that smell?”

Another example:

“Pete, if this is your idea of a joke. If you’ve set me up...”

He laughed. “Course I haven’t...”

His voice trailed away.

“What?” Sue demanded. “What? Speak to me. You’re scaring me now.”

In a voice no more than a whisper he said, “What do you think that is, standing over there?”

Even the way one character addresses another can indicate the change in mood. Imagine if Mary normally called her husband, Joe. What kind of mood do these alternatives suggest?

“Joseph, I’m talking to you!”

“Oh, Joey… have you got a moment?”

Today’s Exercise:

Your protagonist is walking across the clifftop with someone their care about and all is going to plan. Using dialogue and narrative, write a scene to reflect what they are doing, and then bring in some conflict. Something happens to totally change the mood and atmosphere.

Tomorrow: Improving your narrative.

Thank you Rob Tysall, Tysall's Photography for the image. This was taken from our trip to France to write about Champagne.

Writing the narrative

The narrative is the voice through which you tell your story. Narrative is what leads the reader smoothly through the story with all its ups and downs, high and low spots, emotions and drama. The narrative is what tells the reader what is going on. For example, it lets the reader know that a Highland warrior is marching down the valley, kilt swinging, his beret tilted to one side. The narrative is what tells the reader that thunderous black clouds are rolling in over the rooftops and that the wind is whipping the leaves into a frenzy.

Your story is a balance of narrative and dialogue. However, there is no set formula to see if you are getting the balance right, this all comes down to your ability to write a story – and that comes with practice.

You might start with narrative, setting the scene and drawing the reader into this new world. Or you might start with dialogue and then narrate the next few paragraphs to define who and where your characters are and what is going on. Narrative, like dialogue, advances your story. Narration works hand in hand with viewpoint, so that the writer can merge a descriptive passage smoothly into the key character’s thoughts and actions.

The setting for your story is obviously very important. And the settings will change from scene to scene. The narrative voice will portray these settings, letting the reader in on this world, which so far is a product of your imagination. Your narration as you tell the story must engage and interest the reader. It must describe scenes and characters and stir the emotions of the reader.

Through narrative you set the scene, you describe what is going on, and you move the story forward. You show the reader what you can see in your mind. You have to paint the picture and open up this imaginary world where these imaginary people are battling with the many obstacles littering their path. But be careful not to sit back in your typist’s chair as you, the author, describe this imaginary scene through your eyes. Stick closely to your viewpoint character and let the narrative go hand in hand with their emotions.

Your own style of writing narrative will reveal itself the more you write. It is down to you to polish that style until you create scenes which are vivid, yet not too flowery. Too much and you will be writing ‘purple passages’ which are gushing with sentiment. Too little and your story could be dull.

There is a very fine line however in the narration of the story and the author talking – giving the reader that extra bit of information that suddenly jars them from the world of make believe and allows them to hear the author’s voice. You as author, should stay well hidden – have faith and trust in your characters. If the author goes beyond the narration and pops in their own thoughts, opinions, or additional information, it instantly jolts the reader from this fictional world and reminds them that the author is still there, pulling the strings. The reader does not want that. This story is between them and the characters, the author must remain out of sight.

Find your narrative voice and let that voice speak throughout the story, linking the passages of dialogue, keeping the whole thing flowing smoothly. If you are tempted to add in some piece of random information for good measure, or to start preaching or stating an opinion, then hit the delete key and find some natural way for your characters to pass this information on, either through their actions, their thoughts or through their dialogue.

When writing description avoid writing the obvious. Pick on the most poignant aspect of a person, place or thing. Tell the reader something they didn’t know. Find your own unique ways of showing and describing. Don’t let descriptions slow the story down.

You might want to get across what your hero or heroine looks like. You may have spent hours researching the outfits they are wearing. But to write paragraphs of description can have the reader impatient to know what these two characters are actually going to say to one another. So, blend your descriptions with movement of the characters so the story is continually moving forward, and at the same time supplying the reader with all the necessary imagery in their mind’s eye.

Location

Be imaginative when setting the scene. Avoid the obvious or find something different or unusual about a normal setting. There’s no point in wasting words to describe something everyone knows about. Pick out an element that makes it different and describe that instead.

 Look for contrasts to the ‘norm’ for the locations in your stories. For example, the setting for a ghost story might well be in a ramshackle old house in the middle of nowhere, but it could be equally as atmospheric if the ghost haunts somewhere as ordinary as an office, a library, a hospital ward, a school sports hall.

Why not make your location in acute contrast to the emotional theme, for example love blossoming amidst the hostilities of a war or a riot; or murder at a joyful family celebration.

As you narrate and describe a place, remember it’s not just what can be seen, but the sounds and smells of that place too. Keep your viewpoint character close as you describe a setting. Wherever possible, let it be how the character perceives it – and that will be governed by their mood at that moment.

Today’s Exercise:

Using just narrative write a paragraph or two of a particular setting when the weather is good and your protagonist is happy.

Then write the same setting when the weather is far from good and your protagonist is struggling to cope with the situation and their mood is far from good. Try and portray how their mood can affect the outlook on the same setting.  

Tomorrow: Looking at atmosphere and mood.

Thank you Rob Tysall, Tysall's Photography for the image, taken originally from our trip to Switzerland to write about Search and Rescue.