STORYCRAFT: POINT OF TELLING

Never Write Long Without One

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982) had its Point of Telling on, well, point.

ONE

Maybe it’s just my lack of ability or fiction’s innate trickiness, but it always surprises me how easy it is for key elements within my work to begin to fall into misalignment, to drift.  And how quietly, too – half the time I don’t even notice what’s happening, much less identify the problem.  The longer the work the greater the risk that these subtle incongruities will choke up your story engine like so much narrative carbon. 

I’ve already discussed in an earlier newsletter how I use questions of strategic audience to:

--organize what I explain and do not explain (i.e. establish a definitional economy)

--strengthen the fiction’s inner consistency

--add a touch of calor humano to the narration

And how, in my floundering Martian Novel, my failure to write to the correct audience helped muck up the works. 

TWO

So, I’d like to return to the issue of consistency. 

Consistency, congruity, and harmony are important qualities in literature.  Even works that are famously disjunctive and disharmonious (Ulysses, House of Leaves, Naked Lunch) nevertheless have a logic to their discordances, a deeper harmony, and that’s the kind of consistency one should seek to aim for – fiction should be consistent (faithful) to itself. 

The tricky part of course is that the congruities I’m talking about often function below-the-line, at narrative’s harder-to-grasp lower frequencies.  A reader/writer might not always understand the reason why some works hum with congruity and others do not, but they sure as hell know the difference intuitively, and many a book has been abandoned by a reader/writer due to narrative dissonances whose causes can elude even the wisest. 

And the longer the project, the more issues of congruity and consistency tend to arise. 

Beware Incongruity Cat. Still from The Matrix.

Some writers, of course, lock in and bang out books without nary a hiccup.  These prodigies of literature possess an innate compass that unerringly keeps their work awesomely assembled. 

If you’re one of these radiant anomalies: Ancestors bless you, and keep doing what you do best.

Alas, most of us ain’t so lucky, myself included.  We regular schmegulars got to work it to achieve similar results. 

That’s why I recommend structuring your audiences as a first line of defense for keeping the work consistent and congruous.

But another surefire (and woefully under-utilized) technique for battling narrative drift is Point of Telling: