Many years ago, a writing instructor said that in order to write a story, you need to figure out who the story belongs to. He was talking about the narrator, the lens of the story. I thought it was good writing advice at the time.
Like many people, though, in recent years I’ve been having more and more conversations about community, and how maybe individualism is not all it’s cracked up to be. At the same time, the projects I’m working on in my day job as an engineer are so big and complex that even when I’m neck deep in the design and execution, the movements and the tiny details, I’m still caught off guard by the paths and decisions from other divisions of the company who are solving the problem from different angles. (For those of you who ask how engineering affects my writing, here you go.) Consequently, I found myself growing hungry for a type of story I don’t see very often in SFF.
Ever notice that many stories in the genre revolve around a single protagonist’s journey? So much so that every other character we meet is introduced through the context of how they overlap with the protagonist’s arc (i.e. happenchance traveling companion, bartender, antagonist, etc.) And the narrative lens is so fixed on the main protagonist that, no matter how compelling, driven, unique, or charismatic these side characters are, they will always remain a facet of another person’s story.
There are plenty of stories with multiple points of view, especially expansive, multibook epics. But with these stories, characters come and go, showing different aspects of the narrative as the plot requires. To me, it always feels like the characters are simply pieces of a puzzle, there to help show a picture bigger than themselves. What I’m looking for is something deeper. What I want is polyvocal stories—stories that don’t belong to one character, where every narrator plans on seeing it through to the end. In a polyvocal story, the central problem is approached and attacked differently, depending on character motivation. I want stories that create a sense of the story being bigger than any one person; but also, if any character leaves the story, there will be a hole in the telling, like a missing limb.
I fully admit, I’m incredibly guilty of writing stories that focus on a single character. That for all its flaws, I do love a good hero’s journey. But here’s the thing I can say from experience: part of the reason it’s a compelling approach as a writer is because it’s easy to tell a story with only one narrator. Especially in a short story.
Except, both engineering and writing have taught me that nothing is created alone. This essay, for example, is the result of several conversations with friends and their feedback. Solutions, too, do not come from a single source or one line of attack, especially the bigger and more complicated the problem is. Before my current day job, I definitely did not appreciate how difficult it is to grow crops at scale, especially indoors, and I absolutely couldn’t do that alone. And I’m not even doing something as dramatic as trying to save a broken kingdom.
So why do our stories not reflect this?
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In all fairness, I am only now learning how to tell polyvocal stories after over a decade of writing. Especially in shorter works of fiction. I’ve been experimenting with multiple narrators, as in my story “If We Make It Through This Alive” (Slate 1/29/22)*, but I don’t think I achieved what I’m looking for in this piece. The narration is just a little too tidy and the plot and structure too strong. I suspect the key to a polyvocal story, ironically, is to make each character that has a stake in the story their own unique chaos engine powered by their individual motivations. (I’m always surprised, in real life, how often decisions and paths we decide to explore are driven by ego, disguised as reason). Sarah Pinsker’s novel We Are Satellites (Berkley) does this well, where she shows the effects of a future brain implant which works for some characters, doesn’t for others, and leaves yet others out. It shows a piece of technology that is not, in fact, a problem for everyone, but where the choices of every point-of-view character and the way they interact with the technology affect the others.
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez (Del Rey) handles polyvoice differently, where the story is handed from character to character over the course of the novel. It does this so dexterously that the reader might not even notice that no one character is carrying the whole story, that every shift in time and situation throughout the novel feels imminent and vital. The trick is, all of Jimenez’s narrators are equally invested and important.
Equality is key. That’s something that the hero’s tale inherently misses. We need to start telling stories that move away from the idea of individualism to ones that encourage community. Because the more complex a problem, the more people needed to solve it.
Admittedly, I think it’s easier to tell polyvocal stories in novel form, and I’ve noticed that it’s much more common in the romance and literary genres.
But that’s not going to stop me from trying to pull it off in shorter SFF pieces.
The story I’m working on now is about three characters with very different backgrounds, prides, fears, and motivations, all trying to save their home. The story belongs to all of them, making it a magnitude more difficult to write. But it also adds so much more complexity and richness to the text, something that was absent from an earlier draft, when the story belonged only to one of these characters.
So maybe the question we should be asking is not, “whose story is this?” but, “who does this problem affect?” and, “which of these characters are going to influence the cause and effect of this story?”, giving the narrative all the complexity and shape it deserves.
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*https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/if-we-make-it-through-this-alive-greenblatt-short-story.html