Sunday, August 2, 2015

'Scope' in Storytelling

Mary picked up the phone--it was her mum calling. But there wasn't any way she was going to come home from the restaurant. After a few minutes of talking, the Samsung was shaking in her hand. And when she hung up she was in tears. Mary didn't talk to her mum for a month after that. And it was three years before she forgave her.
 
This miniature story starts out by zooming in quite close on a character and examining her emotion in a bit of detail. But it only does so for the first four sentences. Notice that in the fifth and sixth sentences, the narration suddenly zooms right out and starts talking about much longer time periods, where immediately prior we were hearing about things that were happening 'in the moment'. But does the story actually make sense? Is it coherent enough for the audience to follow? Of course it is.
 
Some novice writers really struggle to use scope effectively as a tool. Suppose you spend a page following a character's actions quite closely as they are walking around their house. But then you reach a point where nothing relevant to the plot happens until either they get to some distant location, or to some distant point in future time. As an author it's common to feel like you have to write in a 'transition' that moves the narration smoothly to that point, otherwise it will feel 'too weird' if you take a sudden jump in scope.
 
But are your readers going to feel the same way?
 
If not, what's the problem? If you spend half a chapter following the activity of a character over a single day, then suddenly jump a month ahead, then continue narrating their actions over a new day, the reader can still follow this and appreciate that they are reading about the important/exciting events. All you need to do is retrospectively add remarks about anything of importance that happened during the gap, if in fact there was anything important that happened. Note that we actually do this naturally when sharing anecdotes in real life. There's nothing strange about describing your doctor's visit for five minutes, then spending the next five talking about the follow-up visit that happened the next week, and in between just saying "then, the next week..."
 
There's a similar concept to keep in mind when writing dialogue. Suppose you actually write out a page-long dialogue between Mary and her Mum. Then she gets off the phone and meets up with her cousin. In the plot, Mary needs to tell her cousin what she talked to her Mum about. Would you really copy/paste the previous page and show the audience that Mary is repeating everything verbatim? Or would you just write something like Mary told her cousin about the terrible phone call, and then just move on to the new resulting conversation between Mary and the cousin?
 
Sometimes it actually is better to tell instead of show, in writing.
 
But that's an easy one. What can be more difficult is deciding when to type dialogue out in the first place and when to describe dialogue. Consider:
 
1. Kurt said, 'that was the worst attempt at cooking a roast chicken I've even seen, Norma!'. Then he left the room.
2. Kurt took a moment to insult Norma's cooking before leaving the room.
 
Both tell a slightly different version of the story, but they both get the story moving. Deciding which way to go with communication is something that can take some practice. Maybe I'll go into this in more detail in a future blog post...
 
 
 
 

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