On How to Manage Different Narrators

Like a Record Producer

That invisible organising narrator — what or who are they?

I’ve mentioned them in passing, but didn’t really explain. Now I’ll do my best.

This is an explanation I have worked on for a while. I’m still working on it, so any suggestions for improvements are welcome.

I’ll start with a statement

The biggest danger a beginning writer faces, in putting together a novel with multiple narrators, is having no real idea of their book’s ultimate point of view (POV).

In other words, it should somewhere have an invisible organising narrator, but the writer has never named this to themselves, or got a sense of what that narrator might do.

It’s more than possible — I’ll say now — to write a very good multi narrator novel instinctively, by ear, and not need to have turned this into a technical issue.

But things are much more likely to go well if the writer has put some conscious into their novel’s overall POV, and has made some decisions and commitments. Maybe even written down some rules.

The easiest way to bring your invisible organising narrator out of hiding is to ask yourself this question:

In my novel, who decides when one narrator stops speaking/thinking/writing and another starts?

You may answer, Well, obviously I do – me, the writer.

Or you may say, Well, they just sort it out between themselves.

Or you may admit, Well, I’ve never really thought about that. I suppose it just happens without me thinking about it.

It’s not immediately obvious how any of these answers work.

Meaning, it’s difficult to see how they can help you make difficult decisions to do with your novel’s form, pacing, tone and overall effect.

The ultimate operating model of the POV of multi-narrator novels can vary greatly.

That’s a very abstract way of putting it. Soon I will make it as concrete as I can.

In one model, the different narrators collaborate and explicitly or implicitly work with knowledge of what one another have already said, thought or written. They don’t double up on giving information the reader got elsewhere.

(To simplify, from now on I’m just going to use said/say for narrated/narrate in any form.)

In another model, the different narrators overlap (in terms of the time they are accounting for) and inevitably say things that contradict one another (because what would be the point of having them entirely agree?). The reader gets information more than once, and has to try and work their way towards ‘the truth’ of ‘what really happened’.

I hope you can already see how these two models differ, and how unwittingly doing them both within the same novel will undermine the reader’s trust.

Switching from collaboration to contradiction, as a basic model, changes fundamentally what kind of novel you’re writing, and how you’re giving the story to your readers.

Let’s look at a few more examples.

One multi-narrator novel might be a relay race — the narrators have 400 metres to run, from start to finish, and each narrator will individually sprint until they reach a certain point, having completed their allotted distance, and then pass on the baton, without dropping it. There will be an overall symmetry, with each narrator contributing roughly the distance of 100 metres.

Alternatively, as happens in the Winter Olympics Short Track Speed Skating event — the 5000 Metre Relay — each narrator may join or leave the relay race (there is no baton) any number of times to get to team to the finish line. They will come in when a previous narrator has gone as far as they can go, has started to lose pace and needs a break. The departing narrator may even give them a helpful push on the bum to start them off.

Another model, to switch entirely, may be more like quadruplets sitting on a sofa telling an old family story, recited many times, about how their parents got together. In this case, there isn’t a baton — there’s an unceasing flow of talk, and one quintuplet jumps in to add to or contradict what the previous one just said. They’re all essentially in agreement about what the story is — it’s about the difficulties overcome before the start of a happy marriage — but they may disagree about details.

This is where it might help to take apart what I mean by model, and to start being concrete about the invisible organising narrator.

Let’s imagine we are now in a recording studio. We’re in Studio Two, Abbey Road. We have chairs, microphones, noise-cancelling headphones and — most importantly — we have isolation booths where someone can speak without being heard even by someone sitting a metre away.

This is where we’re going to examine the different models of multi narrator novels.

Because, from now on, our invisible organising narrator has become visible as the record producer of this session.

She decides where all these elements go and how they are used.

Now, imagine we’re recording a story told not by quadruplets in basic agreement but by two couples who are divorcing – A and B, C and D.

At the start of the session, all four of them are sitting, lined up very awkwardly and angrily on a long and very sofa.

This is deliberate — the producer wants to get them riled up before they start speaking. She’s aiming to capture all their complexity and passion.

The two former couples have a lot to talk about. A had an affair with D, and after B and C found out about this, they started their own affair in revenge.

Each of them wants to get their side of the story across, because they all disagree on the most profound level about what really happened.

Of course, the producer knows that she can’t record them, as she did the quadruplets, by putting a single microphone in front of them and letting them decide who speaks. That will only end in shouting, and nothing useable will be recorded.

Nor will giving each of them a microphone work. Because the same thing will happen.

And so the producer needs to make a decision about how they are going to run this recording session.

Just as a novelist needs to make a decision about how to manage their multiple narrators.

For today, I’m going to leave this with you to think about.

You’re the producer. You want to get this complicated story, told by four different people, down on tape the best way you can. How are you going to achieve that?

As I’ve mentioned, you have the basic equipment of chairs, microphones, noise-cancelling headphones and isolation booths.

You can arrange A, B, C and D any way you like.

You also have the Control Room, up those stairs at the back, from which you can speak the four people collectively or individually.

How are you going to get the best, the worst, the juiciest, the saddest out of them?

Image of Studio 2 (I hope) from Sound on Sound.