On Multiple Narrators Speaking to One Another

and Listening

Only a little more on multi narrator novels, I promise.

But if nothing else, what I’ve written should have got across that writing one is a head-scrambling business. It involves constant decisions about inclusion and exclusion, about the most basic issues of Point of View.

Who will tell this bit best? Do I always go for the character at the centre of the action, or doesn’t that become a bit sweaty and blurry and reactive? Isn’t it better to vary between protagonist and eye-witness and someone far off who only hears distorted rumours?

What I’m going to look at next is, I’d say, the default form of multi narrator novels.

As well as the Abbey Road isolation booths, in which they’ve placed the four speakers, A, B, C and D, our imaginary record producer also has a talkback. This allows her to address each or all of the the speakers through their headphones. And so the producer can prompt the next thing that is said and recorded either by letting a speaker listen to what a previous speaker has said (perhaps about them), or they can summarise the general gist so far, or they can ask a specific question.

What did happen that evening you all went out to dinner together?

All of these approaches will be implicit in what eventually gets to the reader.

It is the efficiency of multi narrator novels, the fact that one speaker neatly picks up just where another left off, that reveals the presence of the invisible organising narrator.

Let’s say A describes their wedding to B, and mentions that they saw D looking at C in a peculiarly intense way when it got to the vows. Something was going on between them, but what?

The next or next-but-one chapter can visit with D, to get their explanation. Neat as that. And even though each speaker is apparently just saying what they want to say, they are, in fact — because the invisible organising narrator makes it so — assisting one another, and augmenting what has gone before.

They are collectively telling a good, shapely story.

Some novelists will have one narrator immediately correct another. The witting irony will be obvious. Snark and sass will be among the pleasures of the novel. The reader won’t be credited with anything more than short-term memory.

Other novelists will play a very long game. It may be part of the plot of the novel that we don’t find out the truth of a particular early incident until the very final pages. The ironies of the speakers, even if witting, will be far more subtle — because the reader is being trusted to remember a hint from two hundred pages earlier.

Is it possible to do this instinctively?

Possible, yes, but for every writer who flies many will come a cropper.

If a beginning writer isn’t aware that it’s the invisible organising narrator who is present, on top of A, B, C and D, and who is crafting all of this — if they believe that their characters are disembodied voices speaking into a vacuum, and that the vacuum has no basic laws — then they risk writing opportunistically.

This short term gag will be really good here. But I want that subtle long range stuff as well. We’ll learn about the wedding, and then I’ll leave the honeymoon a complete mystery.

The reader of such a novel is almost certain to become frustrated. They began by hoping to take pleasure in a certain limited range of irony, because that’s their taste at the moment. They wanted information to come at them in a controlled, measured way. But they find what they’re reading is literally all over the place.

This is why I ended up telling my Creative Writing students not to write a multi narrator novel straight off.

They are so much more technically challenging than a first person past tense narrative.

Even if you find (as I do) that my metaphor of the recording session breaks down, and doesn’t always fit with how writing long-form fiction works, I hope it has helped give you a picture of something like what’s going on in all those jumps between speakers, all those producers’ decisions.

Here’s a hack —

You can simplify everything by saying, Enough of all this! I’ve made up my mind. I am the invisible organising narrator — I am deciding who speaks next — I am following my own ironic pleasures.

This decision can make technical questions become questions of taste. Your own previous reading of novels similar to the one you are writing can guide you. As, of course, can going back and carefully analysing how they do what they do.

How did the writer of your favourite multi narrator novel run their recording session?