On the Most Laborious Way of Writing a Multi Narrator Novel

In Toto

Let’s look at the most sensible, commonsensical way to run this fractious recording session — which is my way of thinking about the challenges of writing a multi narrator novel.

Because they are so angry and argumentative, your characters, A, B, C and D, have been separated and placed in isolation booths. These are completely soundproofed, and out of sight of one another.

This is an approach almost any novelist will take. Their narrators/characters may interact during scenes, either remembered or in the present moment. But they are not narrating in tandem. When we switch from one to another, with a chapter break, we get each of them unalloyed, uninterrupted.

And so the most basic way of running the recording session is politely to ask A, B, C and D — the divorcing couples — to tell their own individual version of events, from start to finish, taking as much time as they like, going into wonderful or awful detail if they feel like it.

The producer, because she wants to concentrate on the sound quality of each voice, and to spot bits that might need retaking, records each character/narrator separately, one after another.

The job of putting their story together in listenable form then becomes a massive task of post-production for her and her team.

This is how documentary producers work with archive materials. They spend days selecting which account of this or that crucial incident they are going to include.

And, of course, the same materials can be edited to make a very different overall impression.

With this recording set-up, all of the characters/narrators are speaking with unwitting irony — or at least, they are not speaking in the knowledge of what exactly another of their number has said. They are not reacting, correcting, satirising or pleading.

However, it’s entirely open to the record producer (i.e., the invisible organising narrator) to create — by careful chronological arrangement and juxtaposition — masses of delicious unwitting irony.

We all had a lovely time together that evening.

Can come just after.

That was when I decided I could no longer bear to be in the same room as him.

As I said, this would be a commonsensical way of going about the recording session — and it may, now and again, be how a novelist chooses to write a multi narrator novel. But it’s also kind of ludicrous, because it means you’re writing the same events four times, putting down tens of thousands of words you know you’re never going to use. This is the most laborious way of writing in this form.

And so almost all novelists will avoid spending days creating material that stands no chance of getting in the finished book.

There are always wrong decisions, wasted efforts, but these are unavoidable. Experienced novelists accept them as part of the job. They write a novel from one POV, realise that was wrong, change it; realise the change was wrong, change it back.

Here’s the important point — you need to make an early decision, when writing a multi narrator novel, whether you want to give the impression that every one of the narrators has told their version of the whole story, and it’s just been edited down for the reader’s convenience, or whether that editing, that efficiency, has been part of the process of putting the story into shape, and the narrators have only been asked to tell their most crucial moments.

Because this is where some beginning writers are able to write this kind of technically bewildering novel by ear. They go instinctively from narrator to narrator whenever they sense that shift will be best for keeping up the momentum of the overall narrative.

The simplest decision a writer of a novel with lots of characters, multi narrator or third person, can make is, I’m going to stick with whoever is closest to the centre of the action.

In other words, I might arrive at the ball with Cinderella, but when the handsome Prince starts to fall in love with her, I’ll switch over to him; and when the Ugly Sisters notice this, I will go to them, for a bit.

Most novels make an implicit promise to the reader —

I am telling you this story in the best way I know how.

To give the sense of a mass of unshared material, of versions of the narrative that might have been but weren’t given to the reader — that’s a very particular effect.

The reader gets the thrill of reading a ruthlessly edited version.

One of the most delightful paragraphs in Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a footnote from the editor who has assembled what we read as an epistolary novel (the not-at-all invisible organising narrator). It goes —

Mademoiselle de Volanges having a little time after changed her confidant, as will be seen in the following Letters, there will no more be given in this collection of those she continued to write to her friend in the convent.

In other words, I’ve saved you all the boring bits. Who wants to listen to this jejune stuff? Let’s get back to the wicked people.

That’s the effect of pretending to have run the recording session so every character got to spill their guts completely.

But equally thrilling can be what we’ll look at tomorrow, which is the recording session where A, B, C and D don’t just speak in unprompted isolation, but are being asked very pointed questions.

So how did you react to that?