There's nothing better than a good craft book, unless it's a good craft book you manage to get hold of second-hand. If it's a collection of discrete essays that you can take in piecemeal around all the everyday tasks that get in the way of important things like writing, reading and considering both, better yet.
I've been having a good time taking in Pullman's Daemon Voices, my copy of which fills all the above criteria. I must confess to having a certain amount of difficulty with some of Pullman's novels - I find he foregrounds his themes to the detriment of the story - but he has proven capable of breaking my heart on occasion, so I am more than willing to consider his advice.
There's one essay in there which has both intrigued and puzzled me, as I initially had trouble with seeing what its key concept was for and how it could help my writing. This concept is his idea of the narrative particle, the smallest indivisible element of a story. It reminded me immediately of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Tale, which breaks down Russian folk stories into immediately recognisable elements and narrative sequences, some of which look suspiciously as if they would slot into versions of the Hero's Journey. For instance, here's a structure for the beginning of a tale:
1. ABSENTATION: A member of the hero's community or family leaves the security of the home environment. This may be the hero themselves, or some other relation that the hero must later rescue.
2. INTERDICTION: A forbidding edict or command is passed upon the hero ('don't go there', 'don't do this'). The hero is warned against some action.
3. VIOLATION of INTERDICTION. The prior rule is violated. The villain enters the story via this event, although not necessarily confronting the hero.
Propp was immediately useful to me, as on reading his book I at once realised my current WIP contained several sequences which would have been entirely at home in one of these tales: hero ignores warning and as a result is ejected from the familiar; hero is tested and receives a reward. I perceived at that point that, in addition to all the things I knew my WIP was about, I was also borrowing from a vast old structure of very particular narrative forms, and by using them I was at some level appealing to my readers to treat my tale as a folk tale. I even have characters telling folk stories twice as part of the structure and background of the world I have used as my setting (and of course also as setup for later volumes, because each word should have at least two purposes when you are writing fiction, or it's slacking).
That WIP is currently under major revision, but the folk element is staying, and being coaxed to behave better now I can see it properly ("Propp"erly?).
But Pullman's narrative particle is smaller than Propp's. The example he gives is the act of pouring a liquid from one container to another. It is at first sight mystifyingly banal. It is a simple action, and appears to contain nothing you'd call story at all.
At this point I am going to jump to Ursula Le Guin disagreeing with E. M. Forster's idea of story. Bear with me. I hope it will make sense shortly. (Incidentally, despite no longer being with us, Ursula has an Instagram profile set up on her behalf, which posts regularly to remind us of useful entries in her excellent blog. Worth following).
Anyway, this is what she says:
E. M. Forster had a low opinion of story. He said story is 'The queen died and then the king died," while plot is "The queen died and then the queen died of grief." To him, story is just "this happened and then this happened and then this happened, " a succession without connection.
This succession without connection looks to me rather like a group of Pullman's narrative particles.
Le Guin goes on to say she herself sees story as
the essential trajectory of narrative: a coherent, onward movement, taking the reader from Here to There. Plot, to me, is variation or complication of the movement of story.
Plot, I think it fair to summarise, reading the rest of the blog, is for Ursula, the reason that a book is a book long rather than simply a page.
I have rather a high opinion of both Forster and Le Guin, and I suspect their major difference is over terminology rather than practice. But if, for fun, we equate Forster's idea of story (as represented by Le Guin, I must admit I have not sought out the original source) with Pullman's narrative particle, then at once we can see the role of the narrative particle is as a framework, a scaffolding that carries everything else. Forster might call this everything else 'plot' but as Pullman continues to write his essay it's clear that the apparently neutral event of pouring can quickly become caught up with other detailed meanings - to pour water over someone's head is a baptism, to pour water from a kettle to make tea is to be at home - and that crucially, recurring and re-echoing particles of this nature can make powerful narrative points and metaphors. Now we have an analytical, constructive use for the idea. Narrative particles are something we can examine and find in our work, as I found those folktale elements in my WIP courtesy of Propp. We can see how we are using them to carry multiple simultaneous meanings. For instance, if we describe a teacher in her garden filling the watering can, we understand that she's going to water the plants, without that being necessarily said. There may be extra metaphorical layers there about teaching, or perhaps if she's religious - or fiercely anti-religious - we might be back to the baptism again. There might be a reference to parenthood lurking. If she waters the plants again at the end of the story, in different circumstances, then there can be powerful narrative closure through that act.
Of course, you don't need to use the term 'narrative particle' to look at all this. Pullman was having a great time when he was writing that essay with a detailed metaphor of his own about the 'subatomic' structure of story. All you need to do is recognise an individual action in your work and see how it fits in the story both on a literal and metaphorical level. There's a deeply powerful in-between area where its meaning can reflect around the hall of mirrors making up the whole cultural context of that particular action, and never quite settle in one place (quantum meaning perhaps, to continue Pullman's physics analogy).
Such analysis is always going to be tied to your own viewpoint. People do have a lot in common in their understanding, especially with actions like pouring water, which have a basic relationship with the physical experience of the world. But the context of an action will vary with every person according to their other experiences, which brings me neatly to my own particular use of that very same narrative particle, pouring water. I must admit, seeing him seize on that very image that I'd used in one of my favourite bits of writing is what got me so focused on that essay of Pullman's in the first place.
'Truth is like water - though it does not change
It takes the shape of every different moment
In which it's poured, of every different mind,
And to our partial eyes it shifts and flows.'
Whether it's very helpful for our view of a story to take the shape of a series of narrative particle, I must admit I still have my doubts, but thinking about how actions in a story have multiple meanings on multiple levels and how you can build up those meanings through repetition and variation - that's definitely useful, whatever you call it.
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