Writing Narrative History
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What is Narrative?
- The Telling of a Story. Simple. You do it everyday. In fact,
this is one of those things on which you can try too hard. Don't make it
harder than it is.
- Narrative is not a chronicle. Sometimes budding historians
think of narrative history as a sequenced listing of things that happen.
Nope. That is a chronicle. That is different than narrative. Much more
boring. Narrative does not list events, it tells their story.
- Narratives are accounts. Giving accounts of events is standard
communicative behavior and narratives are nothing but accounts refined
and designed.
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How to write a narrative?
I highly recommend the following steps:
- Just sit down and put the story on paper. Let it flow. You give
accounts all the time. Don't worry about sophistication or scholarlyness.
Just tell the story.
- Go back over your notes and knowledge of the events. See what
you have left out that you think needs to be part of the story. Rewrite
your narrative to include these things. Notice that there is a sequence
between 1 and 2. Don't let your need to include the right things and everything
muck up your narrative flow in 1. Do it in 2.
- Work to achieve artistic quality in your narrative. Now it is
time to use the advice below. Rewrite your narrative to the specifications
below.
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Locating the Narrator
- Whose voice will perform the narrative? Normally in a rhetorical
study of narrative, the voice will be yours, using the 3rd person
to describe the events leading up to and through the communication event.
But think of other options as well. For example, perhaps you are writing
the narrative as a first person account of the communication event - you
are the person delivering the discourse or experiencing the discourse (Kent
Ono's account of a letter to his mother). Perhaps you use the 1st
person to describe your search for a historical fact (Wilbur Samuel Howell's
search for Jefferson's logic in the Declaration of Independence). Perhaps
you want to write the account of a member of an audience experiencing a
great speech (Gore Vidal's account of Lincoln's First Inaugural).
- What will you let him/her see? The author is always in control
of the narrator. You will determine what the narrator sees. All that happens
will not be in the narrator's account. That is because as a scholar you
are always seeing from multiple perspectives and performing sophisticated
reasoning that places some elements of observation in context and dismissing
others as errors. So, you need to think about what you will let the narrator
report and how you will let him/her craft the story.
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The Plot
- Basically the sequence of events and/or choices that make up
the action of the narrative. The plot is more than a chronicle or list
of the events, however. It asserts connections. It provides structure to
the unfolding of the events.
- A plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Decisions must
be made about where to begin telling the story and where to end the telling.
- The shaping of a plot entails a series of decisions by the author.
Among these are:
- Entailed in the choice of beginning and end is a basic decision on
scope and circumference. That is, where will the circle be drawn
- in time and in influences - in telling the story. One can confine the
telling of the story of a speech to the day of the speech. Or one can begin
the story at the decision to deliver such a speech and end the story at
the limit of the effect of the speech. Or one can begin telling the story
at the point where the speaker acquires her training as a speaker. Or one
could begin telling the story somewhere else. The point is that stories
begin in different places depending on the connections that one draws.
How broadly to draw those connections is a fundamental decision of plot.
- Plots are shaped by decisions about what will be the driving force
of the plot. For example, one might tell the story of a speech by focusing
on the speaker, on the speaker's training, on the situation to which the
speaker responds, on the demands of the genre of the speech, and so forth.
Burke's Pentad may be helpful here. It is one scheme
that can frame a decision about the driving force. Will the plot be driven
by the character of the speaker (agent-centered)? by the choice of what
the speaker wants to accomplish (purpose-centered)? by the circumstances
of the speech (scene-centered)? by the selected theory of speaking (agency-centered)?
or by the unfolding events in which the speaker finds herself (act-centered)?
- What to include in the story. Decisions about which choices
and events are important to telling the story are important decisions in
constructing the plot. They should be driven not by their sheer occurrence,
but by their importance to the unfolding storyline.
- Pace. Time is a manageable dimension of storytelling. Sometimes
you cover a lot of time in a sentence or two. Sometimes you slow down time
to gaze at a particular moment and take it apart to show influences. Do
so consciously. And do so from the point of view of the narrator. In other
words, even though you may know a lot about a moment of choice, it may
be a moment that went by amazingly quickly for the speaker. So, your point
of view may dictate that your writing style produce rapidly passing events
clashing into each other and leaving the speaker carried along by the events.
- There are standard plotlines that may be appropriate to structuring
stories. Particularly useful in accounts of communication events are:
- Quest. This plotline features a search for some object or outcome.
(See Howell on the Declaration of Independence).
- Agonistic Conflict. This plotline places the communication event
within the framework of a struggle between two powerful forces in which
the outcome is in doubt.
- Climax. This plotline portrays the building of demands on the
speaker or speech, and reaches its pivotal point at the communication event.
The key to the writing is giving the sense of building demands followed
by the relief of the building tension following the speech.
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Moments of Action
- Narratives are built around accounts of moments of action. Actions
give a plotline its movement; they are moments along the plotline.
- Accounts of communicative events tend to be constructed of four
kinds of moments: a moment of choice by a communicator, the moment
of performance of the message, the moment of interaction with the audience,
or the moment of effect from the communication. Other kinds of moments
become relevant as the plotline incorporates them.
- Moments of action are the places where the elements of the story
gather. Elements of influence flow into the moment of action, and effects
flow from it.
- Write your accounts of moments so that there is unity of action.
You my think about this in terms of Burke's pentad.
"Any complete statement of motives will offer some kind of
answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it
was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)"
(Kenneth Burke, Grammar of Motives [1945; Berkeley: Univ of California
Press, 1969], xv). Not only should all elements be present in a well rounded
description of a moment, but the qualities of each should be consistent
with the action.
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Characters
- A good narrative also takes its quality from the character of the people
who inhabit the plotline. Because communication is a human action, the
character of the communicator is often a central element of the accounts
of communicative events.
- Identify the people that are central to your plotline. Decide how the
character of each will be communicated in your narrative.
- Character is developed from:
- Value choices. Develop the forces on all sides of choice which
define the moment of choice. Show the communicator responding to those
forces with their choice. Describe the reasons for the choices as well
as the choices that are made.
- A pattern of choices. Construct the narrative around the series
of choices that mark the action. The character of those involved come from
the texture of repeated choice.
- Set character in relationship to the times. The tensions between
the person and his/her times is a major component of character. How does
the person fulfill the character of his/her times and how does s/he resist?
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Narrative and Proof
- Narrative is not merely a writing form, but in history must respond
to questions of veracity. You have an obligation to seek out the factual
implications of your account and do the historical work to check them against
facts.
- Walter Fisher indicates that the credibility of your narrative will
revolve around two dimensions:
- Coherence. That is, an account must be rich enough and consistent
in its form so that it has a solid feeling of reality.
- Fidelity. That is, an account must ring true with the experience
of the reader. Narratives of human behavior achieve their credibility through
their plausibility.
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A final checklist of key qualities in good narrative
- Concentrate on the becoming, not on what it became. That is,
what is interesting in narrative is the unfolding of the events. So put
your emphasis on development of the events.
- Provide dynamism. Choices are paths taken, and paths not taken.
Communicate the implications of choice. Let the reader see the implications
of the choice.
- Resist clocks and calendars and geography. Do not be bound by
the pacing of the clock or the calendar. You will create time and space
as you write a narrative. You will control time through pacing and geography
through scope and circumference. Manage these in the service of your narrative.
- Leave your reader with the experience, not just understanding.
In reading your narrative, the reader should be able to be there, to experience
the time and place.
- Develop vivid characters. Be sure that you have enough moments
of choice to communicate the character of the people communicating in your
account.
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Burke's Pentad
The five terms of the pentad are:
- Act. What happened?
- Agent. Who was involved. This can, of course, be more complex.
There can be co-agents that work together to facilitate the act or counter-agents
whose struggle defines the action.
- Scene. The background in which the action is set. Many things
can be a part of your description of the scene. You simply need to figure
out what happened in the context that shapes the act.
- Agency. Roughly how the events are shaped. This is the structural
element: how the agents go about doing the action. It enters into accounts
of communication events often because various theories of communication
may give a communication act its character.
- Purpose. Why the agent performed the act? Also key in communication
acts because the dominant theory of communication pictures messages as
purposive.
The pentad is a way of thinking through the shape of your account. Burke
urges at least two uses:
- Locate the central term. An account of an event will feature
one of these terms as its key shaping force. For example, an historian
may tell how the character of the speaker (agent) is the primary force
shaping a speech. Or, he may picture the speaker as constrained in her
response by the situation (scene) in which she finds herself (Bitzer's
Rhetorical Situation). Or, he may describe a eulogy in which the careful
requirements of the form (agency) dictate the character of the speech.
- Using the ratios track the influences of the terms. The ratios
are the relationships between any two terms. Thus, the agent-act ratio
stresses how the act takes its character from the character of the agent;
The scene-agent ratio locates the formative force of the character of the
agent in the character of the scene. In general, you want the qualities
of all the various terms to coincide so that you have a consistent portrayal
of character of the narrative. But other options are possible. You might
want to project the character of the agent by showing how she successfully
resists the forces that she encounters in the scene.
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