Five Narrative Techniques You Wish You’d Invented

Posted on June 28th, 2009 in Writing by Simon J R Holmes
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As a writer I often seem to read about a story idea that is so obvious, yet so brilliant, that it seems like even a monkey poking at a typewriter could turn it into an award winner. But what amazes me even more is when the narrative itself is written in a clever way. So I present the five that have most wowed me. Some of the techniques in this list now seem hackneyed, but when they were first used they shocked readers and confounded critics. Others are far less widely-used these days. While one can probably never be used again. WARNING: This piece unavoidably contains spoilers.

  1. The Hidden Message

    Vladimir Nabokov was a writer with a love of language. Of course, all writers must love language to some extent, for it is their means of expression, the air through which they speak. However Nabokov went further than a mere fascination with words and phrases, he enjoyed word puzzles and acrostics, and in writing The Vane Sisters produced perhaps one of the greatest literary conjuring tricks in the 20th Century. On first glance a rather regular short story, The Vane Sisters contains within it a hidden message that corrupts the relationship the reader has with the narrator / author and leaves a chill in the spine. The story is narrated by a professor, who is ridicules the idea of communications from beyond the grave. The narrator recounts a journey around his neighbourhood and remembers some of his interactions with the titular Vane sisters. All seems straightforward yet the story finishes with a rather bizarre final paragraph. Upon re-reading this using the suggested acrostic substitution, a new message becomes apparent, one that suggests communication from beyond is indeed possible and the narrator was being controlled all along. So subtle was this construction that the story was initially rejected for publication by the New Yorker, prompting Nabokov to write to editor in its defence. It is now seen as a classic amongst his considerable volume of work and it is fair to say the twist may never have been discovered were it not for the author’s intervention.

  2. The Dual Identity

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    The novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is narrated in the first person by an unnamed narrator. While undergoing therapy for insomnia (basically involving him visiting support-groups for terminal illnesses he doesn’t have) the narrator meets Tyler Durden, an enigmatic and potentially dangerous character who encourages the narrator and others to rebel against the 20th century culture of consumption and credit by starting underground “Fight Clubs” to cause mischief throughout the city. The twist comes when the narrator discovers that Tyler Durden is in fact another part of himself, a split-personality, such that everything that the narrator describes Tyler doing was actually done by the narrator, a kind of first-third person. This leads to some inventive scenes where the narrator escapes from having been held at gunpoint by Tyler because when he thinks about it the gun isn’t really in Tyler’s hands, it’s in his own.

  3. The Narrator As Villain

    Thinking of Agatha Christie I am sure for many creates an image of a quaint old English lady sipping a cup of tea in-between producing reams of writing from an old typewriter, the kind of stories that get turned into films you see on a Saturday afternoon on the old movie channels. However beyond this image Agatha Christie was actually revolutionary in some of the techniques used to create her detective stories. In fact, think of a twist in a detective story and it is highly likely that she got there first. One of the best occurred in her novel The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd featuring her famous detective Hercule Poirot. The story is narrated by Poirot’s assistant and starts of in a regular way for the detective genre at the time – the clues are catalogued and the suspects rounded up. However there is a twist in the tale: when Poirot has run through each of the assembled suspect he turns to the book’s narrator, his assistant, and proves how it was him that committed the murder. This was a unique use of the unreliable narrator at the time and split critics and readers as to whether the trick was fair. On second reading the narrator never directly lies to the reader, but he is deliberately vague when he needs to be. What’s interesting is that this technique seems so obvious these days and has been done over and over in films and books, it is necessary to remember that at the time this was an incredibly fresh idea.

  4. The Time Flipper

    There is a scene in Slaughterhouse 5 where the narrator is shown a sequence of World War 2 playing out backwards such that Allied bombers fly over Dresden sucking the fires into metal containers that fly up to the planes. Then the planes return to their base where the bombs are sent back to America and made safe, burying their dangerous minerals in the ground. This passage was the inspiration for a whole novel that shows time running backwards, Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis, which tells the story of a doctor involved in the Holocaust who later flees to America. The book is narrated by a kind of floating conscience that is separate to the main character and makes assumptions about what is going on based on what it can see in reverse. There are some ingenious scenes: doctors hurt prostitutes who are given money and healed by their pimps; kindly Nazis put gold fillings from their stores in the teeth of Jews. Of course there is the ultimate symbolism in all of this – the Holocaust is literally humanity running backwards.

  5. The New Genre

    Science Fiction gets a bad rap time and again, both going forward in time and heading backwards. It’s seen as somehow lesser to its peers, perhaps unfairly, particularly when you consider that often the only difference between Science Fiction and Literary Fiction is that Science Fiction attempts to explain any “magical” goings on where as in literary fiction they just happen and have to be accepted. So in Kafka’s Metamorphosis the narrator turns into a fly and that’s that, high-brow fiction, whereas in Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit a beautifully reasoned science putting man’s mind into a whale get piled in the Sci-Fi section. Then again, not that long ago it didn’t even exist. The inventor of the genre is widely held to be Mary Shelley, and her novel Frankenstein was the first to feature the combination of the supernatural with the scientific methods. There is therefore perhaps no better way to make a mark on the literary scene than by creating a new genre (or perhaps this author just ran out of ideas after the first four narrative techniques). You may be tempted to say that it must be impossible, surely no more genres lay waiting to be discovered. But really people could have said that a long time ago. And as long as there are hyphens on the keyboard there’ll be people wanting to label your next piece of work as post-modern-trancidental-shamanic-whatyoumacallit until the cows come home, from space. Trust me.

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