Hello, writers. So I planted a few cucurbits this year. My neighbor Muskrat, who rejoices in cattle, brought over a load of composted manure, which I heaped into nice little hills.
I planted three squash seeds, one pumpkin seed, and five cantaloupe seeds, plus my sacrificial watermelon seeds—I always plant watermelons, and never get any.
Then there was a week-long heatwave, during which I carefully poured a gallon of water onto each hill every evening.
Now I have the Vines That Ate New York. They’ve expanded twelve feet beyond the edges of the garden, so far, and are eating the kale in a neighboring plot. The squash vines are growing two feet most days, though on overcast days they grow only one. And every plant is sending out a couple new vines every day. I expect to be strangled in my bed.
I go out and hunt for melons—no need to hunt for the pumpkins and squash; they are huge and plentiful—and naturally this always makes me think of Robert Browning’s
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.
We’ve talked about Mr. Browning’s narrative poems before. They’re excellent examples of character and viewpoint. As in “My Last Duchess”, the narrator of Soliloquy is revealing far more about himself than he knows. And like the duke, he’s describing a person who sounds (pardon the expression) likeable enough. His explanation of why he hates Brother Lawrence is really a description of the narrator as a hater.
If your story has a narrator, the narrator should have a bias. There’s no such thing as an unbiased narrator. The narrator’s bias isn’t necessarily the writer’s, but it will affect what gets told to the reader and how it gets told—and how accurate it is.
(George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books have two narrators, with two different biases. The first person main character, Flashman, is frankly loathsome, and the fictional “editor” of the books, whose voice comes out mainly in historical footnotes, is constantly disapproving of Flashman’s tone. Yet the author’s
own opinions were apparently much closer to Flashman’s than to the “editor’s”.)
A narrator’s bias can do a lot for a story—for example, if the reader is encouraged to doubt the narrator.
Tonight’s challenge:
Let’s go back to our much-used hero, the Callow Youth. For those who came in late:
A callow youth (male or female) is the Chosen One who must obtain the sacred jewel of Togwogmagog in order to save the kingdom.
The callow youth grew up, let us say, in the Castle of Stroop. As a card-carrying Chosen One, s/he was treated with a certain deference. Another child, Oogle, who also grew up there, was not treated quite the same way.
The callow youth is about to start out on his/her journey. Let Oogle narrate the scene, in the first person.
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