I've been thinking about the decisions every writer makes for every story about narrative voice and tenses. Sometimes you have a brilliant
idea for an opening scene. You rush to the laptop to get it down in all
its glory. Then you kind of peter out and all you've got is a mood piece. And you
realise that in your rush to start writing, you made a number of unconscious
decisions about who’s telling the story and in what tense. Often, what’s needed
to get the story flowing again, is to realise what those decisions were and ask
yourself whether they were the right ones.
Let’s say you’re going to write a
story about... er... kinky shenanigans in a chicken coop. As you do. So you put
your fingers on the keyboard and this comes out:
Nick put the last screw through the hinge of the chicken coop and stood
back to admire his work. It was a pine A-frame ark with a cosy perching area
opening onto a meshed run. Perfect for the four Plymouth Rock point-of-lay
pullets they’d be picking up next week.
‘What do you think?’ he called over to Leanne.
She straightened from weeding
the French beans. ‘Looking good,’ she said. ‘But you’d better test it out. See
how comfy they’re going to be in the run.’
Nick clocked the change in dynamic between them. Leanne had a wicked
smile on her face and a handful of nettles in her gloved hand. His cock
tingled.
If you take a step back, you can
examine the decisions you made without even realising: The story is going to
be in the third person, but from Nick’s point of view. It is in the past tense.
It starts at a point at which the sexual element between the two characters is
just coming into play. This means some backstory is required right away about
what the hell’s going on with the chicken coop. So let’s look at some of the possibilities.
I think a lot of us probably
start out as writers with the third person being our default setting. It allows
us to describe the main character in a way they wouldn’t do for themselves:
‘Nick’s hair was dark and in need of a cut; it stuck to the back of his neck
where working in the sun had made him sweat.’ You couldn’t just translate that
into first person: ‘My hair was dark and in need of a cut; it stuck to the back
of my neck where working in the sun had made me sweat.’ It doesn’t work. No one
goes around describing their own hair colour or their level of perspiration.
To
convey the same kind of information and mood in the first person, you’d have to
say something like this: ‘I wished I’d been for the haircut I knew I needed.
Working in the sun had made the long bits at the back of my neck stick to me.’
And it may just end up sounding better.
What’s the difference? You get
less objective description in the first person. If you want to describe Nick’s
hair colour, you’re going to need a narrator that isn’t him. But you get more
emotional depth in the first person. I’m coming round to the idea that my default setting for erotica is the first person, although it’s not always
appropriate. It leaves more space for the reader to identify with the
protagonist precisely because that person is not describing their own
appearance in detail. And it gets you right into the person’s thoughts and
physical responses without having some mysterious mind-reading narrator
hovering over the action. I mean, how does my narrator know that this is what
Nick is thinking and what his cock is doing?
Nick clocked the change in dynamic between them. Leanne had a wicked
smile on her face and a handful of nettles in her gloved hand. His cock
tingled.
It’s much more immediate and, I guess the word I’m looking
for here is sexy, to have Nick tell it himself:
I clocked the change in dynamic between us. Leanne had a wicked smile
on her face and a handful of nettles in her gloved hand. My cock tingled.
What we’re getting here is the direct
effect of Leanne’s smile on Nick’s body without any guesswork. And as a reader,
you’re right there in the action, living it through Nick.
Sometimes, you can wring more
depth and meaning out of the action simply by swapping who is actually telling
the story. The more obvious option when writing about D/s relationships is to
write from the submissive’s point of view because they’re the ones who’ll be
experiencing a range of emotional and physical responses. I think it’s harder
to write with as much depth and emotion from the dominant viewpoint. But if you
crack it, it can be pretty darned hot because the dominant player actually has
to be closely attuned to all the things going on in the submissive’s mind and
body. We could have Leanne being the first-person narrator:
I watched Nick put the last screw through the hinge of the chicken coop
and stand back to admire his work. His hair was sticking to the back of his
neck from working in the sun.
‘What do you think?’ he called over to me.
‘Looking good. But you’d better test it out. See how comfy they’re
going to be in the run.’
His lips parted slightly as he clocked the change of dynamic between
us. He glanced at the handful of nettles in my gloved hand. I smiled.
It’s not about the dominant controlling the sub’s response,
but anticipating from experience what that response is likely to be, watching
it happen and throwing something new or unexpected into the mix. Like a handful
of nettles.
I’ll be writing another post about how you choose what tense
to use, at what point of the action the story starts and the issues with
weaving in back story. In the meantime, my story about chicken coops and
nettles is over at the Every Night Erotica site.
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