Watch Out for the Narrator
In real life, things happen that we have no control over. In narratives - stories that we tell in speech, film or writing - someone is in control of everything. This is a very important distinction.
If it happens to rain heavily in real life, there’s not much point in asking why. The weather is just the way it is, caused by things like atmospheric pressure and cloud formations that hold little deep interest for most of us.
But if it’s raining in a novel or a film, there is definitely a reason why. Somewhere in the process of writing the script, the writer chose to make it rain.
Why would they do this? Because usually the real effects of the weather are not physical (like snow closing the roads), but psychological. The weather affects our mood: rainy days bring us down; sunny days lift us up. The psychological context of our daily lives is incredibly complex, made up of our feelings toward ourselves, the people we live with, those we work with; what work we do and how we have to do it. It’s weird to think that a minor but significant part of this context could be affected by something as simple as the weather.
But it is. Cold rain and biting winds make being outside unpleasant, a thousand annoyances - broken umbrellas, unsheltered bus stops, wet socks - add up imperceptibly. We don’t venture out unless we have to, so rainy days feel monotonous. I’m sure we gaze out of the window less when the weather is dreary.
It’s the opposite when the sun is shining and the warm air waves in a cool breeze. We spend time outside for the sheer joy of it. Even if we’ve had a horrible day at work, the trip back home in a summer evening takes some of the edge off.
In real life the weather affects our mood; in stories the mood of the characters affects the weather. Raindrops magnify the effect of tears, as if the entire world weeps with our characters. It’s easy to see why - a sad scene in the rain is just more powerful than a sad scene in the sun (unless the contrast is being played for effect), because of what the rain evokes in us: memories of being cold and wet and uncomfortable.
A similar thing happens when a narrator builds suspense. Weather isn’t used so much here - the thunderstorm that makes a castle creepy is cliche these days. Instead of using the weather to trigger feelings, the narrator might use a combination of the environment and carefully chosen details.
A familiar suspenseful scene is a person walking alone at night. This person is more often female than male, perhaps signalling that the narrator believes that lone women and girls have more to fear from the dark. The woman will usually wear bright clothing, increasing the contrast between her and the surrounding darkness. Emphasising that she is “out of place”.
In visual media, we almost always see her from behind. Why is this? Placing the camera behind a character makes us feel that they are being watched. It’s unsettling. We worry about what might happen to them. Letting the character walk toward the camera would destroy this effect, because we would be able to see behind her. The potential watcher would be revealed, either as nothing or as a concrete presence. Both of these are less frightening than the unknown.
Literature uses similar tricks, though they are arguably more subtle. The feeling of being watched might be evoked by describing things half-glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Objects are described in a defamiliarised and threatening way - every bush hides a monster and cars with darkened windows stalk the streets.
In real life an unrelated thought might occupy our mind together with the vague sense of being watched. These thoughts are always omitted from narratives unless they somehow add to the story. Details that are truly irrelevant would break the suspense the narrator has so carefully built.
So although the meaning of stories derives from what they tell us about reality, their power lies paradoxically in their very artificiality, in that every single thing they contain was chosen by the writer for a purpose. To make us empathise more fully with the characters; to immerse us more deeply in their universe.
And why is this important, other than allowing us to enjoy narratives both for the quality of their construction as well as their content?
Because our memories are just stories we tell ourselves about something that happened to us, once upon a time. And our experience of reality is just a story we tell ourselves about what’s happening right now. It’s so easy to let our feelings dictate what we notice, to let our sadness emphasise everything negative or to let our happiness make everything negative disappear.
The narrator we really need to watch out for is ourselves. It’s hard to consider the camera when the camera is the mind’s eye. But on the rare occasions that we manage it, we enjoy reality both for its content and the way we choose to construct it. And that makes everything so much more interesting.