How should I handle writing a story where different portions of the narrative are told from the point of view of several different narrators?
My story is told from the perspective of different satellites that are creating a narrative. There are over ten of these narrators. I'm wondering if this might appear confusing for readers if the voice of the author is never seen anywhere in the story. So every paragraph in the story has a different character attached to it as the narrator.
I have several reasons for this. One is to detach a reader from any of the narrators. Don't bother forming any kind of connection to a narrator, because some of them appear once and never again. Another point is to establish a hierarchy. Without some characters first speaking, no one else can. In some way, I am intentionally trying to drown the readers in several narrators to the point where whoever is telling the story doesn't really matter. The story remains coherent with or without the narrators.
What is the best way to present this that won't confuse the reader?
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@FraEnrico talks about epistolary novels, and I agree with him - it does sound very much like what you're trying to do. What troubles me, however, is that usually one would have epistolary novels. You seem to be going for an epistolary short story. Ten characters are often a bit much for a short story; you want ten narrators.
I'm not saying that it can't work, but I am saying that you've got your work cut out for you. You've got to mark out very clearly who's speaking at every given point, and you've got to help the audience not get them all confused. Not just "help the audience understand who's speaking right now", but also help the audience remember which bits this particular narrator told before, how those bits tie together, why it's he, and not another narrator, who's telling this bit.
If, as you mention in a comment, you want readers to ignore the fact that different people are telling the story, and just focus on the story, why do you need so many narrators in the first place? Why can't it be just one invisible narrator (you) narrating the whole thing? Usually, multiple narrators would be used when they have a stake in the story - when they've been there, when they see things in a particular way that might contrast with the way another narrator would see the same events. But you're saying you want the readers to ignore the narrators. So what is it that they add? If any element of a story is to be ignored, why is it there in the first place?
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This isn't a standard short story, so present it in the most clear and understandable format, so your readers won't have to play guessing games, like so:
Mark: I met Jim when we were in third grade. He was a pushy kid.
Jim: I always thought Mark was such a wimp.
Lisa: It bothered me that Jim was always beating Mark up.
This will give it kind of a documentary feel. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it will be easy to comprehend, and could be effective if done well. It may look intrusive, but it will fade to the background pretty quickly, because it's functional (versus forcing people to guess, every 5 seconds, "well who is this now?").
From a writing standpoint, the typical challenges around multiple narrators are (a) giving us a reason to care about each of them in this very short period of time, (b) giving them distinct voices, and (c) giving us a larger event that we care about to unify the narratives. However, given your aims, it sounds like a and b might not be priorities for you. In effect, you don't really have 10 separate narrators, you have one narrator in 10 parts, or, in other words, a Greek Chorus. So in that case, your biggest challenge is c.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39777. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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