It is often said that we make sense of the world through the stories we tell ourselves. Whether we’re recounting sequences of events from daily life, retelling episodes from our dreams or simply rehearsing the ongoing ‘story of me’, it seems that we live much of our life through stories. This narrative consciousness is both our birthright and inheritance, and it may well be hard-wired, developing as we mature to become the dominant way in which we see the world and reflect on our experience of it – events and their causes, problems and their resolutions, goals and their achievement, characters, relationships, situations and all the ways in which these interrelate and unfold over time. Narrative, therefore, includes the fictional stories that we encounter in films and books, but also constitutes a wider and more pervasive way of attuning to the world. Roland Barthes (Reference Barthes and Barthes1977)¹ put it like this:

If this narrative consciousness is in some way primary or fundamental,² ‘like life itself’, the fact that we are drawn to stories, in whatever form they take, is hardly surprising. We shape fictions just as fictions shape us. Oral folktales, urban myths, paintings, comic books, poems, films and soap operas all play their part. And from very early on in the history of writing, this visible language has been used to record and replay the stories that matter to us – creation myths, tales of ancestors and stories of conflict or moral dilemma are all part of this inheritance. Through narrative, writing records, replays and reflects our lives, our hopes, our dreams and our fears, refracting them through the kaleidoscope of our collective imagination.

Although narrative consciousness is not dependent on writing, it finds expression through it. But focusing on how narrative consciousness is reflected in writing is not without its challenges. In attempting to capture the breadth and depth of this kind of writing, I’ve struggled with the title of this chapter more than any other. Calling it ‘Writing Narrative’ doesn’t quite get to the variety and creativity, or to the ingenuity and imagination at work. But I want to avoid the idea that this chapter is just about books or literary fiction – although they are certainly included within this category. Why? For a start, some narrative writing may not be comfortably or unequivocally classed as literary – a controversial term in its own right. It might be taken to imply that some fiction is not actually literary in some sense of the word. For instance, is romantic fiction, spy fiction, pulp fiction, sci-fi, cli-fi³ or any other kind of genre fiction you can think of, included? Perhaps it would be less contentious to simply stick with the more generic category, fiction. That would work up to a point. But then it is also important to recognize that not all written stories are fictional. Some are retellings of actual events. A lot of historical writing falls into this category, grounded in evidence of one kind or another and tied together as a kind of story. And then, to complicate things even further, some stories, stories that perhaps have an uncertain status in actuality, may be believed by some and not by others. As a result, ideas about fiction begin to seem as problematic as ideas about what might or might not be literary.

I also want to avoid any grand notions about literature partly because of its complex associations with elitism, with culture with a capital ‘C’, and the ways in which this often privileges the book in its material form. Yet the kind of writing I want to talk about is intentionally and often skilfully put together. For instance, attention may have been given to the telling, to the ordering of events and the perspective taken. In this sense then, the idea of making or writing narrative works. In summary, my focus here is on the kind of writing that takes shape as a story, writing that is made up in the sense of being composed. This kind of writing matters to us. If it is an expression of narrative consciousness, it is important, and it certainly has a distinctive quality, it draws us in, it entertains and instructs us. And sometimes it has a particular kind of magic that is both compelling and immersive, enticing us into the written world whether on page or screen.⁴ To a greater or lesser extent this sort of writing is crafted. This is because writing a narrative involves a range of different kinds of decisions – decisions about what to focus on, what things to emphasize and what to hint at or to leave out, the order of telling and more subtle effects like the relationship of the narrator to the events described.

7.1 Narrative Forms and Formats

The history of writing offers some important insights into our fascination with narrative. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Cuneiform, appears on twelve-numbered clay tablets and is the oldest written story yet to be found. It was recorded some 3,200 years ago and it is a tale of kingship, deities and the supernatural – and it includes the story of a great flood. The eponymous Gilgamesh and his wife are forewarned of this flood, they build a ship and, like worthy guardians of biodiversity, stock it with pairs of animals. And if that sounds familiar, it’s worth noting that the Biblical version of this flood story first appeared a thousand years after The Epic of Gilgamesh. Scholars seem to think that parts of the epic had been circulating for a very long time, as part of the repertoire of oral storytellers, almost certainly pre-dating the invention and development of writing.

We can learn quite a lot from this example. Firstly, it underlines a point already made, and that is that narrative is certainly not dependent on writing. Narrative quite clearly predates writing although, as I have argued, it can also be an important medium for it, particularly because it preserves stories for readers in other places and times. Secondly, the specific material technology of writing is pretty much irrelevant to the story itself. Written with a stylus pressed into clay, the version of The Epic of Gilgamesh in the British Library can be read in a print translation or online. The narrative is more or less the same.⁵ Thirdly, and perhaps more controversially, a narrative need not be attributed to a single author and indeed its detail as well as its interpretation can vary. Oral stories are often passed down through generations and in doing so they change. They can also spread in a geographical sense, they are exchanged between different cultural groups, they get translated and adapted, and take on different characteristics as they do so. The story of the flood is a good example of this. Stories, story fragments and story forms travel well.

But stories that take shape as epic poems, novels or fiction are only part of narrative expression. As I suggested above, narrative consciousness is expressed through writing in many everyday forms. The ‘newsy’ content of emails to friends and family often contains a narrative element, and the same goes for texts or WhatsApp message threads. Usually, these are simple recounts of events or situations we find ourselves in, but the basic structure of narrative is very much a part of them. It has often been observed that what narratives have in common is a problem-solution patterning – events that involve characters and their interactions in one or more settings that evolve over time, characters that overcome challenges, resolve difficulties and achieve their goals or at the very least find some sort of resolution. Real-life narratives might involve something like a disrupted journey involving a vehicle breakdown, a health problem that gets resolved or a humorous sequence of events concerning a young child in the family. These everyday narratives have the same basic ingredients as the most celebrated works of literary fiction and are frequently expressed in writing, communicated to others or recorded in a message, a diary or on social media.

Narrative writing can also be found in magazines and on blogs, in comic books, erotic stories and fan fiction, and I want to suggest that it is one of the most influential ways in which writing is put to use. It could well be seen as one of the most benign forms of writing, although we would do well to recognize that even the most straightforward account of events will tell us something about the world view of those involved in its production. Harmful views, negative attitudes and cruel actions, as we shall see, can be justified or even glorified through narrative writing.

7.2 Everyday Stories and Micronarratives

Giving a straightforward factual account of our experience is a challenge for most of us. Dogged by selective attention, bias, unreliable memory and an inbuilt tendency to isolate things into discreet events can sometimes make us into unreliable witnesses. But this way of curating experience is an invaluable part of making sense of life and we’d be lost without it.⁶ Many everyday events find their way into written accounts. Social media is awash with the micronarratives of daily life. The most economical written narrative may well be found in the shortest of sentences. As an example, consider the WhatsApp exchange in Figure 7.1. I suggest that a case could be made for this being the simplest form of narrative account. This happened – noteworthy here, because going off and covering yourself in sunscreen is just one of those funny things a young child might do. The post doesn’t require a situational context, or detail about the character (although those details will be familiar to the intended audience). The deictic ‘this’ refers to the image and the triple exclamation marks underline the humour and what in story grammar is often referred to as the coda ‘At least she’s ready for the sun!!!’ is supplied by the interlocutor.

Figure 7.1 A Whatsapp micronarrative.

For some people, this paired-down account of an event may seem just too thin to be classed as narrative. In defence, I would argue that much that could have been written to give it more of a narrative feel is, in this context, redundant. There is an economy to the telling that is highly appropriate, and it’s an example of what I described above as a micronarrative of everyday life. Those who are uneasy about its status could consider what might need to be added to this account for it to cross their narrative threshold. In the light of this example, and its debatable status as narrative, it may be instructive to offer a comparison. What about a longer piece of writing in which someone goes out to the shop, buys some things and then returns home again? Could this be a narrative, albeit a rather banal one? I think the answer just has to be ‘yes’, and in the hands of a skilled writer, it may not even be so banal. As it happens, Saul Bellow’s short story A Father-to-be does just that, with the writer supplying all the interest value through the searching interior monologue of the shopper – the father-to-be.⁷

Everyday stories can, of course, have more to them than my example does. The message below, extracted from a longer thread functions as a comment on entry requirements to Spain shortly after Covid restrictions were amended. It’s a straightforward first-person narrative, but includes a chance meeting as well as referring to two different kinds of entry requirements:

Everyday narrative is simply the most common way in which we present the detail of our day-to-day life to others. It’s a key part of many of our conversational interactions and it seems to me that, with the rise of social media, we have become more used to encountering it in a written form. Before we move on, it’s worth underlining that what I have called everyday narrative writing can achieve greater complexity. In some journals and blogs, it has wider significance and through circulation it reaches a wider audience. For example, Alan Bennett’s diaries, like those of famous diarists before him, offer polished micronarratives, that become longer reflections and humorous observations on the events of daily life.⁸

7.3 Fact and Fiction: A Porous Boundary

The boundary between fact and fiction is a particularly difficult one to uphold. Some have argued that the fiction/non-fiction binary is an invention of librarians, but I suspect that it has a much more complex history than that. Many works of fiction are instructive – and not simply because they can give insight into the experiences, thoughts and decisions that others make. In reading Anna Karenina,⁹ we may find ourselves immersed in the details of Levin’s philosophical or political reflections, or in Middlemarch¹⁰ by Dr Lydgate’s changing reputation, but both works also function as informative commentaries on social and cultural change in the first half of the nineteenth century – and both sets of commentaries are carefully intertwined with the stories of their female protagonists as well as those of their cast of minor characters.

Pushing in the other direction is writing that overtly draws on actual events or historical evidence, helping readers to understand and reflect on this material through the narrative that has been constructed. The way in which Julian Barnes uses Sargent’s painting Dr Pozzi at Home to introduce the life of the pioneering surgeon, Pozzi, is a good example of this. The story of Dr Pozzi as told in The Man in the Red Coat¹¹ becomes a sort of portal through which we enter into Belle Epoque Paris, and we are introduced to an array of colourful supplementary characters along the way. In a similar way, Jing Tsu¹² skilfully takes us into the world of Chinese writing by introducing us to Wang Zhao. She begins her book in story mode.

It may not be great literature, and there may be some poetic license in the account, but it works well to raise our interest and introduce the politically contentious history of writing in China.

If there is a boundary between fact and fiction it is most certainly a porous one as these examples illustrate. Furthermore, it’s certainly the case that some kinds of writing depend on narrative to tell or illustrate their subject matter. Some of the best journalism helps people to tell their own story, and as insiders will tell you, the history of ethnography is punctuated with concerns about writing and representation. On the other hand, it is important to underline that writing isn’t somehow bound to narrative. There’s plenty of writing that has no narrative element at all, and indeed the book you’re reading now has little in the way of narrative to propel it forward or hold your attention!

7.4 Writing that Takes Itself Seriously

One of the more difficult aspects of this topic of narrative writing comes when we consider writing as an art form. It is precisely at this point that value judgements and matters of taste begin to emerge and all the apparatus of literary theory and literary criticism comes to bear. I have delayed my discussion of this topic partly because of its contentious nature, but also because it is not exactly central to the general overview of the topic of writing that this book offers. But some might disagree with this – arguing, perhaps, that one of the ways in which writing still matters is that it has the potential to express important and sometimes highly complex ideas in a way that is sophisticated, readerly and carefully – perhaps even beautifully, crafted. As someone who derives considerable enjoyment from literature, the argument is compelling. Yet, at the same time, I’m also keenly aware of the fact that this enjoyment is culturally constructed – a product of my own family context and education, bolstered by my social position as a privileged, economically stable, middle-class white man and by the habits these conditions have produced. On the one hand, I don’t want to make inflated claims for the value of a certain kind of narrative writing, but on the other, I don’t want to neglect the idea of writing as an art form.

Writing that aspires to be an art form is a kind of writing that takes itself seriously. By this, I mean that it is a considered and purposeful endeavour, even if its content or subject matter is less than serious. What for the sake of convenience we might now call literature may be a cultural enterprise, shored up by a whole industry of review and criticism, by institutions that sponsor festivals, award scholarships and judge book prizes, by literary agents, prestigious publishing houses and by marketing campaigns, by specialist journals, blogs and podcasts – but it is also, at least in the eyes of the author, an earnest attempt to make something of worth. Whether it ends up being seen as ‘good’ or ‘flawed’ is often a matter of intense debate, personal preference or prejudice. Take the 2021 Booker Prize shortlist, for example. From the shortlist, Richard Powers’ Bewilderment¹³ seemed to me to be contrived, rough around the edges with a cast of unconvincing characters. Critical appraisal in the Times Literary Supplement was more generous, praising it not least for its emotional gravity.¹⁴ By contrast the prize winner, David Galgut’s The Promise,¹⁵ seemed to me to be a bold, densely layered and evocative exploration of life in post-Apartheid South Africa. Adam Mars-Jones, writing in the London Review of Books,¹⁶ was less impressed. With no robust or abiding objective criteria literature, like any other art form, will always divide opinion and the response to a particular work will inevitably be a distinctly personal one. I don’t believe that this invalidates the work of criticism, but it does mean that we should be cautious about definitive statements about good writing.

Questions of literary preference and value have been amplified by recent online developments and particularly the emergence of BookTok. The BookTok hashtag on the popular social media app TikTok is a forum for book recommendations, discussions and playful book-related humour. Booktok is dominated by amateur content (as opposed to that of the literary establishment), and often features staged and exaggerated emotional reactions, quick-fire agreement or disagreement and rapidly curated ‘bookshelf tours’. It is also a forum in which popular titles can go viral. Book publishers and booksellers are well aware of its impact and will make sure to promote what’s hot and what’s trending on BookTok quite explicitly.¹⁷ Such activity might enrage (or intrigue) the literary establishment, but it is another example of the power of new kinds of writing, as well as the contested notion of what’s good in literature.

All this means that literature is a difficult category to define with any degree of accuracy. The phrase ‘writing that takes itself seriously’ is the closest I can get, although the words I’ve chosen could apply to different kinds of writing. Factual or scientific writing can be carefully crafted, too, and so can long-form journalism. But fiction writing that takes itself seriously needs to work well on a number of levels. It’s not simply the case of getting the best words in the best order,¹⁸ or refining the narrative voice, although these ideas do suggest something about the kind of detailed attention that writing demands. The French writer Flaubert said that ‘Prose is like hair: it shines with combing’,¹⁹ again evoking the importance of close attention and perhaps suggesting how important revision was to him. These perspectives serve to underline what I mean by writing that takes itself seriously, as long as we understand that this sort of close attention is also given to the story as a whole, and to all levels of it, to characterization, to dialogue, to plot and setting and everything else. Interviews and discussions with those who write fiction for a living can often reveal the level of painstaking work and background research, some of which may not be immediately visible to the reader, that lies behind the final published work.

Although literature is now available in a number of formats and can be read on a variety of different e-readers, its history is very much tied up with that of the book, and so much so that e-readers often imitate page turning (audially and visually) alongside other features such as bookmarking. The historical development of the codex, the predecessor of the bound book, created a particular kind of object that through successive refinements became the portable object we now think of as a hard- or soft-back publication. The popularization of literature depended as much on the ability to mass-produce print books as it did on increases in leisure time and the spread of literacy. In Portable Magic,²⁰ Emma Smith directly addresses this combination of form and content in her concept of ‘bookhood’, clearly illustrating how in her view literary works ‘…don’t exist in some ideal immaterial state: they are made of leather and paper and labour and handling’ (p. 10). For Smith bookhood includes the sensory experience of handling books, their touch, smell and heft as well as their covers, illustrations, the texture of the paper and the choice of typeface. Her idea of bookhood is also used to acknowledge the strong emotions that books can evoke in us, from boredom and disgust to inspiration and delight, and everything in between. So, books are defined in terms of form and content as well as the relationships that we have with them.

The author Will Self has described how his first drafts are always written on a typewriter, – an Olivetti Lettera 22 to be precise – and he suggests that this is appropriate to the form of the book.²¹ Through this practice he is acknowledging the intertwined history of materiality and writing, a sensitivity akin to Smith’s idea of bookhood. But we shouldn’t let his particular practice blind us to the wide variety of writing processes of fiction writers. These processes also include Jack Kerouac’s feverish typing on long scrolls of paper as well as the measured dictation of Henry James.²² Writers’ relationships to the process of writing are certainly heterogeneous. Courses on the craft of fiction writing may well be very useful, but the weight of evidence suggests that creative processes at work in producing the kind of extended written narrative we might refer to as literature are highly idiosyncratic, and just as varied as the books produced – and the vast majority are still books.

7.5 Narrative Frustration

Narrative writing has often been fertile ground for experimentation and one in which writers have searched for new ways of telling stories and new ways of representing experience. Sometimes such innovation confounds our expectations of how stories can be told. Examples are legion in postmodernism’s experiments with playful metafiction, self-reflexive irony and untrustworthy narrators – ideas that have been absorbed into contemporary literary fiction. In an early example, the poet, John Ashbery played with the cut-up as a poetic technique. Working at the same time that William Burroughs was using a similar method, Ashbery’s work is beguiling, as we see in this extract from the poem They Dream Only of America (Reference Ashbery1962).²³

Perhaps as a reader, we get a sense of something – but what? Critics of the time struggled with this poem, as they did with the collection as a whole, because the problem of any sort of interpretation withdraws as each successive line frustrates our desire for narrative fulfilment. The same frustrations can surface in other experimental writing. In a reaction against the French literary establishment, authors of ‘nouveaux romans’ published challenging work that aimed to disrupt conventional realism. This could include derailing or suspending any sense of completeness. Robert Pinget’s The Inquisitory²⁴(Reference Pinget1962), for example, is a 400-page question-and-answer session involving a detective and a suspect, but the reader never finds out what crime has been committed. With similar effect, some postmodern fiction plays with conventional narrative pleasure. Simon Okotie’s slow-motion detective fiction Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon²⁵(Reference Okotie2012) is a humorous play on this, dwelling predominantly on elaborate digressions, and in a similar vein concerns a crime that is never actually solved.

So, whilst the concept of narrative consciousness suggests that we have a predisposition to interpreting experience through story, perhaps even to see it when it isn’t actually present, it also seems that it creates an expectation that events will make sense, that problems will be resolved and that there will be an ending of sorts even if it’s not exactly the one that we had in mind. As a result, writing that frustrates this narrative arc is likely to be challenging to read. J. Robert Lennon²⁶ playfully experiments with this challenge in his novel Subdivision creating the following nonsensical paragraph:

Whilst this writing works at a grammatical level, it defies any attempts to make sense. This contrasts with the Ashbery poem. The former generates impressions through the concatenation of clauses, whereas the Lennon extract descends into nonsense, defying our narrative urge. So although we may tolerate a degree of innovation and appreciate an element of surprise – a sense of things taking off in an unexpected direction – we don’t usually want too much disruption or digression, let alone something that escapes meaning altogether.

7.6 Other Stories

Narrative innovation is not the sole preserve either of literature or the printed book. Individual writers or groups of writers who produce playscripts, screenwriting and contribute to videogame production all contribute to our aesthetic appreciation, enjoyment or entertainment through narrative. New technologies have led to a proliferation of new kinds of narrative that include Twitter fiction and personal Instagram stories. Digital fiction – creative writing whose structure, material form and meaning are digitally mediated – is a growing area that has already attracted some scholarly attention.²⁷ A more complete definition of this kind of fiction is work ‘…written for and read on a computer screen, that pursues its verbal and discursive and/or complexity through the digital medium’. In other words, its digital nature is an essential defining feature because it would ‘lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium’.²⁸

Some of the first experiments in digital fiction required interactive reader responses and this trend reaches a new level of technical sophistication in a text like Pullinger’s Breathe,²⁹ described by the author as ‘ambient literature’, which uses your phone’s location to personalize the story. Other digital fictions are not necessarily linear, or dependent upon a single-reading pathway like most print fiction. In these stories, navigational complexity is achieved through hypertext. Digital fictions may also be media hybrids occupying a new sort of narrative space, somewhere in between video installation, written narrative and soundscape. In Tran’s Acts of Translation,³⁰ we see two long windows with curtains fluttering in a slight breeze. A randomly generated ‘dialogue’ between two of the 37 cities is featured, and every hour, on the hour, a personal narrative of a broken heart is narrated. The stories are based on individuality but the global nature of the dialogue suggests a sort of universality. Acts of Translation pushes the narrative envelope in a completely different way to Breathe but the contrast serves to highlight the level of innovation as well as the possibilities of digital fiction.

Digital fiction has confounded established forms of criticism based on print media, precisely because it works on the boundaries of form and possibility. The narrative experience can be far more diverse – plot, character, story beginnings and endings can be fluid and often multiple. And complexity continues to increase with the wider availability of more sophisticated multimedia authoring packages with enhanced visual and auditory attributes. It’s quite clear that in hyperfiction, digital technologies add to the narrative in ways that a conventional digital version of a print book, produced for an e-reader doesn’t even approach. Perhaps, it is here that we encounter the real cutting edge of narrative writing, and a creative urge which seems irrepressible.

7.7 The Importance of Narrative

In this chapter, I have been arguing for the importance of narrative and its expression in the written form. It could simply be the case that the kind of writing under consideration is a logical extension of narrative consciousness. If we experience or at least represent the world to ourselves through narrative, it seems to make sense that we should use writing in a similar way. But, it also seems that writing has expanded the possibilities of narrative. It has done this in at least two ways. In a quite literal sense writing extends the reach of the stories we tell. Whether we’re thinking about those micronarratives shared on social media, more lengthy pieces of journalism, histories, biographies or literary fiction, the technologies of writing, publication and distribution help these stories to reach a wider audience – those who are not co-present. In this way, our narratives can transcend space and time, they can travel. Writing has extended the possibilities of writing in another sense, too. It has encouraged us to develop, innovate and experiment with the narrative form, to make adventurous and sometimes risky experimentations with storying itself. You may consider Ulysses³¹ to be completely off-putting, daring or simply unreadable, but it certainly pushes at the boundaries of possibility. A novel like McCormack’s Solar Bones³² with its sparse punctuation and unconventional paragraphing is a contemporary example of this sort of experimentation, albeit on a more modest scale. There are also plenty of examples of how ingenious visual artists contribute to graphic novels or have worked with the shorter form of children’s picture books to explore new ways of creating narrative that are driven by the interplay of words and images. In all these varied ways, writing narrative can entertain and sometimes delight us. The close relationship we have with this literature can change us. At the same time, we leave our mark on these texts – the signature on the front page, the cracked spine, the train ticket we used to mark our place, the biscuit crumbs that fell and the barely visible marks of our hands on the cover and the corners of the pages.

We might well conclude that writing narrative is a good thing, even if particular examples of it are banal, frivolous or just not exactly to our taste. But to do this would be to forget how world views, attitudes and prejudices are consciously or unconsciously transmitted through stories told, the settings and situations they describe and the characters that are portrayed. The evidence suggests that the effect of some narrative writing is actually harmful. The way in which narrative fiction in particular has portrayed minoritized groups has attracted a lot of attention. Over the last thirty years or so, critics interested in social justice have drawn attention to both the hidden and the not-so-hidden prejudices in literary history. Often the notion that negative values and attitudes are simply reflections of the values of their time seems inadequate, especially when such values may be uncritically approached by contemporary readers. Since censorship is an undesirable and unworkable alternative, we must be able to do more than simply wince when we encounter such material. The most viable approaches seem to lie in critical review and discussion or through textual annotations and commentaries. Although some reading is a solitary affair, most people are part of a community of readers, whether formally or informally constituted, and it is here that we must debate, challenge and be challenged about our impressions of what we read.

Narrative writing can clearly be dangerous in the wrong hands. A recent example will serve to illustrate this. The Camp of the Saints,³³ written by the respected French writer Jean Raspail, is a dystopian fiction which chronicles the collapse of European civilization as it is overwhelmed by mass migration from the Indian subcontinent. The book has been valorized by the Far Right, particularly because it seems to resonate with a conspiracy theory known as the ‘replacement theory’.³⁴ The Camp of the Saints has been regularly referred to by white supremacists in online discussions and has certainly contributed to the spread of an ideology that has resulted in abhorrent acts of violence and hate speech. Literature of any kind can never compel its readers to act in particular ways, but it can certainly become a significant channel for propagating particular kinds of behaviour and, in this example, has played a part in the larger narratives of extremists. It is also the case that the world views of extremist groups are fed by the less visible narratives that circulate online, by racist micronarratives as well as by misinformation and fake news. This all suggests that narrative writing matters – it not only matters because it can delight and inform us but it also matters because it can mislead, misinform us and lead to wholly undesirable behaviour.