Sillies

How I write for the narrator (long post)

This isn't perfect advice, this is just what I do to make him sound canonical.

Every good fictional character has their own rhythms and cadences for how they speak. Word choice and pacing have a certain flow when spoken aloud. I notice in the script there are patterns that repeat. He has a tendency to do rapid fire "no"s, for example.

(ex. "Are you really just doing this for the achievement? Click a door five times? Is that all that you think an achievement is worth? No, no, no, no, no."

"Oh, no! Oh, no no no no no no no no no no no no, not again." (when the player re-enters the broom closet.

"NO! No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no! This isn't right at all! You're not supposed to be here, yet! This is all a spoiler! Quick, Stanley, close your eyes!" (adventure line when it leads you back to the monitor room)

Another pattern he has is switching between really short sentences and longer ones.

"Stanley waited. Hours passed. Then days. Had years gone by? He no longer had the ability to tell.

But the one thing he knew, for sure, beyond any doubt, was that if he waited long enough, the answers would come. Eventually, some day, they would arrive."

There are other patterns he has too, but they're kind of hard to put into words.

The narrator is also a dramatic MF, so when emotions run high, he really amps up what he's talking about.

"The moment he entered his manager's office, Stanley froze in his tracks. Not a living soul anywhere. Could he really be all alone? This was too much for Stanley to take; too much for any man to take. He fell to his knees, bursting into half-moans, half-sobs... the guttural retching of life from a man denied any hope, any reason to keep going." (Narrator, what the f*ck. we're- we're just standing here)

and

"No! He refused to believe it. He couldn't accept it; his own life in someone else's control? Never! It was unthinkable, wasn't it? Was it even possible? Had he truly spent his entire life utterly blind to the world?" (narrator~, your showmanship is, well, showing~)

He's also a sarcastic boi, which I usually downplay because I prefer the narrator's sweeter side. But it's still there.

"You too?! Unbelievable. I'm at the mercy of an entire species of invalids. Perhaps there's a monkey nearby you can hand the controls to? A fish? A fungus? Look, you can hammer out the details; I'm not particularly picky."

"Okay, I think we all know the drill by now. Blah blah blah, dark secrets, the keypad, Stanley pushes some buttons, oh hey, look, it's a new passageway! Quelle surprise!"

Another thing to think about is word choice. The narrator is someone I'd describe as erudite. He uses large words a lot. An example of large words that I can pull from the script include: "momentum, "warrants recognition", " examination of structural narrative tropes", "Physical malady", solace, catalyst, immense." And this is just from a quick glance at the script. I admit, it's a tricky balance. You want him well spoken, but not a jackass, unless you're specifically writing him to have maximum pretentiousness. Try and find words that not everyone knows, but can guess based on context if they're too lazy to look the word up. Eventually you can fine tune it.

The more you practice this stuff, the more intuitive it becomes. These days, when I write him, I can hear whether or not it sounds like something he'd actually say. and I think there was a post that modmad talked about when writing characters. There's a voice inside that will tell you whether or not what you're writing fits his character. "Listen to that voice, that's the character speaking" or something like that.

And a small confession: I keep the script open when I write these things in case I need to refer back to him or check in to see if what I'm writing fits. I don't have the entire script memorized (yet)

Again, this isn't a perfect system, but it's how I do it.

And if it seems like I've got a particular knack for it... I'm an english major who reads character analysis papers and looks at linguistic styles for fun. I love thinking about what makes characters tick. I have major original ideas that I'll one day write about. It's my dream to one day write professionally. I think it would be hilarious to be at a convention 10-20 years from now doing one of those author Q&As and tell the audience that I used to run a headcanon blog. I imagine the crowd would go wild at hearing that. I love writing, it's my other special interest/gen

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sapphirepng

8 months ago