Every tool has its purpose, and when it is being used in the right way (to accomplish that purpose), there’s no problem… but… where it is being used inexpertly, or for a purpose that it was not designed to meet, it creates more problems than it solves.
I can’t help feeling that a lot of the popular hate levelled at narration amongst modern audio-dramatists arises from its misuse (or from its inexpert use) rather than from a genuine problem inherent in narration itself.
I grew up listening to old time radio. Narration was a constant feature of those stories (and I am very used to it, so perhaps I am conditioned to not notice it as much). In my view, it can be a very efficient tool in the audio-dramatist’s tool-box. A moment or two of narration can introduce a story, set a scene, and/or shift a scene very quickly… and where brevity matters (and it almost always does), that can be helpful. It can also clarify a soundscape that would otherwise be ambiguous or difficult for the audience to decode.
THE REASON FOR NARRATION’S BAD REPUTATION
For some modern listeners, it has to be admitted, narration can break the fourth wall unnecessarily and destroys their sense of immersion, but, delivered quickly, in a single sentence or two, it can achieve its intended effect with barely any notice being taken. When delivered with immediacy (in the present tense) and via a character (either in dialog or voice-over) it can be even less intrusive.
More often than not, I believe, narration gets its bad name from being done badly. Bad narration takes a megaphone and draws attention to itself (breaking the sense of immersion created by the story). Usually, this is a function of length (too many words) or overloading (too many details).
For narration to work it must be brief and evoke rather than describe.
EFFECTIVE NARRATION
Audio drama can’t spend a lot of time painting scenes in the minds of its audience. It needs to get underway quickly and hook its listeners fast. We can, in our writing, rely on the audience’s imaginations to help us create our scenes, so few words are needed.
The words “in an office downtown…” are sufficient to bring a detailed downtown office to life in the minds of our listeners. These four words of narration can evoke the office, without describing it, and move us on to the action of the scene quickly. If the narration is short and the action starts right away, the audience will have forgotten the preceding narration before it has time to consciously register it (but it will have still accomplished its scene-setting purpose).
As noted earlier, this can be really helpful where time is a factor in our storytelling.
We could also set the scene through sound and dialog, of course (showing rather than telling), but it will usually take longer. There’s nothing wrong with this, but there is a trade-off at work and we need to understand that, when we avoid narration, we often sacrifice pace in order to supply the same information in a different way.
Badly handled narration, however, is far more problematic than poorly executed or slow-paced drama. Describing the decor, and the way the light filters through the begrimed window, and the fly that buzzes nearby the overhead fan, while evocative in its own way, is more likely to intrude in a drama and draws attention to itself as prose and away from the story.
Poor narration, clearly, has many problems, but I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Narration can still be used very effectively as a tool for scene setting, clarifying action, and pacing (so long as brevity is emphasised). If you narrate no more than is strictly essential to your purpose, and if you use it to quickly focus attention on the drama, it can be helpful. Overuse narration, or indulge in long detail-laden monologues, and it will distract from the story it is trying to serve.
THE UNIQUE NEEDS AND LIMITATIONS OF AUDIO DRAMA
On the issue of “show, don’t tell”, I had a long discussion with a novelist friend of mine not long ago. In the novel, description is helpful, but you want to reveal detail through action (character interaction etc.) wherever possible. This is equally true of audio-drama. However, audio-drama has a number of unique features and challenges that the novel does not. Likewise, it differs significantly from live theatre and film/television in some unique ways.
The audio drama, regardless of its reach, has an audience of one. The action plays out behind the audience member’s eyes, on the viewscreen of their imagination. In this regard, it is much more like a book than it is like a play or tv performance. We don’t get the benefit of crowd psychology (the engagement that occurs when viewing something with a crowd around us), but the writer doesn’t need to do as much work setting scenes either.
The fact that we tell our stories to single audience members rather than groups means we don’t have to command attention in the same way as public performances do. We don’t have to signal that it is time to begin listening. We can just begin. And we don’t have to dress our sets with rich detail and spend time describing them in order to convince our audience members that they are real – the audience member builds our sets for us.
We do, however, have to make the action clear without the aid of the visual sense. Sometimes, therefore, showing is necessarily a function of description – and that description can be fairly artificial – after all, no-one in real life says “Look out, Pam. Charlie’s got a gun”. In real-life (or on the silver screen) its apparent to everyone that Charlie has a gun and the event requires no such pronouncements. For this reason characters in an audio drama often verbalize actions that would never be spoken aloud in the real world or that would simply be shown on screen.
Likewise, the audio-dramatist needs to provide narrative cues for those sounds that are ambiguous. And many sounds are ambiguous. Crackling cellophane can be used both to indicate a fire, and a thundershower. What makes the difference? The listener’s imagination, prodded by the scriptwriter!
Ambiguous sounds require “stage-setting” or guidance from the writer. This stage-setting should generally occur before the sound is introduced to prevent confusion. If the listener is thinking “conveyor-belt” before the sound is identified as a “waterfall”, then confusion will result.
Generally, the identification of a sound is made through dialogue or narration, but occasionally through other sounds. It doesn’t need to be explicit; an implied identification is often all that is required.
In many cases, sounds become clear through context (through the plot itself), via perfectly natural references in dialogue and narration.
Sounds which always need identification include rain, a waterfall, a river, manufacturing noises, thunder, an automobile, and an aeroplane.
Despite the surface similarity to the novel that arises as a result of the “audience of one” phenomena, the immediacy of audio drama results in a faster pace. Long scene building introductions, physical descriptions, and verbal explorations of emotion and inner life, are not merely unnecessary but tend to turn our audiences off.
The reader of a novel can skip about and control the pace of the work themselves (skipping boring sections entirely, if they so choose). This is not true of (or at least much harder for) the listener to an audio-drama. They must follow the story at the pace it is presented (and for this reason, the pace of drama is necessarily much faster than that of the novel).
The story contained in a novel that takes twelve hours to read, can be dramatized in less than one-third of that time. A dramatization is expected to present the action with economy and to not waste its listeners’ time. If the pacing is clunky, audience members will abandon the story rather than skip forward. As such the action must be continually moving forward with economy (even in a contemplative work).
Narration that slows the pace unnecessarily (and there are times when slowing the pace is necessary) and draws attention to itself rather than moving the story forward, is our enemy. But where it moves the story forward, clarifies the action, is delivered with brevity (without an unnecessary word) and harnesses the imagination of the audience to quickly evoke details, mood etc., it is our friend.
USING NARRATION WELL
There are at least three places where narration can be helpful. It is not essential to use narration in these locations, but short narration can be a good fit here.
The Opening of the Story.
A typical audio drama needs to establish who, where, and when as quickly as possible. A quick narration is among the most economical ways of dealing with the opening. The introductory narration may be carried by one or more voices or it may be dramatized, but there’s no denying that two or three lines of narration can establish the opening faster than a dramatic dialog.
NARRATOR: Deep in the Kentucky Woods, two men creep from room to room in the darkened Westerley mansion, unaware of the dark presence that haunts its halls…
The Opening of a Scene and its Transition.
While rarely necessary, a narrated transition between scenes can save time, establishing the new scene (time, place, mood etc.) in a sentence or two without feeling like clunky character exposition, essentially moving the story forward more quickly than would occur if the scene had to be established through dialog alone.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Sam returns to his down-at-heel rented office in search of a fresh shirt and a bottle of rye…
The Closing of the Story.
Once the climax of the story has been reached, there is often little in the denouement to keep the audience’s attention. For the story to feel complete, of course, there must be a denouement (an opportunity to see our characters enjoying the fruits of their victories). This can be dramatized, but, for the sake of brevity, can also be covered quickly via a few lines of narration. The clear advantage of this is that it allows the listener to quickly exit the story after the moment of highest dramatic interest, maintaining the climax as the focus of the story.
NARRATOR: A few days later, Alice and Jim sit on the balcony overlooking the park and toasting the memory of the friends they lost to the monster of sixth street…
In each case above, narration is useful as a means of establishing context and then getting out of the way of the key elements of the dramatic presentation. It is effectively a time-saving way to get to the most interesting (from an audience’s point of view) moments in the story by compressing the least interesting (descriptive) elements. Where time is not a factor, a more leisurely approach is of course quite legitimate and the scene setting, transition, and closure can all be handled with sound and dramatic dialog. But, even here, it is no crime to opt for brevity through narration. After all, our audiences are hardly likely to object if we use the tools available to us to quickly focus their attention on the most interesting dramatic moments in the story and minimize the time spent on less important things.
CONCLUSION
Does narration destroy the illusion of immersion? Sometimes, but often no more than a clunky piece of scene-setting dramatic dialog, or a difficult to interpret soundscape. The extent to which immersion is broken varies from listener to listener as well. Perhaps I’ll leave the last word to Erik Barnouw, who wrote, back in 1947, …
Some producers feel that a narrator injected into the middle of the program “spoils the illusion.” This is doubtful. An illusion, after all, is not something foisted on the listener against his will.
Some debates are, simply, never-ending. As a writer, I feel its best to choose the tool that I feel is right for the job and wield it with as much expertise as I can, without discarding it simply because it has been used badly in the past.
This article is © 2017 by Philip Craig Robotham – all rights reserved.
What’s your view on narration? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Let me know in the comments below.
