Narrative voice
“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”
That is the first sentence in the novel “True Grit” written by Charles Portis and evidently per this glowing review by LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan, the opening dialogue in the Coen brothers’ new version of the movie.
Let’s read that line again:
“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”
Spoken by the film’s Protagonist Mattie Ross, we learn about the central conceit of the movie (a revenge story), one unusual narrative element (it involves a 14 year-old girl), but perhaps most importantly we get a clear sense of Mattie’s voice. As Turan writes in his review:
That bleak but completely delightful Portis novel, in which a much older Mattie remembers the frontier West of the 1870s, has been charming and disconcerting people since it was published in 1968. The key reason is the vim and vigor of Mattie’s irrepressible narrative voice, which more than one critic has compared favorably to Huck Finn’s. Yes, it’s that good.
In this case, the narrative voice is an actual narrator. But the idea of narrative voice extends to all stories regardless of whether they have a narrator (V.O.) or not. Narrative voice is the invisible character in your story, the one present in scene description, pace, transitions from scene to scene, how you handle the writing of each scene, and so on.
I have a formula for narrative voice. It’s this:
Genre + Style = Narrative Voice.
At a bare minimum, the style you use must be in concert with the genre. If you’re writing a comedy, the style must be funny. If you’re writing a thriller, the style must be thrilling. If you’re writing a drama, the style must be dramatic.
But narrative voice goes beyond that. If you fully embrace the idea of it, you will find yourself approaching your stylistic choices with a specific character in mind: the person who is ‘telling’ the story. Again even if you have no narrator, there is this invisible character — your narrative voice — who is handling the disposition of scene description and all the rest (as noted above), and they have their own voice.
An easy way to get a sense of this is to read the first 10 pages of several scripts by different writers in different genres. You will see the styles all differ from one another, a reflection of their distinctive narrative voices. You can get a taste of that in my series Scene Description Spotlight. A few examples:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
So the next time you sit down to start writing a script, think about Mattie Ross, how singular her narrative voice is. Try your best to find your story’s narrative voice and put that to work in the style of your writing.
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