Problems with Narrator Perspective and Character Personality

Zach Kazanski ·
narrativeprose

A recent reading from my cousin-in-law said that the writing sounded juvenile. This was verbatim. Her feedback was after reading chapter 5, narrated from the point of view of Napoleon when he’s having an interaction with his sister and sending the Polish legion off to Haiti.

There are two issues here that she helped identify.

  • One, the atmospheric content and description is bland, mainly because it’s not talking about how Napoleon is experiencing the things around him. It’s the narrator narrating what is happening, which doesn’t respect the autonomy, the philosophical disposition, background, and life story of whoever the narrator is.
  • Two, the conversations between Napoleon and his sister were difficult to follow because they both sounded exactly the same. In theory, they should have similar vocabulary as they both were born and raised in the same type of environment, but their life experiences as a man and a woman, as an emperor and as the emperor’s sister, are going to be different, and so their life philosophies and dispositions will be different. Therefore the way they communicate should demonstrate that.

Furthermore, my sister-in-law notably pointed out that the narrator themselves should be using similar language for the narration parts as well, since it’s from their perspective and inner dialogue. For example, in books where the character narrating is pretentious, they should write things pretentiously. Great writing will leave the reader feeling that the narratoris pretentiousness insufferable. A strong viseral reaction. You don’t get that with the current chapter 5 draft.

Here are somes excerpts from the very beginning of the lastest chapter 5 draft:

Napoleon stood on the quay before dawn and watched the fleet assemble in the fog. Forty ships. Twenty thousand soldiers. Two hundred cannon. Cavalry horses stamping in the holds, their hooves drumming against green wood. Surgeons, engineers, administrators, a colonial government compressed into wooden hulls and waiting for the tide. The harbor smelled of pitch and brine and sawdust of last-minute carpentry. The largest expedition since Egypt.

He found Pauline on the flagship, wrapped in furs against the cold, a glass of wine already in her hand at seven in the morning. The fur was Russian sable. She had a talent for wearing the spoils of nations she could not find on a map. She was twenty-one, dark hair loose against the sable. Half the officers in Paris had seen her naked. The other half were lying about it. “Brother.” She didn’t turn from the railing. “How thoughtful of you to come see me off. I’m touched. Truly.” “You’re drunk.” “I’m warming up. There’s a difference.” She sipped her wine. “But then, relaxation requires a soul. And you traded yours for a hat years ago.” His jaw tightened. The ulcer flared. “Someone should lecture you. God knows your husband won’t.”

Potential Remedy

My cousin-in-law suggested The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah for a great modern example of immersive writing. Reading and analyzing Kristin’s book is on my todo list, but since that will take time, my current task is to try tackling the issue of narrator perspective and personlity.

To remedy this problem, I’m going to attempt to create character files inside of the story folder (read more about the story folder and its purpose here). That will contain not only example prose from the character’s perspective and how they would typically communicate with vocabulary they would use, but it will also contain their philosophical outlook on life in terms of metaphysics, ethics, ambiguity, knowledge, relationships, and other such topics that are important to the character. These will of course be informed by Philippe and I and our particular dispositions about life and about people and how they interact.

If this works with a single chapter, we will run another experiment whereas we loop through each chapter writing each paragraph (see our post on the authoring loop) and updating a blank character file that maintains the author’s knowledge about the characters at that point in the story, as well as the reader’s knowledge about the characters at that point in the story, and have that continuously update as paragraphs are written so that the AI can maintain cohesive memories or narratives about characters in the story and who they are, similar to how a traditional author would keep those memories or a person would of people in their life.

Execution

We built two things: character files and a POV editing command.

Character Files

For each character who narrates or speaks in the novel, we created a detailed voice file in story/characters/. Each file has nine sections:

  1. Identity Summary , who they are and their arc
  2. Voice and Language , vocabulary, register shifts, verbal tics, what they would never say
  3. Perception and Attention , what they notice first, what they skip, their metaphor domain
  4. Psychology and Personality , behavioral patterns, defense mechanisms, stress responses
  5. Philosophy and Worldview , operating assumptions, moral framework, blind spots
  6. Relationships and Opinions , how they see every other character
  7. Dialogue Signature , conversational posture, humor, sentence rhythm, go-to moves
  8. Narration Mode , what the prose sounds like from inside their head, and how their presence affects other characters’ narration
  9. Key Symbols and Objects , recurring physical details tied to the character

The edit-pov Command

We wrote a slash command (/edit-pov) that takes a chapter file and rewrites it from the POV character’s perspective. The process:

  1. Read the source text and identify every character present
  2. Determine the POV character by checking whose interiority the narrator accesses
  3. Load the full story context (plot outline, motifs, sequence structure)
  4. Load every relevant character file, paying special attention to the POV character’s Voice, Perception, and Narration Mode sections, and to non-POV characters’ Dialogue Signature sections
  5. Rewrite the passage so that everything is filtered through the POV character’s perception patterns, using their metaphor domain and vocabulary in narration, and rendering each speaking character’s dialogue consistent with their voice file
  6. Self-edit against the character files to verify the narration could only belong to this specific POV character

Result

The rewrite changed many lines of narration while preserving the dialogue and plot beats.

Here is the original opening:

Napoleon stood on the quay before dawn and watched the fleet assemble in the fog. Forty ships. Twenty thousand soldiers. Two hundred cannon. Cavalry horses stamping in the holds, their hooves drumming against green wood. Surgeons, engineers, administrators, a colonial government compressed into wooden hulls and waiting for the tide. The harbor smelled of pitch and brine and sawdust of last-minute carpentry. The largest expedition since Egypt.

And the rewrite:

Forty ships. Twenty thousand soldiers. Two hundred cannon. Fourteen hundred cavalry horses in the holds, their hooves drumming against green timber like rolling barrages muffled by distance. Surgeons, engineers, administrators, a colonial government packed into wooden hulls the way ammunition racks a caisson, and every hull waiting for the tide.

Napoleon counted the masts.

The fog made the harbor a problem of triangulation. Each ship sat at a fixed point on a grid he could not see but could calculate from the delay between shouted commands carrying across the water. One second of delay per hundred and sixty toises. He placed each vessel without needing to see it. Pitch. Brine. Sawdust from the last joints nailed at midnight. The largest deployment since Toulon. Three weeks to design. Four months to assemble. The ratio was acceptable.

Here is the original treatment of Napoleon’s ulcer:

Napoleon’s hand moved inside his coat, resting against his stomach. The old habit. The ulcer had been burning since three in the morning, a low gnawing ache beneath his ribs that every surgeon blamed on something different and every campaign made worse.

And the rewrite:

His hand moved inside his coat and pressed the heel of the palm against his stomach. The ulcer had been working since three in the morning, a coal bed that flared when he leaned forward, dulled when he stood straight, and burned regardless. Every surgeon blamed a different organ. No surgeon could quiet it. He pressed harder. The pain narrowed to a point, became a coordinate he could fix. He released the pressure and it spread again, shapeless.

The Pauline scene:

The columns in his mind, the inventories, the grid of ships and men, lost their alignment. She did this. She was the only one who did this.

And after he descends the gangway, the grid snaps back:

Forty hulls at anchor, each one a figure in a calculation he had already closed. His boots struck the quay stone and the grid locked back into place, clean and cold and holding.

What We Learned

Character files work. The narration now sounds like it could only come from Napoleon’s head, although there is a bit overuse of the same metaphors that are laid out into the charcater file. We will do some massaging of the prompt to ensure varied metaphors get used.

The next step is to build character files for every POV character in the novel (Andrzej, Erzulie) and run the same experiment on their chapters.

- Zach