Yesterday, I touched on narrative units in writing, and how I found games a lot easier on that front than prose. I'm going to try to poke at that idea a little more here. To reiterate the nature of this blog: this is intended to be a messy thought sketch where I'm thinking on the page and trying to move closer to a thought, rather than something declarative and pre-baked.
I'm reasonably certain I got the term 'narrative units' from Hannah Nicklin's Writing for Games, which is singularly fantastic. Without checking back, I can't be sure, and I might have come across it somewhere previous to that, but credit where it's almost definitely due as it's super helpful in exploring this concept.
So narrative units are a slightly squishy concept, but I'd define them as the divisible pieces of writing or narrative that constitute 'a work'. What constitutes a 'unit' to me varies depending on the precise depth in which you're looking and your current frame of reference. There are a few larger categories which occur to me offhand:
Dramatic units like scenes, acts, even broader plot beats.
Form-specific units like storylets, comic pages and panels, audiologs, barks, in-game lore texts, chapters.
Atomic units like lines of dialogue, words, sentences, paragraphs.
Dramatic units I think are broadly applicable everywhere. They're fairly high-level, and refer to more generalised narrative concepts that will apply most of the time regardless of the form in which you're working.
'Form' is another word I've been using heavily since reading Nicklin's book. I think it's usefully more specific than 'medium', though, looking back to refresh my memory, it's more malleable:
‘Form’ might feel a little woolly as a definitional term at this point. Sometimes I’ve used it to describe what I’ve also called’ structure’ (the form a story takes), and also the formal expectations of the medium and of genre. That’s okay though, because ‘form’ is a word that simply means the ‘shape’ of something - the shape we design or a set of expectations about how things are usually shaped.
The meaning of 'form’ is modified by context – structural form, media form, genre form. I’ve touched on ‘form-driven design/storytelling’ as a kind of approach too – using the shape of structure, genre, or medium to underline or contrast with the content. Elements of form in games are ways the storytelling is shaped by the writer, the design, the gameplay, and by the player. These elements include:
So, to clarify, I'm currently using the word 'form' to distinguish between, say, video games, interactive fiction, TV, novels, etc. -- what are often called 'mediums'. I'm already coming to regret this terminology, but that's for me to fix in a future post.
I'm now finding the need to distinguish slightly between form and... it's hard to put a term on it. There's a difference between a dialogue-based format vs prose-based one. Dialogue-based formats fit within a bunch of different forms -- (parts of) video games where words are written for VO, text-only dialogue (that's still not prose per se), theatrical scripts, film scripts, audio drama, etc. Those are different forms with a common format. Prose is also not a form per se. The forms could be personal essay, novel, short-story, video games that use in-game prose in some way, and so on -- each with their own affordances -- but there is still a commonality of prose behind them. Maybe this is where 'medium' is useful, in the physical sense of 'an intervening substance'. Yes, that feels right.
The form-specific units are usually key, because they bridge the gap between the more generalised dramatic units and the specific shape of the form you're working in. You could break a story entirely in dramatic units before even thinking about the form-specific ones. You might have an entire story worked out before even settling on a form through which to tell it! But there's then an additional breaking step to map the general dramatic units onto the form-specific ones.
The atomic units are more, for me, about the execution of very specific things. Pacing and flow within a scene. Just the right-feeling word choice. Rhythm and prosody. They're still connected to everything else, but they're a more granular part of the writing process.
All of the different units have stuff in common. The key things are that they generally seek to convey specific information (you could call this 'purpose' more broadly or 'content') and achieve specific effects for the audience. Whenever I'm struggling or need to force myself to be more specific, those are the two elements I fall back on for a given unit ('What is the actual purpose of this scene and how do I want it to make them feel.' 'What does this specific sentence need to convey to set up the next bit. What tone do I want it to set?'). That's the same when breaking the story in a dramatic context or when doing it for the form-specific units. But also at the atomic level -- when it's not working intuitively, interrogating the content and the effect work well for me.
(I would love to give some specific examples here, but it's 28 degrees in my office and I've been steaming like a ham all day.)
To the point from yesterday that inspired this post: I think with prose specifically, I have a fairly loose grasp on what the form-specific units are. Pages feel less meaningful in this context; chapters certainly are meaningful but are also too macro to stand alone for my purposes. Scenes could just stand as a form-specific unit rather than a dramatic one, but again that feels like muddying the distinctions a bit.
With games, the form-specific units are often very visible and legible (storylets! audiologs! barks!) -- often to the player directly, and certainly to the developer. With prose, I think they're less so.
Something for me to interrogate further, then, is the idea of something like 'sequences' or 'blocks' which represent a form-specific unit in prose as a thinking tool when writing and revising, to enable clarity of purpose and effect.