Narratee

My friend Meg from my critique group introduced a bunch of vocabulary words at our last meeting, and I have found one particularly helpful this week.  That word is Narratee, or he receptive target to whom a narrator tells the story.  This can be another character in the story, a character in a frame narrative, or a reader/listener that the narrator imagines writing/speaking to.

When we talked about this at critique group, it seemed pretty self-explanatory, especially since usually my narratee is the same as my implied reader (or whoever I imagine reading my story).  The narratee and the implied reader are the same person, who is a stranger whom my narrator does not address directly. 

I saw this as a restriction that you have to think about when you decide to do something like using diary entries or letters.  In those cases, you want to get information across to your reader, but you have to keep in mind that in a letter from your main character to their sister, the sister is already aware of all the background and saying something artless like, "as you know, our parents died four years ago in a car accident," is pretty silly.  So a writer has to get creative in how they address the gap between the narratee and the implied reader.

But then I started work on a short story, where my initial idea was "a woman at The Moth open mic explains that there are different kinds of werewolves."  And once I got going, I realized that the opposite of how I had understood this concept was happening.  My narrator is telling a story where when the audience (the narratees) need information, she can straight out explain how things work.  This is perfectly acceptable in live storytelling events.  You can say, "For those of you not familiar with Starbucks, it works like this..." And it works because the audience either

• doesn't know the information but needs it to understand the story and is therefore appreciative
• does know the information already, but understands that others in the audience might not and can wait while it is explained
• does know the information, but finds the explanation amusing because it's familiar

So, since the narratee in this situation is not one person with a set experience, but a group of people all coming from different places, it allows for some wiggle room.  

As I've moved through the process of writing the draft of this story, if gained a few layers (thank goodness) and I've thought a couple of times about if it would serve the story better to drop the whole story telling event framework and make it more like my usual short stories.  But then I would lose that direct address.  "I know you don't know about werewolves, so let me explain."  Info dumps like this are generally frowned upon unless there is some direct address, so losing that direct address to a specific group of narratees would require a re-write and a re-thinking of how the information is presented.  Plus I would lose the joke that the narrator is supposed to be telling a true story, but gets up and talks about werewolves.