The alternating POV in Farthing and Ha'Penny is almost too simple to consider as structure.
What it gives me though is tension between the two things, in the "piece of thread on a loom" sense of "tension" and the other sense.
With the bit that was irritating me in Ha'Penny what was actually irritating me was external to that, in that I couldn't move events up. This is a mild spoiler, but I bet it'll be in the blurb and you're not going to read it anyway -- some people are trying to kill Hitler at the first night of a production of Hamlet. And I couldn't change when the first night was going to be, so I had to have events take that many days, in both threads. No, but now I think about it I did get something out of it structurally, I got a whole bit of plot, because something had to happen.
This is interesting, to me anyway, but long. Sorry.
You know my theory about genre as pacing -- different genres have different expectations of pacing, and that's what makes Phases of Gravity (Simmons, mimetic novel about astronauts with SF pacing) an SF novel and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Byatt, novella about female academic finding a bottle with a genie in it with literary pacing) not a fantasy story. Well there's also the theory, which I think is Teresa's, but maybe Mike Ford, that plot is what stops everything happening at the same time.
Well, structure helps tell you when things need to happen, it helps you keep the pacing right, and it says "you need an event here if you're going to get to the end at the right speed". What the event will be is dictated by genre, by the characters, by everything else that has happened, but the need for the event is structural. And if I have the shape when I start I can trust that the events I need will come along when I need them, because the specifics don't matter, as long as the shape is right. That's why I can write without knowing what happens.
And the other thing structure can do is help you balance. So in Farthing (which you've read but spoilers, anyone who hasn't read it, spoilers,) I'm playing with a mystery pace and an SF pace, and it has to do both, and that's forcing the structure, and I have both POVs alternating and one is a first-headlong POV and the other is a slow descriptive third, which it has to be so that I can do the end. I didn't know I was going to do that end until half way through, my first plan was going with mystery pacing and sorting everything out, and half way through I saw that the SF end was the end I wanted. But what I was going to say was, the two threads are perfectly balanced. They're a figure 8 shape, the first half coming together and then the second half. And in the second half where they don't connect at all, once it opens out again, every introduction of a new character in one is balanced by the introduction of a new character in the other -- Mrs Simons and Agnes Timms, Abby and the dowager Lady Thirkie, even every journey is balanced, and (just noticed this) that's why Carmichael can't go home onstage -- until the end where there are again the two opposite threads, one opening out and the other closing down.
So structure suggested to me balance, and because I was writing it very fast and very much from the back of my head I went with it rather than against it and it meant that when I wanted to do the end, I could see all the way to that end and everything I'd need to do, because I had the structure supporting me.
I call this looking at a story from on top, because from inside it's linear, but from on top you can see the shape.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-07-11 02:42 pm (UTC)The alternating POV in Farthing and Ha'Penny is almost too simple to consider as structure.
What it gives me though is tension between the two things, in the "piece of thread on a loom" sense of "tension" and the other sense.
With the bit that was irritating me in Ha'Penny what was actually irritating me was external to that, in that I couldn't move events up. This is a mild spoiler, but I bet it'll be in the blurb and you're not going to read it anyway -- some people are trying to kill Hitler at the first night of a production of Hamlet. And I couldn't change when the first night was going to be, so I had to have events take that many days, in both threads. No, but now I think about it I did get something out of it structurally, I got a whole bit of plot, because something had to happen.
This is interesting, to me anyway, but long. Sorry.
You know my theory about genre as pacing -- different genres have different expectations of pacing, and that's what makes Phases of Gravity (Simmons, mimetic novel about astronauts with SF pacing) an SF novel and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Byatt, novella about female academic finding a bottle with a genie in it with literary pacing) not a fantasy story. Well there's also the theory, which I think is Teresa's, but maybe Mike Ford, that plot is what stops everything happening at the same time.
Well, structure helps tell you when things need to happen, it helps you keep the pacing right, and it says "you need an event here if you're going to get to the end at the right speed". What the event will be is dictated by genre, by the characters, by everything else that has happened, but the need for the event is structural. And if I have the shape when I start I can trust that the events I need will come along when I need them, because the specifics don't matter, as long as the shape is right. That's why I can write without knowing what happens.
And the other thing structure can do is help you balance. So in Farthing (which you've read but spoilers, anyone who hasn't read it, spoilers,) I'm playing with a mystery pace and an SF pace, and it has to do both, and that's forcing the structure, and I have both POVs alternating and one is a first-headlong POV and the other is a slow descriptive third, which it has to be so that I can do the end. I didn't know I was going to do that end until half way through, my first plan was going with mystery pacing and sorting everything out, and half way through I saw that the SF end was the end I wanted. But what I was going to say was, the two threads are perfectly balanced. They're a figure 8 shape, the first half coming together and then the second half. And in the second half where they don't connect at all, once it opens out again, every introduction of a new character in one is balanced by the introduction of a new character in the other -- Mrs Simons and Agnes Timms, Abby and the dowager Lady Thirkie, even every journey is balanced, and (just noticed this) that's why Carmichael can't go home onstage -- until the end where there are again the two opposite threads, one opening out and the other closing down.
So structure suggested to me balance, and because I was writing it very fast and very much from the back of my head I went with it rather than against it and it meant that when I wanted to do the end, I could see all the way to that end and everything I'd need to do, because I had the structure supporting me.
I call this looking at a story from on top, because from inside it's linear, but from on top you can see the shape.