Bittercon: Risky Narrative Strategies

[kate_nepveu]

Bittercon panel number two. Yes, my personal biases are showing; what of it?

Risky Narrative Strategies

Sarah Monette's Mélusine sends one of its two first-person narrators into a tailspin on his third page and drives him crazy before the chapter's over. It certainly doesn't play safe, but it's also risky because it gives the reader very little baseline for the character—particularly since the POV is so tight and he doesn't cross paths with the other narrator for a while. What other narrative strategies are risky, and how? Is information flow the principal kind of risk? In what books do risky strategies work, and in what don't they—but in interesting ways?

Presume that there will be spoilers for Mélusine and The Virtu within; for any other works, ROT13 spoilers or put them between <span style="color: #999999; background-color: #999999"> </span>.

Comments

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

If you have a really odd world, you should probably have less odd characters, and a reasonably calm prose style, and a plot people can follow.

I was thinking of mentioning Lifelode, but thought it wouldn't be fair to those who haven't had a chance to read it.

[kate_nepveu]

Actually, yeah, I think that also has a risky narrative strategy--at least, I think that the narrative form contributed to my feeling somewhat distanced from the story.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It's very weird.

I've fixed it a bit since you saw it, but it's still very weird.

Mind you, I learned a lot by writing it. Like, for instance, try not having everything weird at once next time!

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

There was a very poetically written s.f. novel I read back in the 90's, I think, called ? Winterlong? that managed to take a seriously odd (disturbing, even) world w/odd (disturbing, even) characters and (from what I recall, as I don't actually remember everything that happened so much as I remember some of the imagery) a difficult to follow plot that somehow worked for me, tho I found the overall atmosphere depressing and could only read it in relatively small doses at a time . . .