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kate_nepveu) wrote2007-05-25 09:37 pm
Bittercon: Risky Narrative Strategies
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>.
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Narrative threads that don't intersect.
I inevitably get bored and start reading one to the exclusion of another.
Things I mean: Dave Duncan's _Past Imperative_, IIRC, has two plot threads going (on different worlds?) and doesn't bring them together. While I imagine they intersect in the next book, or maybe the one after that, I just lost interest in one.
Peg Kerr's _The Wild Swans_. Caveat: I haven't read this, but I understand from descriptions that it's two threads set at different historical periods and connected by theme only.
Things I don't mean: Well, _Melusine_, since I knew that the threads *would* meet up before the end of the book.
Books where the threads start out together and then diverge, such as _The Lord of the Rings_, though I continue to go back and forth whether the long middle would have been better interleaved rather than split into different books.
What do other people think about this? About other structural things that they find risky?
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I'm assuming you don't mean like Melusine or Farthing where you have alternating POVs but it's all closely connected.
I think where there are intertwining threads as in LOTR I don't have a problem with it, though Z hates it if you get a sharp cut from, as he puts it, "The orcs were bearing down on them, how could they possibly escape?" to "The duchess sighed as she poured another cup of tea". He won't read The Song of Ice and Fire for this reason.
But to answer your real question, when you have two threads where the first thread is characters A in situation A and the second is characters B in situation B, and they might be on different planets (The Stone Canal, though actually some of the characters are the same but you can't tell) or different times or a long way apart, then both threads have to hold me. Also, if they don't show signs of coming together, I tend to get grumpy. I think it's a real risk.
There's also the related risk of starting off with characters A in situation A which is the prologue, and just when the reader is starting to be comfortable with this, suddenly they're snatched away and you're given a new set. Weber does this so many times in Off Armageddon Reef that I was getting whiplash and was very cautious about relaxing when it did seem that we were actually into the real story now. (The trouble some people will go to to get a reasonable set up for a sea battle!) Also Cherryh does this in Foreigner, which would IMO be a much better book without it, if you just started with Bren, with whom you are going to spend the next 9 books, after all.
Connie Willis said, about Doomsday Book that when you have two narrative threads, you have to use each one to drive the tension in the other one. That's certainly a thing I'm doing with alternative POVs in the Farthing books -- you can have one character and the reader know something, and you can provide tension while the other character innocently has a cup of tea not knowing it, when you know it's about to become really important. I used this as a ratchet at the end of Ha'Penny, which has a sort of thriller pace end. It's definitely a risk though.
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No, _Farthing_ I could see what the connection was, and _Melusine_ I knew that they'd meet within the book, so I could wait until they did. It's your A+A & B+B that's a problem for me--I suppose theoretcially there might be a case where I found each equally compelling, but I get *very* willing to just chuck one of the strands because I can't see why it _matters_.
Whiplash is rarer for me. I know some people complained mightily about _Tigana_, but, well, that was the *point*--which is not to say that they weren't right to be annoyed. I had that reaction to a Heyer, I remember--oh, _The Toll-Gate_.
Anyway, readers expect that stuff's in a story for a reason, and these problems come down to breaking that expectation, or at least not fulfilling it soon enough, I think.
Also, dramatic irony and its cousins are cool. =>
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I didn't know that, either. Probably because I completely dropped reading the one storyline.
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