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

[kate_nepveu]

Ah, that's a good one. Not only do you have suspension of disbelief, as you say & as papersky has said about the Tiffany problem, but you also don't have the weight behind things that the author would like--all that stuff that comes with the historical incident or person mentioned.

And unless you're in a really particular form of narrative, you can't put footnotes in explain either.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Actually figuring out what ordinary people know is a hell of a trick.

I sometimes ask things in my LJ specifically to assess how much I need to ground things. For instance, for Ha'Penny, I asked whether I'd need to explain habeus corpus and the responses I got made it perfectly plain that I would have to explain it far more than I'd imagined was necessary.

When I am talking to someone, if I want to talk about something I can stop and ask them where I need to start from, I either know that they already know about X, or I can ask. For instance, I have a gorgeous button that is a view of Europa in false blues that beamjockey gave me, and when fans ask me what it is, I say that, and if non-fans, I expand to "Europa, the moon of Jupiter". But when you're writing you have to make assumptions -- you can assume an SF reading audience knows Europa, but when it comes to history, what do they know? You can't hope for the precise degree of information you want to connect on.

I once wanted to run an alternate history RPG about the Catiline Conspiracy, for which I needed a group of players who knew a bit about the Catiline Conspiracy. I didn't want people who'd never heard of it or Cicero experts, I wanted people who had a vague notion of when it was and how it went so they knew approximately who people were and where things were going off the rails. I never got to run it.

Heck, I wrote The Prize in the Game because I'd mis-assessed how much intelligent rasfw readers, as represented by you, knew about the Tain.

[avocadovpx.livejournal.com]

>> Actually figuring out what ordinary people know is a hell of a trick.

I find this to be an underappreciated secret of writing, not just of SFF or historical fiction, but especially of writing comedy.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, that would be almost worse in comedy, wouldn't it?

[avocadovpx.livejournal.com]

Probably so, because I could probably read a book about a part of history I didn't know, and still enjoy the book. I could even go read up on the history, come back to reread the book, and enjoy it more the second time.

But hearing a joke that requires me to know a piece of information that I don't know -- that joke won't be funny when I hear it before I know the information, and it won't be funny after I've heard it and learned the information too late. The author needs to know that I know it, or the author needs to provide it in a way that I don't find obtrusive or annoying.

It also won't be funny if I know that information but don't recall it fast enough. It's almost as if the comedian needs to make sure that that piece of information has been moved into my immediate grasp before the joke can be told.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I had no idea how few people know what the word "memoir" means until I wrote one, and had about fifty conversations in which I said that I'd written a memoir, and five minutes later the person I was talking to said, "Oh! So all that really happened!"

Then I began saying, "A memoir, that is to say a true story..." Every now and then someone haughtily replies, "I know what a memoir is!"

But I think my favorite example of unexpected things people don't know was when it was revealed over dinner that my agent, who is a very educated and smart person, and also older than me, thought that a pony was an adolescent horse.

[kate_nepveu]

thought that a pony was an adolescent horse

. . . you mean it's not?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

No, they're a type of horse, any age, that's bred to be small.

[kate_nepveu]

Gosh. Learn something new every day.

[avocadovpx.livejournal.com]

>> Every now and then someone haughtily replies, "I know what a memoir is!"

Grrr, I hate those "can't win" moments. Console yourself with the thought that, if your life were a TV show, that would be the moment you could turn to the audience and roll your eyes, and they would laugh in sympathy with you at the absurdity of it.

At least, they always did for Bob Newhart.