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

Re: More risks:

[mikeda.livejournal.com]

The gender of one of the major characters in "At Amberleaf Fair" (by Phyllis Ann Karr) is kept ambiguous through the entire novel.

It's actually done reasonably subtly, as the storyline for this particular character doesn't depend on the character's gender.

Re: More risks:

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Melissa Scott does this in The Kindly Ones. I thought it worked.