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:

[kate_nepveu]

Well, you've got two things going there, gender ambiguity, and gender disguise. About which I think I am going to agree with you at length.

Ambiguity I think is less risky when it doesn't matter, in which category I would put Caudwell's series. Or when it _does_ matter and that's the point, your reanalysis--alas I have to spoiler-protect a book title here, which is really not optimal, but there's no other way of doing it: rzzn ohyy'f obar qnapr.

The only time I can think of that gender disguise would be a narrative strategy is when the POV character is passing as one gender but the reader doesn't know that--like a murder mystery in which the POV character is also the murderer. That's a very tricky thing to do--which isn't to say it couldn't work, but would be tough, just from a "playing fair" perspective.

Gender disguise as a plot element does have a lot of stereotypes to navigate; I think you should make it another Bittercon panel, done well and poorly, and then leave a link back here! =>