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:

[avram]

Hm. I also say "I" as "eye", but have no problem parsing "Ah" as I, southern dialect. Maybe because it's such a common thing, especially in comics, it's become a standard convention. (Enough so that for Captain Confederacy, Will Shetterly considered having the USA characters talk in a spelled-out Northern dialect -- "eye" for "I".)

I sometimes have trouble with British dialects. The book I'm reading now has a minor character who delivers some dialog in a Cornish dialect, and it's sort of half-spelled out (the author uses non-standard spellings for some words, and for other uses the standard spellings, but adds parentheticals pointing out how they're being pronounced), but I still don't know what a Cornish dialect sounds like, so it never produces a reliable accent in my head.

Re: More risks:

[kate_nepveu]

Southern dialect in novels is common enough that I can usually parse it, though it takes some effort--but spelling things differently seems overdone and grates on my nerves something awful (getting through that translation of _Lysistrata_ that casts the Spartans as Southern hicks was really painful).

Re: More risks:

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Weird British ones are just as bad for me -- if not worse -- than weird US ones.

Just FYI, what a Cornish accent sounds like is old pirate movies. (Maybe new pirate movies too, I don't know, I haven't seen any. I hate pirates. Also zombies.) But all that "Arrgh, I do be zaying zo me hearties" is pretty much an exaggeration of how the people in Cornwall were talking when I was there.