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]

Re: _Melusine_, _The Virtu_: it also surprised me to see how *different* the characters look from the outside, because of how very tight the POVs are. I'm leaning toward the idea that the POVs are sometimes unnecessarily tight when it comes to giving information about the world and the characters, but I'm working on a re-read so I can't say for sure.

I am of the opinion that the opening of _Melusine_ requires the reader to do a lot of work, backfilling as things become clear later, and while I'm used to doing that about *worlds*, it has a different effect on me when it comes to POV characters. Fortunately, there is Mildmay. *gives Mildmay cake, as someone-or-other said*

More risks:

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Stream-of-consciousness, dialects, unnecessary invented words, and anything else that forces you to stop and puzzle out just WTF the author is trying to say.

Blatant hiding information from the reader: especially changing the scene right before an obviously important conversation, or deleting important dialog from the scene. I get really annoyed if the missing information isn't revealed (or deducible) by the end of the book. Does anyone think Robert Jordan still remembers all those schemes that were started in the prologue of The Great Hunt?

Arranging scenes out of chronological order, especially if done specifically to fool the reader.

Re: More risks:

[snarp]

I feel like gender ambiguity - either a character whose gender is kept deliberately ambiguous, or one who's referred to as "he" or "she" for a while, then gets a Big Reveal - is one of the types of information-hiding most likely to fall flat on its face in a really serious way.

Sarah Caudwell and Ashinano Hitoshi are the only writers I can think of right off who have introduced a character who is definitely either male or female, then never bothered to mention which. Most writers want to hammer it out at some point, even if they just say "both" or "neither." Whatever the answer is, when it does come, it's going to temporarily jar the reader out of the story to recalibrate. Particularly if the setting's one in which gender roles matter seriously, and the character's been around for a long time, the reader automatically starts reanalyzing things.

Sometimes this is what the author wants the reader to do, and the story's set up in a way to make the reanalysis productive in some way (Shadow Man by Melissa Scott; Fruits Basket in a completely different way; presumably a certain sequence in Glory Season by David Brin). But sometimes the author just put the ambiguity in there "for fun" (not that there's anything wrong with that!), and if the reader doesn't share the author's culture/politics, it can ruin the whole experience for him/her. (See lots and lots of manga, but Mikiyo Tsuda's Day of Revolution and Princess Princess suffer from this particularly badly - I feel that the humiliation/self-loathing of girls-and-people-who-look-like-girls thing she does is mostly intended to be erotic (her yuri is pretty telling that way), but the way she presents it seems to make it too offensive to most Westerners to be readable as such.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Re: _Melusine_, _The Virtu_: it also surprised me to see how *different* the characters look from the outside, because of how very tight the POVs are.

I think it works better with Mildmay than with Felix. With Mildmay, the reader sees a pretty terrific guy, albeit with some significant flaws; but we certainly see that he's very smart although not formally educated. So it's shocking to see how badly he comes across to others, and gives us a lot of sympathy for him when people assume he's stupid and so forth, or can't understand his speech which, to us because we're hearing his inner monologue, is so charming, witty, and fluent.

Felix is such a self-centered ass that we need to see more of him being charismatic and charming other people; as it is, the interactions we see from the outside... actually don't contrast with his inner monologue, so it seems mere authorial fiat that other people are charmed by him.

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.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I would have had at least one chapter of Felix in his right mind and thinking he was in control of his life before everything collapses. As you say, risky. But I do like the books a lot -- and I'll make cake for Mildmay any day.

The trouble with risky things is that often I can't say if they work or not because if they lose me then I don't bother going on with them. Would you say the prose style of Moonwise was a risk? How about Cherryh telling a very usual story of a lone human among aliens, exclusively from the alien POV? When that sort of thing works, it really works.

I think you can take one risk. You can have one really weird thing. When you get more than that, you're asking the reader to work too hard. If you have a really odd world, you should probably have less odd characters, and a reasonably calm prose style, and a plot people can follow. If you're writing in this world you can get away with writing out of order a lot more easily, for instance.

[kate_nepveu]

I'm going to look for this wrt Felix on the re-read; I read _The Virtu_ much, much too fast and didn't absorb as much I as should have (principally what I retain is "laybrinths!" and "oh no, you DIDN'T!").

Re: More risks:

[kate_nepveu]

How could I forget dialects? I just can't read them. Authors who employ them should know that they are limiting their audience, because people who read by word recognition either won't read the story or will have a really hard time with it.

Similarly the blatant hiding from the reader: if I hadn't been on a kick of reading the whole Wimsey series, I probably would have stopped reading _The Five Red Herrings_ when I got to the page that said, "as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page." Gah!

I think your last two paragraphs can be boiled down to "treating the reader as an adversary"? Which then generalizes back up to China Mieville . . .

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! =>

[kate_nepveu]

I haven't read _Moonwise_, though I did like the first Chanur book and fully mean to get back to the series.

A one-risk-per-story guideline strikes me as similar to comments at the 2004 Worldcon panel on exposition, about one "to be explained" at a time. Which half makes me want, as a reader, to protest that I can handle it, really!--but then I come to my senses and remember I'm reading for enjoyment, not to prove my intellectual chops. => (That's what work is for.)

[kate_nepveu]

A narrative strategy that I find risky but many people don't seem to:

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?

Re: More risks:

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I hate dialects. You can do it with syntax and word choice, you don't have to mess with the spelling.

This is especially irritating when your phonetics are so far from the dialect being portrayed "phonetically" that you can't figure it out by reading it aloud. I say "I" as "eye" and reading "Ah" does absolutely nothing for me. I hate this of all things, it is anti-communication, it is an attack on the fundamental point of comprehensibility.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

They do sort of come together in The Wild Swans. The characters meet.

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.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Maybe I heard it and didn't actually think it, but somehow it got wired into my head a long time ago that mainstream lit is ordinary people in ordinary circs. Genre is extraordinary people in ordinary circs (argument aside about extraordinary "ordinary" folks as opposed to powers or aliens, or other-than-humans) or ordinary folks in extraordinary circs (going to another world, discovering vampires, or time gates here), but the most difficult to pull off is extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is no anchor point, so the writer has to try to build one by implication.

[nanne.livejournal.com]

GGKay's books have a lot of cliffhanger type transitions and explicit hiding of information. Although this technique is a little irritating after the 5th book or so ;-) he does provide a coherent picture in the end and I am content to watch the pieces fall into place. Likewise some of Iain Banks' novels. What's the one called where there are two narratives going in opposite time directions? Talk about a risk--I remember getting to the point of giving up when finally things started fitting together and, oh man, the pay off! It was worth it. But those are writers whose chops I know, so I give their works more leeway since I think they can pull it off.

I read _Melusine_ but don't remember much except claustrophobia with the POVs being so centered and narrow that the world building seemed an afterthought.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

If you have a really odd world, you should probably have less odd characters, and a reasonably calm prose style, and a plot people can follow.

I was thinking of mentioning Lifelode, but thought it wouldn't be fair to those who haven't had a chance to read it.

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:

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

I hate dialects. You can do it with syntax and word choice, you don't have to mess with the spelling.

Buckell fiddles with grammar in Crystal Rain. It still slows the reader down, but it's far less ambiguous than phonetics.

This is especially irritating when your phonetics are so far from the dialect being portrayed "phonetically" that you can't figure it out by reading it aloud.

Yeah, English has to be the second worst language for spelling things phonetically after Chinese. How do Chinese authors handle dialects?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Using little-known real history can be very narratively risky, as people may be much more familiar with what they think is historically true but actually isn't, and assume the writer is wrong.

This seems to come up with particular frequency regarding sexuality, the roles of women, and technology, and I remember a number of discussions in rasfw in which one person would say something like, "And then in a totally politically correct touch, he brought in a Chinese woman leading a pirate fleet, like that could have ever happened, and I threw the book against the wall," and someone would reply, "But Mrs. Cheng was a real person."

Re: More risks:

[kate_nepveu]

Mildmay in _Melusine_ & _The Virtu_ apparently speaks with a really thick lower-class accent, but mercifully Monette makes no attempt to portray this and just uses word choice, grammar, etc., to convey his different social status. I find it reads quite smoothly.

Wikipedia alleges that there are non-standard dialect characters in written Chinese for the sub-languages/dialects/differences that make speakers mutually unintelligble, but I'd love to hear more about it from the knowledgeable.

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).

[kate_nepveu]

That sounds like a reasonable rule of thumb to me, and also neatly encapsulates why mainstream doesn't interest me. =>

I suspect that the natural goodwill of the reader, the willingness to identify with a protagonist at the start, is the anchor point that the extraordinary/extraordinary stories must start with and build from.

[kate_nepveu]

Actually, yeah, I think that also has a risky narrative strategy--at least, I think that the narrative form contributed to my feeling somewhat distanced from the story.

[kate_nepveu]

_The Wild Swans_: Oh, do they? Obviously, I did not know that. Well, I have _Emerald House Rising_ on my to-read shelf, which sounds a bit more to my taste anyway because it's craft-y, and then I'll go from there.

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. =>