Unorthodoxy in Structure, Presentation

[Stuart Dren]

Sometimes a story is told out of order. Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang comes to mind (also a great example of 2nd person POV).

I haven't read House of Leaves yet, but something tells me its structure and presentation is at least not ordinary.

In my current WIP, alternate realities with entirely different settings but the same character open up like a flower in the narrative, but it's fairly close to the end, and canonically merely in the mind of a guilty agent.

Have you ever played with, or are planning to play with, the normal way you or most people might tell stories?

 

[big soft moose]

I'm toying with the idea of doing something like the long firm by jake arnott...essentially the story of one central character is told by a bunch of observers with different view points, my problem is that i usually pants and something like that absolutely has to be planned

 

[Homer Potvin]

Have you ever played with, or are planning to play with, the normal way you or most people might tell stories?

A little bit, so long as there's a good reason for it.

my problem is that i usually pants

I gave that up this year. I'm not quite comfortable with it yet, but it's been very liberating.

 

[Banespawn]

Chapter 1 of my Arch story shows the protagonists at age 7. At the end of that chapter, the MC disappears through the arch. The first scene in chapter 2 jumps ahead 13 years to show how life for the FMC and her village has changed. At the end of that scene, the MC returns. Scene 2 of chapter 2 then jumps back to the moment the MC disappeared. This is the start of his story line, showing what happened to him beyond the arch.

I switch between the two storylines as needed. I try to order the scenes so that they work together to reveal information at the right time, creating mysteries in one timeline and answering them in the other.

Eventually, the MC's storyline will end, somewhere close to the end of the book, and then both characters will continue on in the later timeline.

 

[Louanne Learning]

Sometimes a story is told out of order.

I've always been fascinated by the concept of time and would love to write a story that plays around with it. I imagine it would take a lot of planning to come up with something coherent that uses this technique.

One novel (a gorgeous read) that is out of order is The Lover, by Marguerite Duras – Set in prewar Indochina, this is “the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover.”

When reading, I got the feeling that the story was put together by a collection of loose-leaf papers, each sheet holding a memory. Each time the narrator gained some deeper insight into her past, she grabbed a piece of paper and poured her heart and soul onto it, like another scrap of her life was added to the pile. It was as though the memories/insights were recorded in the sequence they came to her, so the timeline is out of order. This is one way to do it, and it was effective in this novel.

Have you ever played with

I've written a lot of stories, and one that was probably the most challenging is the one that used an unreliable narrator. The "main character" was a pathological liar with dissociative identity - three persons in one. It begins -

There’s three of us in here—Frankie, Martha and me. Sometimes, it gets crowded, and all of us talking all at once. I’m Sebastian. I’m the cool one. I am as cool as a dog wearing sunglasses. Now dogs are pretty cool all on their own, but put shades on them and you know they got it going on. That’s me. If you don’t believe me, just ask me.

Frankie is the dumb one. I try to bring him up to speed with the reality I create for him, but it’s like trying to water a hamburger. You know it just ain’t going to grow. He does have some uses. He keeps our toenails clipped. “In case we get into an accident,” he says.

Martha tends to panic, a panic reserved for existential angst or rats. Not that Frankie and I are rats, but Martha is the one who sees us the best. She’s got X-ray vision and dresses us in a parka in the summertime. “Cover up our shame,” she explained.

As the story progresses, the reader becomes unsure about which of the "characters" is actually the narrator.

Writing that story really stretched my brain. It was a really rewarding experience, though.

 

[Homer Potvin]

Chapter 1 of my Arch story shows the protagonists at age 7. At the end of that chapter, the MC disappears through the arch. The first scene in chapter 2 jumps ahead 13 years to show how life for the FMC and her village has changed. At the end of that scene, the MC returns. Scene 2 of chapter 2 then jumps back to the moment the MC disappeared. This is the start of his story line, showing what happened to him beyond the arch.

I switch between the two storylines as needed. I try to order the scenes so that they work together to reveal information at the right time, creating mysteries in one timeline and answering them in the other.

Eventually, the MC's storyline will end, somewhere close to the end of the book, and then both characters will continue on in the later timeline.

Don't know if you've ever read It by Stephen King but that's got time lines out the wazoo. I don't know how much cocaine he had to do to keep that straight. Hopefully there was some leftover for his editor.

 

[Banespawn]

Don't know if you've ever read It by Stephen King but that's got time lines out the wazoo. I don't know how much cocaine he had to do to keep that straight. Hopefully there was some leftover for his editor.

I haven't. I haven't seen the movies either. Did they have the separate timelines too, or did they structure it differently for the screenplay?

 

[Homer Potvin]

I haven't. I haven't seen the movies either. Did they have the separate timelines too, or did they structure it differently for the screenplay?

They had to do two movies, set 27 years apart. It would have been impossible otherwise. First movie was very good, second was a dud. The reveals got out of whack by separating the timelines like that, though I don't think it was avoidable.

 

[Stuart Dren]

It was amazing how the first movie was constant tension, yet the second movie had none at all.

 

[Homer Potvin]

It was amazing how the first movie was constant tension, yet the second movie had none at all.

Second movie had nothing left to do. We saw everything in first. The timelines addressed the same events simultaneously in the book. It felt like one battle against Pennywise instead of two.

 

[Naomasa298]

Are we just or mainly talking about alternative ways of presenting timelines here? I mean, in writing, not in movies.

 

[Stuart Dren]

Are we just or mainly talking about alternative ways of presenting timelines here? I mean, in writing, not in movies.

Anything unconventional in presentation, even briefly. Timelines where just the easiest examples to come up with. A unique framing/perspective works too, like a grocery list or clone army hive mind.

I'm trying to procrastinate here, not police conceptual oddity.

 

[Rigor Mortis]

I do like to play with form. I can't say it works, other than I have been satisfied with some of the results. There's one story I entered in a competition back in old town, it didn't do very well if I remember correctly, then posted in the worlshop where it did better and I made some changes. I've sent it out unsuccessfully a few times and still have it pending at one or two locations. A couple of rejections said nice things about it, one even short-listing but no further.

I'm going to post it again in workshop and, my gift to you, offer the opportunity to make good use of your procrastination to tell me what I need to do to make it publisher-worthy. That may not be a short list