Selective narration
Mar. 12th, 2006 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranThe new opening to the Silver Bowl relies on selective narration to maintain tension for the reader. Instead of "how is X going to achieve Y?", the driving question becomes "why is X doing this?", even though the character and the narrator know full well what is going on and could have told the reader in a single sentence.
It's a technique I haven't used much before and it's one that can go horribly wrong if you overdo it. I've seen some spectacularly bad examples in stories I've critted, which came across as though the author set out to deliberately annoy the reader. The advantage of using it in this particular instance is that I can turn the framing arc that I need to hang my flashbacks on into a real story in its own right. Why is he doing this? Oh, so *that's* why he's doing it! It also means the twists that were potentially anticlimaxes can be made to appear as character revelations, since the characters will (hopefully) not yet be fully formed in the reader's mind. It also means that I need fewer of the flashbacks because there's already an expectation that not everything's being told.
It's going to be interesting to see if I can pull this off. I'm also using selective narration for the start of the Clay Boy story, so hopefully one will be practice for the other.
It's a technique I haven't used much before and it's one that can go horribly wrong if you overdo it. I've seen some spectacularly bad examples in stories I've critted, which came across as though the author set out to deliberately annoy the reader. The advantage of using it in this particular instance is that I can turn the framing arc that I need to hang my flashbacks on into a real story in its own right. Why is he doing this? Oh, so *that's* why he's doing it! It also means the twists that were potentially anticlimaxes can be made to appear as character revelations, since the characters will (hopefully) not yet be fully formed in the reader's mind. It also means that I need fewer of the flashbacks because there's already an expectation that not everything's being told.
It's going to be interesting to see if I can pull this off. I'm also using selective narration for the start of the Clay Boy story, so hopefully one will be practice for the other.
