Vertical storytelling...

[khiemtran]

There's a certain style of storytelling that involves choosing certain points over the course of the story and drilling down. There's a sense of discovering the story much as you might map an ore seam by taking core samples at different places.

One of the interesting things about this this style is that in each individual scene there is motion, but it is not necessarily forward motion. What changes as each scene goes on is the reader's understanding of the moment. A scene might start at a superficial level. A character is concerned, perhaps, as with one scene in The Last Jet Engine Laugh with the making of a pot of coffee. Bit by bit, more information is offered, at first seemingly related to the main topic, but then gradually shifting and changing the story. Soon the scene is not about coffee at all, as we unearth things that will eventually form part of the real story. Here's a part of the real story lode - an angle of the character that we haven't seen before. When joined up with what we find in the next shaft, over there, twenty years later, we can interpolate between them and find the story hidden there. Here's another one, thirty years earlier. Some of the things we unearth won't make sense at all until every last bore has been made, but we'll keep them anyway, confident that it will one day make sense.

It's also interesting that the emphasis seems to be more on situation than character, which is the way I'm leaning more and more myself now. By that, I mean, this style lets you concentrate on the key scenes and situations and gives you licence to make every scene a good one - you can pick and choose the best moments of the story to tell and you have all of the characters' lives to choose from. What you put in the story is more of factor of what you want to show than what these characters would do next (as it would be if you were following their story in a more linear fashion).

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

It's a revelation I had about writing in omniscient/multiple thirds: you need a much better grasp of the story overall, as you will be choosing/will have to choose from a much greater breadth of possible scenes/events. When you're doing first/tight third (or even a couple of third person narrators) you can allow yourself to be led by events, and in many ways, I find it easier.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. I don't have much experience in writing from multiple viewpoints either. I suspect it's because I always found it easier to just stick to a single tight third. Although, in many ways, multiple viewpoints can also make telling a story easier if done well.