Shifting the Narrative

"Who needs sleep?"- Barenaked Ladies, Who Needs Sleep?

Apparently, writing a novel is exhausting. Someone should have reminded me. Upside: Four chapters of my novel cranked through in the past two weeks. Two of them get workshopped on Wednesday, which should be an interesting and blogworthy experience. Downside: Zero blog posts cranked out in the past two weeks. A thousand apologies, honored reader, for my slackness.

That said, in honor of Heroes, which I hope to catch up on shortly, before the new season leaves me completely and utterly left behind, I'm going to talk today about something I call shifting the narrative.

Shifting the narrative is, in short, taking characters and settings both you and your readers are already familiar with and changing the type of story that they're participating in. Serialized stories often do this, because it's a good way to keep a series going without it getting too stale. Heroes has a pretty good handle on it.

In Season One, Heroes was, fittingly, a hero fantasy. It was a story about people discovering they could do things they were unaware of, coming to terms with that, and then using those abilities to save the world. Season Two was a travesty, except for Hiro's story (a coming of age, face-your-illusions narrative), so I'm going to ignore it and pretend it never happened. Season Three was a family drama, in which sons were forced to choose between their parents (neither of whom was a particularly lovable character, which was one of the season's better points). Season Four we'll see about it, but it sure looks like the family drama story has been abandoned.

What Heroes has done particularly well is flowed from one narrative into the next, without it becoming too obvious that that's what it's doing. When Peter comes back from the future to kill his brother at the beginning of Season Three, you have no idea that it's setting off a family narrative (though in retrospect, it seems like that should be obvious). It doesn't begin with the father versus mother dilemma, it works its way into it in an interesting way.

It's an interesting technique to keep in mind, and for writers who dream of writing novels in series, it's an important one to remember. There are ten million different types of stories out there, and if you try to stick with just one you'll get boring fast. Figuring out how to change between them, how to position your characters so that as one narrative ends they're already at the beginning of a different one, is the great trick in writing sequels.

Limitations of Fantasy

"We were fated to pretend..."-MGMT, Time to Pretend

Alright, so I post often about all the great things that fantasy stories are uniquely suited to do. As a writer of fantasy, I feel like it's my duty to defend my genre, especially since I've seen it slammed over and over again by more literary-minded folks.

But it's worth taking the time to recognize the limitations of the genre as well, and as I was reading The Golden Compass last week, I came across one: fantasy narratives are forced to spend a great deal of time describing the worlds they take place in.

I've been over some of the ways this particular facet of fantasy can be useful. It's great for telling stories that revolve around discovery and growth, because the most natural way of describing a world is for one or more characters to learn about it as the narrative progresses. But it has limitations as well--one of which is that there are really only so many ways to squeeze in world-building details.

Inevitably, you're going to wind up using some of the same tricks that other authors have before you. And if your reader has read enough fantasy, they'll start to recognize some of them. That's never a good thing, even if most readers will forgive you (I mean, if they've read enough to recognize the tricks, they must love the genre) and may be one reason why some people I speak to think of fantasy as full of cliches. Read the wrong three novels in a row and you may get the same trick three times in a row--an unfortunate coincidence that might turn you off of fantasy for life.

So! In recognition of this deadly danger, I intend to compile a list of different ways of revealing world-building information, as well as different twists that can be put on it. Help from the peanut gallery is encouraged.