One of the hardest things I've found with fiction writing is knowing what the so-called 'rules' are and then dealing with the tension between wanting to obey them yet experiment at the same time.
During my creative writing course at uni, I did two assignments in which I sought to break the rules. Instead of the usual plot outline of beginning, middle and end, I divided the narrative into segments each with its own subtitle to create a newspaperish effect. Although each of the segments were in chronological order and all were in third person, the narrative jumped around to different venues to enhance its fast pace. Some of the segments were indeed bits of fictional newspaper articles.
For another assignment, I decided to play around with the time sequence of the plot. The story started off when the main character was 19, then flashed back to when she was five, then jumped forward to when she was 17 and went back and forth between the latter two. Then it went further on into what happened when she was 17 then jumped forward to when she was 19 and skipped back and forth between two separate incidents when she was that age. Finally it ended back at the time when it started. I had no idea if what I was doing had a name but when I got my assignment back, my tutor had written, This is called a discontinuous narrative and it's very nicely done. So there you go. I didn't even know what a discontinuous narrative was but I had created one without knowing what I was doing.
Beware though. If you're playing around with the time sequence in your story, make sure it is understandable. My tutor said it worked because even though my story was jumping all over the place, he could still follow what was going on. It is probably best to get a few people to read your story and let you know if it makes sense. If they all can follow it, then great. If they're all confused, then you probably need to simplify it. I like what another tutor of mine once said. "If only one person doesn't get it, then they're probably just dumb. If the whole class doesn't get it, then either you haven't done it well enough or they're all drunk."
4 comments:
So, LOST must be the ultimate discontinuous narrative. If you don't keep up with it you end up very confused which is why they have lost so much of their audience. I happen to really like this style though which is why I still watch LOST.
Have you read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Franzen? Brilliant discontinous narrative, with illustrations thrown in.
Whoops, the author is Jonathan Safran Foer, not Franzen. Franzen's a good author too!
Amanda, I haven't seen Lost but from what I've heard about it, it certainly does sound that way.
Anonymous, no I haven't read it. I'll add it to my list of books to read :)
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