Prelude to Revision: Real and Complex Compositions, 1 + i - Techniques of Complexity

How can anybody tell a tale without telling it?

The main techniques I know for telling the implicit imaginary tales, without which the explicit real tale is incomplete, are as follows: incluing, exposition, reduction, and re-ordering. This post is for identifying them and their functions in complex composition. Virtues, pitfalls, and examples will be examined anon.

The perfect limit of an imaginary tale is one which is told in effective silence - it is implied wholly in the context of the tale that is told, and no part of it is ever told for itself. Probably nobody ever pulls this off, but it might in any case be extremely difficult to notice when it was achieved. The technique which chiefly drives a composition in this direction, is to convey the matter of the imaginary parts by incluing. This excellent term of Jo Walton's describes worldbuilding by telling implication:

the process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information.

- and here I'm considering its application to suggesting another story all of its own.  The linked posting discusses some of the benefits and limitations of this technique in general, and I'd say they apply doubly or triply when the inclued matter has the character of a tale.

The degenerate far end of the same spectrum is: the imaginary tale which is rotated completely into reality by telling it. Even considered purely of itself, this is not wholly a silly paradox. The distinction between the main tale and this shadow-crafting once admitted, the suggestion arises of telling the secondary tale in a different mode - as a nested tale, or in a different voice, or even in a different literary form interspersed with the main matter. But most complex compositions fall into the intermediate zones, where only part of the imaginary tale is actually made explicit - just as much, in fact, as serves a proper reading of the real one. The methods of achieving this partial telling are what I mean by exposition. Between exposition and incluing, all the imaginary components of the desired tale must be delivered.

Reduction is a multi-level process. At the first level, it is normal editing - the removal of all matter which is not, in fact, part of any of the real or the imaginary tale(s), nor yet of their coupling. But in complex composition, it has a second level - the distillation of the imaginary tale into two fractions, one which needs to be integrated into the real tale by exposition, and the other of which may only be implied by incluing. Finally, there is the issue that the real tale is the one which will receive by far the most scrutiny by the reader. A lot of the deep structure and rationale of the imaginary tale will be, necessarily, inaccessible. Therefore, though it must be retained by the author as construction lines until final publication, and is in this sense really part of the story, a much larger portion of it must eventually disappear into the Silence of the Story than is true for the real tale, to be interpreted by the reader according to their own lights. I call this the occulted portion of the tale, and the shadowiness of imaginary tales no doubt depends very much upon it.

Re-ordering here means not just telling the imaginary story out of chronological order - a technique equally applicable to the real story. It means revealing it in an order not governed by its own internal logic, but ordering the revelations along the narrative line of the real story, according to the logic of the overall complex composition. One of the effects of doing this is severely to disrupt the flow of the imaginary story considered as story, and to replace it with a current of the real story in which the imaginary one is being revealed. To the extent that this is successfully pulled off, I'd expect it to improve the flow and apparent unity of the overall tale.

I think I've learned a good bit by setting out my thoughts thus explicitly. This may explain why this issue of complexity is taking up more posts than I'd expected. Any other perspectives on the telling (and hearing) of explicit tales, would be most timely, and warmly welcomed at this point. There's a lot I still plainly have to get my head around.

Next stop: The Lord of the Rings, a masterpiece abounding in every kind of complex compositional technique - not all of which I wish to emulate.