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Prelude to Revision: Real and Complex Compositions, i - Imaginary Tales
How can I tell a tale without telling it?
In my last revision post, I laid out my notion of real composition as the bringing together of multiple told tales to make a single greater tale; and complex composition as a similar exercise, but including some tales that are untold or imaginary. All the component tales of the work are necessary (or they should not be present), but not all necessarily explicit. The real component is told explicitly with words; the imaginary component, implied in the silences between them.
This is the way I'm presently putting together Three Katherines of Allingdale, with two explicit top-level tales - Katy Elflocks and Killer-Kate - and a great thirty-year hole between, into which I need to cast the shadow of the events that led from one to the other: Kit's missing tale, Crown of Foxfires.
My big structural challenge - the 'Kitty Clause' - is twofold. Firstly, Foxfires if actually told would be approximately as long as both of the others put together. That's an awful lot of implication to fit into the negative space of the tale. Secondly, Kate almost certainly makes insufficient sense to a reader who doesn't pick up the story of Foxfires in the process of reading it. So the job is a difficult one, but also most needful.
To this master shadow-tale must be added several lesser ones set in the subsequent twenty years: Kate's ruin; Luke's deeds in other guises in the far south, centred around the indomitably quixotic hero called El Alegroso, 'the best man he ever knew'; Katy's adventures in fields both strange and familiar, and the settlement of her mysterious 'Sugar-Loaf Country'; and the viciously futile Rock Candy Rising which convulsed Lower Alland in her name, not so many years before my real tale resumes. Where these are not simple in nature, they are at least full of matter which can be left out altogether, or briefly alluded to for texture and plot pointing. Even so, this is more imaginary load for the back of my real tale to carry.
Foxfires isn't simple or supposed to be simple. What the hell became of Kit? needs to be conveyed in sufficient of its twisty detail to suggest a wealth of thoughts about What the hell are our protagonists supposed to do about something like that? - and to make the final resolution of the total, complex tale as satisfying to the reader as it is to me.
This is threatening to be a real monster of a post, so I'll pause briefly with this setting forth of how I view the problem, and move very shortly onto the concrete techniques which map imaginary tales onto real ones.
How can anybody tell a tale without telling it...?
In my last revision post, I laid out my notion of real composition as the bringing together of multiple told tales to make a single greater tale; and complex composition as a similar exercise, but including some tales that are untold or imaginary. All the component tales of the work are necessary (or they should not be present), but not all necessarily explicit. The real component is told explicitly with words; the imaginary component, implied in the silences between them.
This is the way I'm presently putting together Three Katherines of Allingdale, with two explicit top-level tales - Katy Elflocks and Killer-Kate - and a great thirty-year hole between, into which I need to cast the shadow of the events that led from one to the other: Kit's missing tale, Crown of Foxfires.
My big structural challenge - the 'Kitty Clause' - is twofold. Firstly, Foxfires if actually told would be approximately as long as both of the others put together. That's an awful lot of implication to fit into the negative space of the tale. Secondly, Kate almost certainly makes insufficient sense to a reader who doesn't pick up the story of Foxfires in the process of reading it. So the job is a difficult one, but also most needful.
To this master shadow-tale must be added several lesser ones set in the subsequent twenty years: Kate's ruin; Luke's deeds in other guises in the far south, centred around the indomitably quixotic hero called El Alegroso, 'the best man he ever knew'; Katy's adventures in fields both strange and familiar, and the settlement of her mysterious 'Sugar-Loaf Country'; and the viciously futile Rock Candy Rising which convulsed Lower Alland in her name, not so many years before my real tale resumes. Where these are not simple in nature, they are at least full of matter which can be left out altogether, or briefly alluded to for texture and plot pointing. Even so, this is more imaginary load for the back of my real tale to carry.
Foxfires isn't simple or supposed to be simple. What the hell became of Kit? needs to be conveyed in sufficient of its twisty detail to suggest a wealth of thoughts about What the hell are our protagonists supposed to do about something like that? - and to make the final resolution of the total, complex tale as satisfying to the reader as it is to me.
This is threatening to be a real monster of a post, so I'll pause briefly with this setting forth of how I view the problem, and move very shortly onto the concrete techniques which map imaginary tales onto real ones.
How can anybody tell a tale without telling it...?