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

[caper_est]

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.

Comments

[green_knight]

There is always story that happened before, and story that happens at the same time, to people not-protagonists, and story happening on a larger scale or far away that may or may not impact the events which you relate - so while I appreciate that your challenge looks like a monumental challenge, this sounds merely like intense backstory - much more important to you, who knows the protagonist, than to your readers, maybe. If I were tackling this.. I don't know. It seems to me as if some of it probably needs to be foreshadowed in the first part; that there might be room for a prologue in the second, and little vignettes scattered throughout. And to a degree you probably need to write a lot of it to know what happened and how it played out, just so you can daub it on lightly.

[caper_est]

Thanks for the thoughts. Yes - the backstory is both intense and extensive here, a heavy combination. A point well taken.

The one thing that could be foreshadowed in Katy and hasn't been (more or less accidentally) already, is minor, and more worldbuilding than story as such.

I really don't want to soften the impact of the second story's opening with a prologue - but I may yet have to, or else put some related jam in the middle of the doughnut.

The vignettes and the pre-writing already exist in large part: in the case of the vignettes, possibly too large a part. The worst case is that my whole strategy is all wrong, and that I need to actually write Foxfires as a standalone novel, after e-publishing a revised Katy to a novella market; or again, fixing Katy up to novel length with some new tale of her and her friends - the Foundation of Fairfields comes to mind, being full of danger and drama. That last might create enough clue-space to displace the need for Foxfires, if I did it right. But I'll try every other remedy before such desperate ones as those.

No, my real problem here isn't that I haven't done stuff along these lines: I reckon it's more that I've done it by instinct, whilst discovering the story, and I don't think I got it right first time. But since I didn't very well understand why I was doing it, correction is now difficult without first analyzing it and seeing it from outside. A lot of this Prelude waffle may well be just my way of distancing myself from the story enough to successfully rationalize what's going on with its construction - and where it diverges from what ought to be.

Still, even if nine-tenths of my analysis cancels itself out before I'm done, at least it's making me think about structure in several ways I haven't before. Thanks again for a very down-to-earth and specific response to some rather abstract flights, here!

[green_knight]

Jay Lake just mentioned Gene Wolfe illustrates this fantastically in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, wherein he presents three linked novellas, the gaps and shadows of which tell a fourth, distinct story that is never put to page which I thought I'd point out in case you weren't familiar with the work (I wasn't) - just to see how someone else would do it and what works for at least two (agent and editor) and quite possibly a lot more readers. Gene Wolfe in general strikes me as a writer who makes high demands on his readers; and his readers are very happy with that.

(I want to come back to the McCaffrey discussion at a time when I have both brain and Internet at the same time. Just ordered broadband, so this is the forseeable future.)

[caper_est]

Thanks - I've read a lot of Wolfe, including that one many a year ago, though I don't remember it so clearly. I do like him and he does make high demands: the yarn may well be due a re-read. He buries a lot of stuff a lot of the time.

I'm not reaching for the same effects as he usually is, and quite often he carries them a bit far for my taste - partly because we have seriously different metaphysical views, and I think the textures he likes to create are one aspect of his - but he's very good at what he does.

Now you've mentioned it, there's one crucial aspect of this story through which his artistic agenda and mine approach a lot closer than they usually do, and a review of how Wolfe pulls off his techniques might come in really handy there, at that. H'mmm, add him to the list. Thanks. I doubt I'd have thought of him otherwise.

Best of luck with the broadband!