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caper_estUntil I started this comb-through of Lord of the Rings, I'd forgotten just how much of this Tolkien manages to pack in. You can hardly turn around at any point in the first book without falling into another bout of it. The fact that this impression never particularly lingered until I went looking for it, suggests that it's very well integrated indeed.
If exposition by loremaster routes large numbers of secondary stories through a single master-node, peer-to-peer exposition distributes them widely amongst whichever nonspecialized characters are appropriate. The technique can be as direct as having characters walk offstage, and return with a more or less condensed description of what happened while the reader was following the main story; or as devious as having them tell a secondary tale which is only relevant at a slant, at just the point where the reader needs to hear it. Sometimes the story might be more important for what its matter or its manner says about the character, or about a way of looking at the world, than for any content of its own. Sometimes, though not in Tolkien, it affords a convenient way of lying to the reader without making the actual narration unreliable.
At its worst - or at least its most stagey and artificial - it is an As You Know Bob set-piece, and the character(s) have very little reason to expound except that the reader needs to earwig on them. Tolkien mostly avoids this latter failing, but builds himself a nice cushion for the bits that incline that way towards the beginning, by characterizing hobbits in general as fonder of old stories than of new ones. This is another of his particular tricks that isn't all that portable.
He also draws somewhat on the Comic Gabby Commoner stereotype of bygone ages, which is about the reverse of anything I want to do - in my world, we're rather more likely to find aristocrats splaining the bleedin' obvious to their inferiors either as an act of social aggression, or because they really think that they must need to, since the peasants are clearly too stupid to give them everything they want immediately on demand with a cherry on top. And people do play up to this arrogance, because it's safer to.
Golden Kate and Prince Lucas have particularly bad cases of this sort of attitude in The Deed of Katy Elflocks, and I suppose that even though their targets for it shift radically, neither of them ever entirely loses the mindset. I don't think I use it very often for dumping information, but I might need to look at that again, just to check.
A particularly neat trick for p2p exposition is to escape dwelling on long, elaborate, and difficult excursions whose details are frankly peripheral to the tale. LotR's Chapter 5, A Conspiracy Unmasked, is functionally largely about pacing, character (especially Merry's, of which we have not had much measure before), and getting Merry and Pippin onto the Quest Train. The conspirators have indeed been as efficient as Frodo remarks, and it is particularly unclear just how Merry accomplished several of the things he mentions pulling off over the past twenty or so years.
It is of course supposed to be. The point of the unmasking scene is chiefly to show the devotion and resourcefulness of Frodo's friends, tick the plot along briskly, and set Merry up as a clever and adventurous character from whom many unexpected things may be looked for. This has the further benefit of setting him up as a highly competent guide for the imminent Old Forest expedition, and heightening the impact of the way this will so swiftly and completely fall apart on him. Detail would be dilution. Merry vs Bag End is a perfect instance of a very definite story which, equally definitely, ought to remain mostly 'imaginary'.
The absolute master of ellipsis in this regard is Aragorn, another of those been-everywhere done-everything guys, and of whose numerous stories we are generally lucky to get more than a tantalizing snippet that illuminates why he knows or says or does something. This trait will come into its own when we consider the wrapping of Lord of the Rings around the practically tacit Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, which will get its own post as soon as I've worked my head properly around it.
With Aragorn it is all about the history, but mostly p2p serves for letting a large cast report offstage parts of the action. The art of doing it right is mostly about deciding which sub-stories of the main tale to show, and which to have somebody tell. It's not a simple one. In The Two Towers, the fall of Isengard is an all-action spectacular high point, and the film doesn't neglect this opportunity. But Tolkien takes the counter-intuitive decision to have Merry and Pippin recount it over booze and weed in the ruins - and this feels right, right, right. I'm not sure why this is so, but I think it's a question of rhythm, and of making Helm's Deep a proper dramatic climax. By making Isengard only a secondary story engagingly told, he manages to keep it an unforgettable tale full of haunting images, and yet to eliminate the primary tension from it, so that it belongs rightly in the falling action from the battle in the Deep. Whether there's more to it or no, the choice is an artistic masterstroke. I read; I gape; I learn.
Do I learn anything very specific for use in my own story?
- I'm possibly over-sensitive to the danger of excessive p2p exposition, and its complication the Curse of the Talking Heads. Kate and Luke, in particular, have twenty years of catching up with each other to do, and it's not like they don't care. True, that gets in their way as much as it helps. But I can probably allow them to be considerably less terse or offstage in the rewrite, wherever they and my narrator can agree on it. (New thought. Tolkien tends to avoid directly presenting scenes of intense emotional intimacy, especially between men and women, or else has his characters use trad English restraint. This would not work for me as a general rule. But there are several scenes implied between Kate and Luke where eavesdropping on their conversation would be as raw as busting in on somebody's bedroom, if not on somebody's skull. There are parts of their respective stories that I just can't be there while they tell each other - not because of what 'happened', but because of what it means to them. Not going to happen any more this time, than it did on the first go-around. Okay.)
- Tolkien has a very high proportion of characters who are good storytellers. I have a rather lower one. This is going to affect the way I use them.
- The talkiness of Fairfields isn't relatively anything like as bad as it seemed when I was writing it. The conversations around the Wassail may need a fair bit of revamping, but they don't necessarily need to be any shorter, after all.
- The transition section at the end of the penultimate chapter might indeed be much, much stronger if it shows the news arriving in various places by various messengers, in another of the viewpoint kaleidoscopes I initially brought in to show the First Clash from all its widely-distributed angles. Looking more and more like another chapter, there.
General thought. Peer-to-peer exposition seems naturally best suited to broad-canvas stories with large, strongly-differentiated casts and well-distributed character agency. This certainly describes Lord of the Rings. Three Katherines is deliberately a far more parochial tale, but the landscape is deliberately denser; and Killer-Kate has that feeling of broadness to me in a way that Katy Elflocks doesn't, because its threads diverge and rejoin so much. Does anybody else find this connection between the feel of the story and the method of the exposition a natural one?
If exposition by loremaster routes large numbers of secondary stories through a single master-node, peer-to-peer exposition distributes them widely amongst whichever nonspecialized characters are appropriate. The technique can be as direct as having characters walk offstage, and return with a more or less condensed description of what happened while the reader was following the main story; or as devious as having them tell a secondary tale which is only relevant at a slant, at just the point where the reader needs to hear it. Sometimes the story might be more important for what its matter or its manner says about the character, or about a way of looking at the world, than for any content of its own. Sometimes, though not in Tolkien, it affords a convenient way of lying to the reader without making the actual narration unreliable.
At its worst - or at least its most stagey and artificial - it is an As You Know Bob set-piece, and the character(s) have very little reason to expound except that the reader needs to earwig on them. Tolkien mostly avoids this latter failing, but builds himself a nice cushion for the bits that incline that way towards the beginning, by characterizing hobbits in general as fonder of old stories than of new ones. This is another of his particular tricks that isn't all that portable.
He also draws somewhat on the Comic Gabby Commoner stereotype of bygone ages, which is about the reverse of anything I want to do - in my world, we're rather more likely to find aristocrats splaining the bleedin' obvious to their inferiors either as an act of social aggression, or because they really think that they must need to, since the peasants are clearly too stupid to give them everything they want immediately on demand with a cherry on top. And people do play up to this arrogance, because it's safer to.
Golden Kate and Prince Lucas have particularly bad cases of this sort of attitude in The Deed of Katy Elflocks, and I suppose that even though their targets for it shift radically, neither of them ever entirely loses the mindset. I don't think I use it very often for dumping information, but I might need to look at that again, just to check.
A particularly neat trick for p2p exposition is to escape dwelling on long, elaborate, and difficult excursions whose details are frankly peripheral to the tale. LotR's Chapter 5, A Conspiracy Unmasked, is functionally largely about pacing, character (especially Merry's, of which we have not had much measure before), and getting Merry and Pippin onto the Quest Train. The conspirators have indeed been as efficient as Frodo remarks, and it is particularly unclear just how Merry accomplished several of the things he mentions pulling off over the past twenty or so years.
It is of course supposed to be. The point of the unmasking scene is chiefly to show the devotion and resourcefulness of Frodo's friends, tick the plot along briskly, and set Merry up as a clever and adventurous character from whom many unexpected things may be looked for. This has the further benefit of setting him up as a highly competent guide for the imminent Old Forest expedition, and heightening the impact of the way this will so swiftly and completely fall apart on him. Detail would be dilution. Merry vs Bag End is a perfect instance of a very definite story which, equally definitely, ought to remain mostly 'imaginary'.
The absolute master of ellipsis in this regard is Aragorn, another of those been-everywhere done-everything guys, and of whose numerous stories we are generally lucky to get more than a tantalizing snippet that illuminates why he knows or says or does something. This trait will come into its own when we consider the wrapping of Lord of the Rings around the practically tacit Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, which will get its own post as soon as I've worked my head properly around it.
With Aragorn it is all about the history, but mostly p2p serves for letting a large cast report offstage parts of the action. The art of doing it right is mostly about deciding which sub-stories of the main tale to show, and which to have somebody tell. It's not a simple one. In The Two Towers, the fall of Isengard is an all-action spectacular high point, and the film doesn't neglect this opportunity. But Tolkien takes the counter-intuitive decision to have Merry and Pippin recount it over booze and weed in the ruins - and this feels right, right, right. I'm not sure why this is so, but I think it's a question of rhythm, and of making Helm's Deep a proper dramatic climax. By making Isengard only a secondary story engagingly told, he manages to keep it an unforgettable tale full of haunting images, and yet to eliminate the primary tension from it, so that it belongs rightly in the falling action from the battle in the Deep. Whether there's more to it or no, the choice is an artistic masterstroke. I read; I gape; I learn.
Do I learn anything very specific for use in my own story?
- I'm possibly over-sensitive to the danger of excessive p2p exposition, and its complication the Curse of the Talking Heads. Kate and Luke, in particular, have twenty years of catching up with each other to do, and it's not like they don't care. True, that gets in their way as much as it helps. But I can probably allow them to be considerably less terse or offstage in the rewrite, wherever they and my narrator can agree on it. (New thought. Tolkien tends to avoid directly presenting scenes of intense emotional intimacy, especially between men and women, or else has his characters use trad English restraint. This would not work for me as a general rule. But there are several scenes implied between Kate and Luke where eavesdropping on their conversation would be as raw as busting in on somebody's bedroom, if not on somebody's skull. There are parts of their respective stories that I just can't be there while they tell each other - not because of what 'happened', but because of what it means to them. Not going to happen any more this time, than it did on the first go-around. Okay.)
- Tolkien has a very high proportion of characters who are good storytellers. I have a rather lower one. This is going to affect the way I use them.
- The talkiness of Fairfields isn't relatively anything like as bad as it seemed when I was writing it. The conversations around the Wassail may need a fair bit of revamping, but they don't necessarily need to be any shorter, after all.
- The transition section at the end of the penultimate chapter might indeed be much, much stronger if it shows the news arriving in various places by various messengers, in another of the viewpoint kaleidoscopes I initially brought in to show the First Clash from all its widely-distributed angles. Looking more and more like another chapter, there.
General thought. Peer-to-peer exposition seems naturally best suited to broad-canvas stories with large, strongly-differentiated casts and well-distributed character agency. This certainly describes Lord of the Rings. Three Katherines is deliberately a far more parochial tale, but the landscape is deliberately denser; and Killer-Kate has that feeling of broadness to me in a way that Katy Elflocks doesn't, because its threads diverge and rejoin so much. Does anybody else find this connection between the feel of the story and the method of the exposition a natural one?
