Goat Notes

Until 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.

( Peer-to-peer exposition in Tolkien, and its several subtleties. )

( Reflections on p2p, with its uses and absences, in my first draft and going forward. )

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?

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has so many intricately detailed secondary stories which require exposition, that he uses just about every single expository technique on Earth, and several in some pretty exotic orbits. I think this variety is one of his strengths, because of all narrative techniques, exposition is one of those which get oldest fastest. And the richness of this particular story demands a lot of it.

What is exposition? Back to basics:

...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.

By imaginary stories, to recap, I mean stories which are not exactly told as stories at all, except in the limit as they approach reality and are glommed onto the 'real' story whole. But they are intended, essential to the overall composition, and actually presented in some clear sense, or else we don't care about them. In the next few posts I'm dealing with the expository techniques of making them somehow explicit and localized, as opposed to the incluing techniques of implicitly spreading them throughout the text.

The crudest and simplest method of exposition is just this: the narrator dumps on the reader exactly what they need to know of the exposited story, when they need to know it, by Word of God, or at least Word of Phil the Fibber whom it is pleasing the reader to stand the drinks.

( Example of direct narrative exposition. )

( Narrative exposition in Tolkien. )

So. What does this mean for my own project?

( What it means. )

Next up, a Tolkien favourite and now a big-time genre trope in its own right: Exposition by Loremaster.

A happy New Year to one and all!

I have not been awful active in a literary way over the holiday. 2,650 words of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, all of them from a long Council of Infodump very little of which will survive the redraft. But the developments it sparked have changed both my present chapter and the whole dynamic of the Rising beyond all expectation. Again, I am cast upon strange tides, and many-braided Allwater has taken me to some places I never imagined I'd see.

Two new visions which may bear future fruit, and which have at least helped keep me out of mischief. One was a reverie into which I fell upon the Holyhead train, in which I learned that one Man's Eru is another Orc's Azathoth - and that one side's desperate doomed stand against overwhelming horror and power can look remarkable similar on the other side of the lines. But not necessarily in the same genre. I like Doc Wolfram and Splicewire and the Lady of the Last Ditch almost as much as I would hate to live in their world, and it is just conceivable that I've met a dark fantasy notion with enough heart that I might be able to yarn about it. Certainly I haven't stopped having new flashes about that setting yet.

...And one that came to me in a dream, of a hunt on St Lucy's Eve, where I involved myself in a thousand-year adventure with St Lucy herself, and the Titaness Luna, and a charming and witty Iranian emigrée named Soraya, to wrest the light of the world from the heartless legalist glare of Delian Apollyon.  The end of this dream is not yet, so I shall say no more.  But if there is really a sensible answer to its central problem, I should give a great deal to be able to tell of that, too.

Ars longa, vita brevis, as always.

Meanwhile, here is a merry year's-getting toast from me and all the Katherines; and here are certain New Year's resolutions, looking to a day when they have gone to their long slushpile. 

Wassail, dear friends and good neighbours!  Drink hale! 

[Glug]

This was quite an unexpected place to spend my dreams last night.  It's probably as well that it phased into my brainspace rather than Tolkien's, as Lord of the Rings might otherwise have been a far shorter and strangely unsatisfying book.

It could fold down into a dimensionally transcendental winkle-shell, too.

It seemed me that there was at least a novel's worth of Ripping Yarn going on within the city, but - alas - I can no longer remember one point of it.