How do people feel about hard narrative style shifts?

[ColGray]

I'm in the process of editing a shorter book and found that I was struggling with a concise establishment of the stakes. A previous technique I've used to "solve" this is the bottle/frame tool -- You establish a story about the story, thereby quickly disclosing the story. Think, Suneater, Name of the Wind, Moby Dick, etc. (those three books are roughly equal, right??). A narrator sets up a device by which they will tell the tale that is the rest of the book.

NotW does so as vocally relaying a story to another character. SunEater does so as a journal or diary, written to history/the reader, with some occasional second person (e.g. "you, dear reader.") Moby Dick is somewhere in between those two.

It got me thinking about hard shifts in narrative style-- not character POV shifts, but outright narrative structure. I've done this in the past where the book might be in 3rd person indirect but then there are chapters written as research notes, letters or transcripts. The movie Oppenheimer used a structure that shifted back and forth between a hearing and the actual events.

I don't think I've seen it done where some chapters/POV's are 1st and others are 3rd. I've definitely seen where some are close 3rd and some are indirect 3rd (usually protagonist vs antagonist). I'm less interested in that (though others may be).

If quality between styles is equal, how do people feel about those types of narrative style shifts? If they're used sparingly and well done, I tend to really enjoy them but I'm interested to know if others find them distracting, annoying, meh, etc.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

If you don't follow the rules, or don't know the rules, about how the proper structure of grammar tells one the exact relationship between the words in a body of text, then it doesn't matter. Any way you can pick up clues as to who is doing what is good for thought.

Some editors don't like mixing up points of view because that can cause some readers to become unable to determine who is doing what. The simpler the format, the more readers can follow the story.

 

[The Big Peat]

It works. Done well, it works well.

I've never really seen the point of framing devices - Kote telling his story, the prelude to the tale in Jacques' Redwall books, knowing LotR is a translation of a lost document, and the rest of it - but I don't see anything against them.

Bigger shifts can do wonderful things. John Langan's The Fisherman is superb, and it's half a man telling his story and half him telling a story he heard from someone else. There's a book I once read called Red, White and Blue which was 1/3rd diary, 1/3rd fiction... and I forget the other third, but captivating. I hugely admire the way Marie Brennan's Turning Darkness Into Light uses translations (and translations by different people) in the story.

The list could go on. But basically - if you think it's going to add, go for it.

 

[Toby Frost]

I've never really seen the point of framing devices - Kote telling his story, the prelude to the tale in Jacques' Redwall books, knowing LotR is a translation of a lost document, and the rest of it - but I don't see anything against them.

I agree. I'm not sure what they lend to a novel beyond telling you that someone survived to tell the tale. They can work fine, although I think they have to be treated with caution. The endless flashbacks in the Locke Lamora books, for instance, began to feel like padding and took away some of the pace of the main story.

 

[HareBrain]

I don't think I've seen it done where some chapters/POV's are 1st and others are 3rd.

I've definitely seen this done, I think more than once, though (helpfully) I can't recall where, or what the quality of the novels were. Complicity by Iain Banks, on the other hand, has most chapters in 1st and some in 2nd. I can't remember if the 2nd-person sections can be read as speculations by the 1st-person narrator.

The problem I sometimes have with novels where the whole thing is an actual narration by someone who appears in the story (like NotW, Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness) is just how unlikely it is for someone to speak for several hours like this. But I guess the reader only starts thinking like that when they're not taken into the story anyway.

 

[ColGray]

Oppenheimer uses it very well (IMO) as it is 6 weeks of hearings and he's recounting 20ish years. It's a nice mix of foreshadowing, different angles, different narrators and then trying to determine the politics in the room. Having read, and now re-read, American Prometheus, it struck me that the movie, in many regards, shot the book: what's on the screen has the feel of a biography where quotes, letters and transcriptions are interwoven with the overall narrative. It made it feel more real -- because, agreed, Sit down and listen to me talk for 3 days, is an odd and unnatural device.

Realizing I am in the minority, I can't stand Banks. I've only read two (Consider Phlebas and Player of Games) and i just can't with any others. They're both "bucket of good ideas" books--cool concepts, cool ideas, surface interesting characters-- with janky narrative structures, pedestrian dialogue and completely undermined motivations (spoiler: the benevolent robot overlords did it!)

 

[HareBrain]

Realizing I am in the minority, I can't stand Banks. I've only read two (Consider Phlebas and Player of Games)

Ah, but that's Iain *M* Banks. That might sound facetious, but I think they're almost different authors. I'm not keen on his sci-fi either.

 

[ColGray]

Oh, shoot, sorry! I didn't realize there were two with such close names!

 

[HareBrain]

Oh, shoot, sorry! I didn't realize there were two with such close names!

No, they're the same guy, he just uses the "M" for his sci-fi.

Of course it might be that you knew this and were just pretending not to as a joke that went whoosh over my head, in which case I hate the internet.

 

[ColGray]

Lol, nope! After 2 books and a hard nope on the guy, I kind of stopped paying much attention to him

 

[sknox]

How do I feel about it? If done well, then I feel good about it. If not, then not.

 

[ColGray]

@sknox lol and fair.

I'm more asking because there are definitely tropes/styles/affections that some readers love and others loathe. I have a good friend who hates bottle stories/episodes. Despises them. Passionately. He finds them to be the height of lazy writing. (I would argue like you: when done poorly they're bad; when done well, they're great.)

I tried showing him the West Wing episode, Thirteen People. It's basically a 45 min bottle play and, IMO, it's excellent. I got a lengthy note from him about all the deficiencies with it.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I don't think I've seen it done where some chapters/POV's are 1st and others are 3rd.

I've seen this done. Private L.A. by James Patterson plus co-author comes to mind. Read like it was normal for the series.

 

[HareBrain]

I've seen this done. Private L.A. by James Patterson plus co-author comes to mind. Read like it was normal for the series.

Ah, that's jogged my memory a bit. I think the examples I came across were first-person detective mysteries, and that combination makes sense for those.

 

[Phyrebrat]

Christine by SK is written in 1st and 3rd.

Seconding Peat’s referral of The Fisherman. And, as luck would have it, John Langan is our October podcast guest. He was great (which is more than you can say about my hosting )

 

[The Big Peat]

I agree. I'm not sure what they lend to a novel beyond telling you that someone survived to tell the tale. They can work fine, although I think they have to be treated with caution. The endless flashbacks in the Locke Lamora books, for instance, began to feel like padding and took away some of the pace of the main story.

I can't really recall having that problem with the first LL but I think once you get into multiple flashbacks, framing device is possibly not the right word.

Similar but I liked it would be how in Cornwell's Warlord Trilogy, most of the story is our old man Derfel telling the tales of his youth, and every now and again we skip back to the present day and him talking to the reader of his tales. Partly the scene skips are funny, partly its smart because it's an Arthurian retelling so it allows Cornwell to talk about his divergences, and partly I think it helps increase the pace of the story by building a sense of ebb and flow.

Which, when we come to it, is what all sorts of flashbacks have to do. They're there to create a pacing dynamic which helps the main story hit harder (among other things). The obvious risk is it slowing everything down but the man who never made a mistake never made anything and all that.

 

[tinkerdan]

I don't think I've seen it done where some chapters/POV's are 1st and others are 3rd. I've definitely seen where some are close 3rd and some are indirect 3rd (usually protagonist vs antagonist). I'm less interested in that (though others may be).

My work does this.
It's first person present tense and then third person present tense.
I kept the tense the same to give it some consistency.
There seem to be a number of readers that don't care for present tense--but that's a different issue.

 

[ColGray]

My work does this.
It's first person present tense and then third person present tense.
I kept the tense the same to give it some consistency.
There seem to be a number of readers that don't care for present tense--but that's a different issue.

The radical change in tense is interesting. It would never occur to me to do that. Can i ask why you did it/what moved you/what it adds?

 

[tinkerdan]

The radical change in tense is interesting. It would never occur to me to do that. Can i ask why you did it/what moved you/what it adds?

I had found that the story took off for me when I found the specific voice for it--which turned out to be first person present tense.
But because of the limitations of that POV I needed to give information that the Main Character didn't have yet and didn't know so I decided to do it with third person POV from various other characters. I found that having started in present tense that it worked better for me(to keep control of the tense in the main story)to continue to use present tense with the third person POV.

Another part of it is that having started in first person present tense it put the reader into the story as it was happening and I was trying to keep all the story lines(scenes)in that same immediate mode.