Novel Architecture

[Dom]

novel architecture - as in, the architecture of a novel, not architecture that has some sort of novelty to it.

I find myself, more and more, not discussing writing on boards all that much, because I find that, after several years of discussing it, all the low-hanging fruit has been touched! (POVs?  Check, I don't care anymore, I'm comfortable with how I do it.  Ideas and plots?  Much ado over nothing, ideas and plots are a dime a dozen.  Worldbuilding?  By and large, it's mental masturbation.  That's not to say that I don't do it, and that it won't pay off big later on in your career if you do it right, just that unless you're a published author with a lot of talent nobody's going to really care about the details now, so why bother posting them.  Am I jaded or what?)

But novel architecture still intrigues me...mostly because it's so abstract it's hard to discuss, and by the time you get to this point as a writer, most writers as far as I can tell are working on 'instinct'.  They aren't necessarily analyzing what they do, but practice it as an art.

Here's what I consider to be novel architecture...what do Stephen Brust's Vlad Taltos series and Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series have in common?  What about C. S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy and Joan D. Vinge's Snow Queen and Summer Queen?

Brust's Taltos and Butcher's Dresden series have urban fantasy underpinnings...first person wise-ass characters with magic.  A world that feels closer to our own than other fantasy worlds do.  There's a certain immediacy, a certain...mundanity. Some things are fantastic, others not so much so.

The Coldfire Trilogy and the Snow/Summer Queen books on the other hand are epic sci-fi stories on worlds that were colonized by technology and regressed.  Both have interesting characters, but at some remove--you can't get quite as close to them as you do with Vlad Taltos and Harry Dresden.  Both have epic world-changing things going on here.  The society and culture have aspects that are very alien.

Now, what if you were to take something like the Dresden books and write them with a different style of novel architecture?  What if they were written like the Codex Alera books?  3rd person, multi-pov?  There'd be a lot of things the same, but the overall feel of the books would change drastically.

Now, changing the architecture of the Dresden files books is a silly thing to think about doing--they're out there as they are, and the form that they have is what drew us, the readers, to them.  *We* have no ability to change that, and I doubt many of us would really wish to.

But, when you are in the writer's seat yourself, suddenly it's not as cut-and-dried.  You can write your story with different "bones" underlying the skin of world/character/plot.  YOU can switch these things and out as easily as re-writing a scene.  A lot of writers tred the already trodden paths...third person, multi-POV, archaic, stilted English Epic Fantasies with elves and everything.  Or, wise-ass (or bitchy, unfortunately) first person characters in a grim and gritty jaded urban fantasy world.  Or something else.

But what's really interesting is when you take your world and characters, and switch the bones around.  Take your urban fantasy setting and try to evoke an Epic feel with techniques usually used in Tolkien knock-offs.  Now that's interesting.  Or follow the gutter people--really follow them--in an urban-fantasy like way, but in a world put together more like an epic fantasy world.  Sarah Monette did this with Melusine, The Mirador, and The Virtu, and I'm crazy about Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora.

How do you come to a decision upon what sort of bones to use for your story?  What sort of architecture, what sort of voice in narration, what sort of word choices in English?  What sort of presentation?  Do you just fall into it?  (I suspect most do.)  Do you try to manipulate it.

If you compare this to visual art--you can draw a bat in a tree in de-saturated, grainy earth tones, and it will evoke one sort of feel.  Or you could draw it in bright super-saturated neon colors on black and white, and evoke a totally different feel.

And there's more to it than that...you can focus on a character's coming of age, where the plot isn't really as "plotty" because it's more of a character study.  Or you can focus on battles won and lost.  Or the creep of something cultural into your world.  You can emphasize and de-emphasize different things...all the while using the same characters, the same world, the same basic ideas.

Do I make any sort of sense?  I'm sort of referring to style, but not just skin-deep style, but choices that affect how the written story comes out in the end.  The bones you use to prop your castles and houses and buildings and the shape and form of your story up.

How do you guys decide on these things for your stories?

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

But novel architecture still intrigues me...mostly because it's so abstract it's hard to discuss, and by the time you get to this point as a writer, most writers as far as I can tell are working on 'instinct'.  They aren't necessarily analyzing what they do, but practice it as an art.

This is another place where I thinkw e are handicapped by having the existing critical tools designed for analysis of finished works and not well fitting with works in conception or in progress.

Take your urban fantasy setting and try to evoke an Epic feel with techniques usually used in Tolkien knock-offs.  Now that's interesting.  Or follow the gutter people--really follow them--in an urban-fantasy like way, but in a world put together more like an epic fantasy world.  Sarah Monette did this with Melusine, The Mirador, and The Virtu, and I'm crazy about Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora.

While I agree with what you have to say in general, and I love the Vlad Taltos books, I'm inclkined to see Lies of Locke Lamora as an intersitng example of getting this wrong, because I do not think the structure chosen supports the tonal shift between the beginning and the end well at all.

How do you come to a decision upon what sort of bones to use for your story?  What sort of architecture

Depends on shape and size of the story and where the key points are.  For a 150,000 word novel, that usually to me falls out as one or two middle ones and an end one or set of ones.

what sort of voice in narration, what sort of word choices in English?

I don't think of those as architect ure issues really, because all voice is characterisation, every word choice is characterisation, and if I have a character, I have their voice.

Do you try to manipulate it.

Oh hell yeah.  D'artagnan does not speak in the same sentence structure as Sam Spade.

If you compare this to visual art--you can draw a bat in a tree in de-saturated, grainy earth tones, and it will evoke one sort of feel.  Or you could draw it in bright super-saturated neon colors on black and white, and evoke a totally different feel.

But whether it was right for the bat would depend upon the bat's personality and motivations in each case.

Do I make any sort of sense?  I'm sort of referring to style, but not just skin-deep style, but choices that affect how the written story comes out in the end.  The bones you use to prop your castles and houses and buildings and the shape and form of your story up.

fwiw, I would call that "mode".

How do you guys decide on these things for your stories?

Usually they come with the idea.  I knew straight away, frex, that the first contact Utopia love story wanted to be in blocks of three human-POV chapters and one alien POV chapter, with the  human-POV chapters split between the two human POVs but not following the same pattern in any specific block.  I knew that the lost-colony quasi-medieval tech level SF novel wanted one POV character from each side, alternating, but that they would also swap over at the three larger scale key points. Sometimes it's for contrast; if I have been doing 60.000 words of a couple of characters who have fairly similar prose rhythms and I am going into the head of someone very different and I know that's going to jar, I put that at a place in the plot where the jar is a positive impact.

Sometimes they are inherent in the mode.  A Dumas pastiche without a certain style of chatty, discursive narrative voice, be it an omniscient narrator or Paarfi of Roundwood or a first within the story, is not a Dumas pastiche, it's some other kind of swashbuckler.

[Dom]

Sorry for the long delay in reply!

This is another place where I thinkw e are handicapped by having the existing critical tools designed for analysis of finished works and not well fitting with works in conception or in progress.

I think that's very likely; I'm reading your reply, and feel that we're mostly on the same page, but lack the jargon we need!

While I agree with what you have to say in general, and I love the Vlad Taltos books, I'm inclkined to see Lies of Locke Lamora as an intersitng example of getting this wrong, because I do not think the structure chosen supports the tonal shift between the beginning and the end well at all.

I've found TLoLL to pretty much split people; some people love it, others really dislike it.

I don't think of those as architect ure issues really, because all voice is characterisation, every word choice is characterization, and if I have a character, I have their voice.

Not all word choice is characterization of the character--it really depends on if your narrator is your POV character, which it doesn't have to be.  Think of older books, where the narrator is going, "Now, dear reader, that is not to say our main character Billy Joe didn't think of that himself..."  That's not really Billy Joe's "voice".  It's the narrator, with his or her own opinions, talking about Billy Joe.  That's the narrator as a separate entity, one that can flavor how the events of the book are perceived by the reader.  Modern fiction typically merges the narrator with the POV character, to a degree--how much depends on the author--but that's not the only way that things can be done.

For example, I have one story that is strict 1st person.  The narrator is the POV character, period.  I also have a story with a 3rd person POV...but it's very "tight", this narrator is ALSO the POV character.  In these cases, all word choice keys back into the POV character, no matter if it's dialogue or narration about the color of the trees.  But I have an entirely different story where I de-couple, in the manner of more epic fantasy, the narrator from the POV character, in certain scenes.  And when that happens, you can play with the non-dialogue word choice to influence how the book is perceived by the readers, without altering the actual bones of the character, because it is NOT the character speaking, but the narrator.

To take a Butcher example--the Dresden books are narrated by Harry.  There is no separate narrator.  But the Codex Alera books have a narrator that is not at all as closely to Tavi and everyone else's head--the narrator is slightly a separate entity.  It's strongly flavored by the current POV character, but it's not 100% assimilated as it is in the Dresden books.

But whether it was right for the bat would depend upon the bat's personality and motivations in each case.

I think you have POV tied into your narration much more than me; I feel it is possible to have a degree of separation between the two, and that the amount of separation is authorial choice.  It's modern convention that causes most modern works to have a POV character and the narrator be the same, but it's not the only way you can do it.

For example, say there's a photographer taking a picture of the bat.  The photographer could use full color film, or sepia tones, either of which evokes different feelings in the person who views the photo.  The bat has no control over the photos that the photographer shows around, but that doesn't mean that the bat stops having that inner battiness due to how the photographer is displaying him.

The writer can do the same thing to a character.

(hahahahaha, that paragraph cracks me up!  And I mean every last word of it.)

So, that's why I consider this to be something you can use to alter the bones of the story.  You can choose your narration style .  And if you're good enough, you can make it work, although obviously the more obscure or edgy you get with your narration style, the harder it is to make it work.  A la, some people have issues with Scott Lynch's narration styles.  I love it, others find it jarring, because it's not typical.

(Off topic...I think my space bar is dying; it's making a very loud sound each time I hit it!)

But yeah, often people kind of go into things knowing the...mode, I guess...they want to use.  It just comes to them...either you-as-a-new-writer have no utter clue how to start messing around with it, or you learn it, but learn it so instinctively you can't really spell out *why* you do things the way you do.  Very hard to pin down.

Some day, I'm going to do some exercises...a short story, and start messing with the bones.  Just to pin things down.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Not all word choice is characterization of the character--it really depends on if your narrator is your POV character, which it doesn't have to be.  Think of older books, where the narrator is going, "Now, dear reader, that is not to say our main character Billy Joe didn't think of that himself..."  That's not really Billy Joe's "voice".  It's the narrator, with his or her own opinions, talking about Billy Joe.  That's the narrator as a separate entity, one that can flavor how the events of the book are perceived by the reader.

Agreed entirely, but the word choice is still characterisation, it's just characterisation of the narrative voice, who is the lens the story is seen through. Paarfi of Roundwood is an extreme example.

I think you have POV tied into your narration much more than me; I feel it is possible to have a degree of separation between the two, and that the amount of separation is authorial choice. 

I think we may just be using the same words to mean slightly different things.

For example, say there's a photographer taking a picture of the bat.  The photographer could use full color film, or sepia tones, either of which evokes different feelings in the person who views the photo.  The bat has no control over the photos that the photographer shows around, but that doesn't mean that the bat stops having that inner battiness due to how the photographer is displaying him.

And then you have the bat in the photos, and also the backdrop of whatever the bat is photographed against, which is the equivalent of the narrator's character.

A la, some people have issues with Scott Lynch's narration styles.  I love it, others find it jarring, because it's not typical.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit, it had lots of good people and ideas and stuff in; the only thing in it that fails for me is going from a clever and witty heist to being something else in a different emotional tone entirely.

(Off topic...I think my space bar is dying; it's making a very loud sound each time I hit it!)

My keyboard is buzzing slightly with every letter, if I type fast enough I can approximate the rhythm line to the Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" but that's probably not good for it.

Some day, I'm going to do some exercises...a short story, and start messing with the bones.  Just to pin things down.

As exercises in that direction go, I recommend taking an album you know and like and writing a story coming from each song. This does admittedly work better with Leonard Cohen than with many artists.

[meg_evonne]

I've corresponded with neurovore concerning the complications of multi-POV but this is the first serious discussion that touches upon the proximity of the narrator to the character or characters.  I've been trying to wrap my ideas around this concept for sometime.  I continue to pull apart short stories and novels trying to key in on the subtle differences and i still feel that i am no where close enough to give it a try.  (Thus this is why i haven't responded to your kind response, neurovore.  I've left the work on the back burner while I let it gel.)

In another thread Dom, you discuss that you sometimes resent the time you are pulled away from what you consider the main character or perhaps an interesting 2ndary character.  It's easy to say that the story structure was lacking in someway or that the author wasn't proficient enough to pull it off.  Especially if the secondary character is what you want to see more often.  It also seems possible that the author may have done such a great job in presenting their characters that you are personally drawn to one over the other.

The complications simply seem to multiply into overwhelming complexities in fairly short order.  There must also be an overwhelming tendency to move that narrator distance in closer for characters that an author is personally drawn to instinctively.  Could this be the case in your comments that I refer to in the paragraph above?  The key that I'm carrying away from what I've pulled apart in my own study is that it is the consistency of the distance held that must hold true for this format to work.  Is that your experience in your own work and your study?

Further there is the concern that as lovely as it would be to manage to pull this off successfully, are you not still left with the average agent or publishing house that will not quite grasp what you have accomplished?  Run of the mill may be boring, but it seems to work and be marketable.

I am not saying that marketable should be the goal.  I can well attest that my favorite books are from small university presses and generally books that push the boundaries of society and sometimes literary structure.  In fact it continually irritates me that something i admire from these presses are frequently sought after by the larger houses a year or so later from other authors who have a similar plot, structure, and style.  With a larger house exposure, they perform irritatingly better as a market item.

If you decide to experiment with your architecture, I hope you would share them.  Best wishes on your endeavor.  To see even a few pages or one scene pulled apart to that level and be able to compare them would be interesting.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I've corresponded with neurovore concerning the complications of multi-POV but this is the first serious discussion that touches upon the proximity of the narrator to the character or characters.

The explicit narrator and sort of got broken in the nineteenth century, with the modern bestseller-omni that hops from head to head with no discipline at all as the resultant monstrosity, for which I basically blame Dickens.

I continue to pull apart short stories and novels trying to key in on the subtle differences and i still feel that i am no where close enough to give it a try.

if it helps, what seem the really major tonal changes to me are between: headlong/braindump where you are getting the story as it happens, and story with an implicit later frame in which they are being told [ both of which can be either first or third ]; story that is always inside somebody's head, and story that does any moments at all of camera-eye [ Sometimes an end-of-scene pull back from an inside-somebody's-head story will go close to an almost camera-eye last line, in things I write and in a few things I read, though first seems a lot less prone to doing this messily (first-with-frame can of course have this as the narrator going back and filling in things they did not know at the time)  like "They talked of other things then, long into the night", or one line of the empty room the POV character has just left. ]; between narrative perspective and protagonist perspective - the gentle art of showing a viewpoint character doing stuff that makes sense to them and that they care about and believe in which your book as a whole does not necessarily want to support - and lastly, between having an explicit narrator and not.

(Thus this is why i haven't responded to your kind response, neurovore.  I've left the work on the back burner while I let it gel.)

Entirely fair enough.

In another thread Dom, you discuss that you sometimes resent the time you are pulled away from what you consider the main character or perhaps an interesting 2ndary character.  It's easy to say that the story structure was lacking in someway or that the author wasn't proficient enough to pull it off.  Especially if the secondary character is what you want to see more often.  It also seems possible that the author may have done such a great job in presenting their characters that you are personally drawn to one over the other.

Just simply having a preference for a single narrative POV is fine, as a preference; as a technique it limits the stories you can tell, a lot.

There must also be an overwhelming tendency to move that narrator distance in closer for characters that an author is personally drawn to instinctively.

I don't find it so.  That is, I avoid doing close-focus POVs of sorts of people I find incomprehensible, because I can't do them; but I can definitely do sorts of people I find familiar but distasteful. Some flavours of religious maniac that you get on either side in the Northern Ireland conflict come to mind as ones I've seen a lot of; there's a degree in their worldviews of translating everything into their terms before considering it in any other way, so no external evidence can ever get through, that I find really creepy and unpleasant but not hard to depict.

The key that I'm carrying away from what I've pulled apart in my own study is that it is the consistency of the distance held that must hold true for this format to work.

It depends on what you are trying to do. Sometimes deliberately jarring is what the story wants.

Further there is the concern that as lovely as it would be to manage to pull this off successfully, are you not still left with the average agent or publishing house that will not quite grasp what you have accomplished?  Run of the mill may be boring, but it seems to work and be marketable.

There are enough books doing Weird Things still seeing print, that I have hope in my own oddities some time seeing the light of professionally published day.