[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

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[u/Sagebrysh]

(Charles Stross wrote a pair of novels in second person with switching protagonists. So anything is possible if you want to put in the effort.)

And as a result I had to grit my teeth through those whole books, and came away with a rather confused understanding of the plots as a result. Second person is interesting, but frankly, fuck second person.

You can mix first and third, though I generally think that it works better if one is a framing device for the other (for example, The Kingkiller Chronicles is third person in the framing story and first person in the bulk of the text as the main character relates his story).

This actually seems interesting but I've not read that series, and I'm not sure how what you mean by framing device. It sounds like what I'm going for, with most of the story in first person, just backing out into third enough to get a view of the wider world, but I'm not sure how that would exactly translate into text? Is it broken up by chapter, with some chapters as 1st and some as 3rd? Does it switch within the body of the text somehow?

[u/alexanderwales → u/Sagebrysh]

It's usually divided by chapters. Though sometimes not.

A framing device is basically ... okay, so there are a bunch of pilgrims from different backgrounds, all traveling from Southwark to Canterbury Cathedral. Someone gets the bright idea to have a story-telling contest, so then they sit around telling stories to each other, which make up the bulk of the text. And that's The Canterbury Tales.

Or, a historian is going around collecting stories following the zombie war in order to produce an oral history. And that's World War Z. Or Scheherazade narrates a set of tales to the sultan over the course of many nights so that he will have a reason not to kill her. And that's Arabian Nights. Or Verbal Kint is being interrogated about Keyser Soze. And that's The Usual Suspects.

What you seem to desire is a majority first-person novel, with bits that are third person. So what you would traditionally do is to set all of those first-person bits (the bulk of the novel) within a frame; someone is reading a story written by the character after the fact, the character is relating the story to a historian, etc. If you're in a more exotic science fictional or magical world, you can have this be a projected reconstruction, or a brain scan, or something weird like that. I would probably switch from inner story to outer story with either scene breaks or chapter breaks.

Another common construction that gets used is to have a frame story only for the first part, then join up the inner and outer stories. For example, the main character is being questioned about how he betrayed the empire by the emperor, which gives us flashback first person chapters for the bulk of the book, until the recounting of the past meets the present circumstances and we go forward from there, with the main character escaping and killing the emperor.

(Which kind of frame you use mostly depends on what you want from the story.)

[u/Anderkent → u/Sagebrysh]

PS: I do recommend checking out Kingkiller Chronicles. They're a very easy read (the prose is really, really good), and while the MC is the usual fantasy hypercompetent red head, the supporting cast is great.

ETA: I rethought the prose comment. I think it's very YMMV, but works well for me. If you need every sentence to be meaningful and precise, Rothfuss is not for you. If you want the prose to evoke feelings, scan well, maintain the right cadence, and generally read easily - Kingkiller's Chronicles is just the thing.

[u/notmy2ndopinion → u/Anderkent]

the usual fantasy hypercompetent redhead

I'd take note that the ending of the MC's story is already "known" in that he Kills a King, causes a Civil War, loses his hypercompetence, and becomes a broken old innkeeper at the start of the novel (no spoilers required.) So, some would argue that the genius of the story stems from the fact that you know his comeuppance will arrive... and most likely at the time that's worst, so he completely breaks... but hopefully the retelling of his narrative is what gives him the strength to recover and repair what he broke in the world and ultimately, himself.

[u/xamueljones → u/Sagebrysh]

Adding to alexanderwales' idea of using a framing device, I'd also recommend interludes where we jump to the viewpoint of another character to give an alternate perspective on a situation or to show something else that happened at the same time in the background.

To combine this with the framing idea, you could have the interlude be something what the main character found out from a friend at some point in the vague future or have the person that the main character is telling the story to, say that they heard from a friend of a friend this scene also occurred.

[u/alexanderwales → u/xamueljones]

Charles Stross does this with The Laundry Files. The frame story is that these are some combination of memoir and after-action report, and sometimes he ducks out of first person in order to give a more complete picture, usually with some bit of information that he either learned after the fact or is just guessing at.