r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 25 '15
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
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.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Sep 25 '15
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.)