ozarque: Writing science fiction; the "current fashion"...

ozarque (

ozarque) wrote,
@ 2008-04-28 08:34:00

Writing science fiction; the "current fashion"...
In my UnReview of Simak's City, I said that "the current fashion in sf is to make the reader struggle to figure out what's happening."

archangelbeth commented:
"I wonder how much of that is a combination of expecting that the reader will want 'new,' and thus probably more complicated stories (working on defining the tale as 'not just another cliched telling of Universal Plot #1'), and the current crackdown (at least, I've heard there's one) on word-counts to keep hardcovers from going so expensive that no one buys them... Basically, something's got to give. Either the plot simplifies or the description suffers."

not_your_real commented:
"That is one of my favorite things about reading SF. (I also madly love the movies Memento and Primer...)"

starcat_jewel commented:
"I disagree very strongly with this. I'm reading a lot of current SF that has very clear plots with beginnings, middles, and ends."

ahistoricality commented:
"This has been driving me nuts for a decade or so: it's very pronounced in short fiction, at least the pieces published in F&SF."

I think the reason I perceive the current fashion in sf as an effort to make the reader struggle is a generational phenomenon; I suspect, in fact, that I'm entirely in the wrong about it. That is, my statement presupposes that the writers/screenwriters are deliberately trying to make the reader/viewer struggle to understand the narrative, and that's probably false. I don't think they're aware that they're doing it. I couldn't do it myself without making a deliberate effort, and I'm not at all sure I could do it successfully, but it's wrong for me to call it a "fashion"; I think it just reflects the natural evolution of storytelling.

You young people have grown up with media where narratives are presented in bits and pieces, flipping back and forth from one character and setting and time to another, in a way that is baffling to an elderly reader/viewer like me. Battlestar Galactica is a perfect example; the novels of William Gibson are good examples. You're used to doing half a dozen things at the same time ... you're used to flipping back and forth among a batch of different IM conversations at the same time ... you're used to constructing a narrative from fragments. It seems to me that your entire concept of "narrative" is quite different from mine. I can imagine it, by analogy with the way I construct narrative when I'm writing poetry; but when I read prose fiction (or watch films) constructed by that method I really do have to work very hard as I read, or I just get lost.

I owe you an apology for making so broad a claim with no explanation or qualification. I can only say that my mind was focused on the problem of making it clear why I had enjoyed City so much, without at the same time strewing spoilers around. And unlike you [youall], I'm no good at processing multiple threads of information simultaneously.

Now -- deliberately -- so that I don't get deeper in trouble, I'll make my final yodel across the Generation Gap an acknowledgment that there are surely many elders who aren't narratively-challenged like me and can skip as nimbly from fragment to fragment as any teenager. Good for them; long may they wave!

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lovecraftienne
2008-04-28 01:45 pm UTC (link)

I`m kind of half-and-half here - I see what you mean, absolutely, but I find I have a certain amount of tolerance for the jump-cut style of life.

In fact, I noticed it very strongly, that generation gap, when I went to see West Side Story in a theatre recently; a group of young-ish, say university-age, people were watching it as well. The opening shot, if you haven't seen it, consists of an overpainting of the south end of Manhattan, slowly shifting colours, but otherwise completely static, while the orchestra runs through the overture.

For me, it's a lovely, promising bit, as the music is laid out before us, pledges of future tunes. Steady on the visual, because the music is talking right now.

But I noticed the younger folk getting restless after ten or twenty seconds (an eternity, for the jump-cut world), and when it went on and on for, oh, I don't know, a minute or two, they were tittering nervously like it was doing something rude. They were so unused to that long, long shot, and the slow move into the city to find the playground where the movie starts.

It really brought home that generation gap. I know I've mentioned before in my own LJ how few movies or fiction-TV I see anymore, and it's largely because of the jump-cutting: for me, it's too frenetic, too disjointed, to watch a single conversational scene shot from six angles, where no angle is used for more than about two or three seconds.

I don't have the same problem with books/stories, but I thought it might be instructive to point out the middle ground - I can see your point,

ozarque, but I can also see theirs. Funny place to be in.

For the time-check on where I sit, I was born in 1966 - the very bleeding edge of Gen-X, as my parents were both born in 1946, just post-war in Britain, the classic definition of Boomers.

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idiotgrrl
2008-04-28 02:30 pm UTC (link)

I'm not sure about the UK, but here in the States the definition of GenX has more or less been pushed back to 1961-1980 as people on the cusp report thinking, feeling, and acting like Xers. Celebrity example: Barack Obama, 1961, who is running on a platform of generational revolt. Likewise, while some people are still wed to the birthrate definition of Boomers, their birthyear has been pushed back to, roughly, "have no conscious memory of the end of WWII." So in the States, you'd be a core Xer like my oldest daughter.

As a matter of fact, a recent article on American Catholicism pinpointed the generations by pre-Vatican II, Vatican II, and post-Vatican II (and 'never heard of Vatican II, implicit) and the dividing years were 'born 1943-later' and 'born 1961-later' - and the new conservative Catholics, born 1981-later. And those square with my observations of the larger secular world.

Just a side note.

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	feonixrift 2008-04-28 03:27 pm UTC (link)
	tittering nervously like it was doing something rude. laughs Perfect. I've seen that reaction so many times. Often, when it took me more than a sentence to say something. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	voxwoman 2008-04-28 04:03 pm UTC (link)
	Heh. My 14-year-old daughter and I started watching West Side Story on Saturday night, and she had the exact same reaction. She has trouble watching a lot of the old films, but I think doing live theater might mitigate that somewhat. You can't really do a jump-cut with live theater. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	archangelbeth 2008-04-28 11:12 pm UTC (link)
	I remember watching the Feet of Flame DVD... And GAH. It drives me batty with how it won't hold a scene for very long. Absolutely batty. I want to get settled and watch it for a while and it's trying to be an MTV video -- original MTV, when they actually showed videos all day -- with fast cuts and fades all the time. EUGH. (Reply to this)(Parent)

blackmonkeymage
2008-04-28 01:52 pm UTC (link)

There is a book about this, Everything Bad is Good For You by Steven Johnson, which makes the case that multithreaded narratives and complicated video games are actually making kids smarter. I remember being fairly impressed by it; maybe I'll read it again. Though the fact that I can't remember exactly how he made the case suggests the downside of all this complexity: we've got to be ready to discard information at the drop of a hat in order to get at the good stuff.

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Response to blackmonkeymage...

ozarque
2008-04-30 01:02 pm UTC (link)

I haven't read the Johnson book; thanks for posting the information and links. I've been reading some research articles, however, and the consensus seems to be that there's no consensus yet. That is, research appears to indicate that lots of interaction with the new fashion in narratives does cause demonstrable changes in the brain, but there's no consensus yet about whether those changes are an improvement or not.

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rosalux
2008-04-28 02:11 pm UTC (link)

I wonder if it's less a talent for knowing what's going on and more a sense of comfort with *not* knowing how things connect.

I don't mind being lost as long as I can trust the author/filmmaker to tie things together in the end. Which is what makes a bad ending so incredibly frustrating instead of just a mild let down.

I experience that in fiction as a difference in worldview, as much as in narrative style; the author is not establishing causation for you by saying "this happened, and so this happened, and so this happened" (Though I do enjoy stories like that - my favorite romance writer is a big proponent of a 4-act narrative structure and you can always see the arc in her plots very clearly). The "all this stuff happened at once" structure is almost an admission that causation is blurry and we may not understand what was happening until it's over.

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leora
2008-04-28 02:19 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, that's what I loved about the West Wing. You'll get an episode where the characters are all talking about some incident or some major issue with no context and you're baffled. But you know that by the end of the episode the context will have been provided. You just don't know how long into the episode it'll be before that conversation makes sense and you have the pieces to hang it on, but you have the key words you know to pay attention to, because clearly what they're discussing is important.

I enjoy that sort of back to front story telling, although there have definitely been days when my brain was not up for it and I simply could not follow the episode. But then, it gives you so much more to notice when you rewatch the episodes. Then suddenly you're as in the know as the characters and the conversations take on new meanings.

But you do have to be willing to sit through being distinctly out of the loop for a while. And I know people who will keep asking what something is about or why something happened when watching a show, when they need to just keep watching to find out, but they expect to understand it when it happens.

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Response to rosalux...

ozarque
2008-04-30 01:09 pm UTC (link)

"I wonder if it's less a talent for knowing what's going on and more a sense of comfort with *not* knowing how things connect."

That's a very interesting idea ... and it makes excellent sense. People who grew up with the Net and are used to dashing around from link to link -- but know for sure that they can always find the path back to where they started from -- might have a much higher tolerance for waiting-to-know-stuff.

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idiotgrrl
2008-04-28 02:23 pm UTC (link)

Score one for Marshall McLuhan across the gap of 40 years. He said that print media gave us the habit of expecting a linear message - story arc, plot, beginning, middle, and end. Though that structure goes back to Aristotle; however, the ancient Greeks were literate in that sense. They, and the Romans after them (and certainly the Hebrews) had the alphabet and had plain-text media - and linear habits of thought, more or less.

(Why that went to a more multimedia non-linear format with the Medieval manuscript may have something to do with the fact that literacy was being picked up by people who had been living a barbarian-level lifestyle within living memory? Surely Dark Ages history indicates that.)

McLuhan knew only of TV, not our current rush of electronic media, but still predicted young people would go back to interactive nonlinear patterns of thought. For good or ill? I can't be objective; my brain is entrained to the print culture most thoroughly.

However, if there's a generation gap, and I'm sure there is, there's where it lies.

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raqs
2008-04-28 03:00 pm UTC (link)

I don't know, I'm not that old and I'm an avid multi-tasker and fan of lots of complicated stories, but I still agree with you that current SF seems to be oftentimes too hard to figure out. Personally I think it's laziness on the part of the writer, or (probably more accurately) on the part of editors who so want something new that they're willing to overlook lack of craftsmanship to get it. If I as a lifelong SF fan and professional reader can't figure out what's going on, I suspect there is a problem in the supply chain somewhere.

But that's just me.

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Understanding narratives
(Anonymous)
2008-04-28 04:04 pm UTC (link)

[If I as a lifelong SF fan and professional reader can't figure out what's going on, I suspect there is a problem in the supply chain somewhere.] Well put! I don't think high-context literature is new -- C. S. Lewis comments upon the obscurity of what was modern poetry in his time (e.g. T. S. Eliot). Despite my many years of majoring in English lit, both graduate and undergraduate, however, I can't stand a narrative in which it isn't eventually made clear exactly what happened. Your comment reminds me of what Marion Zimmer Bradley used to say in the guidelines for her anthologies: If she couldn't figure out what was going on, she didn't care and suspected her readers wouldn't, either. There's a difference between legitimate complexity and either deliberate obscurity or incompetent muddling. E.g. I believe the kinds of narrative in which the author makes no apparent attempt to help the reader keep characters distinct from each other, follow who's speaking in dialogue, or sort out what the setting is supposed to be are examples of the latter. Not to mention jumping among several different temporal settings and not bothering to give sufficient cues as to what's a flashback and what's happening in the present. (The superb time-twisting novel THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE does an excellent job with the jumps; the author thoughtfully provides headers telling us outright what the date is and whose POV we're in.) Being unable to understand the story on THAT level is quite different from having trouble understanding because the depth of meaning or multilayered plotline requires concentrated attention. RE the word count issue mentioned earlier, though, my impression is that publishers tolerate (and often demand) much longer books than the typical length in the 1970s and earlier. The minimum word count accepted in almost all mass market publishers' guidelines is 90,000, often 100,000. Outside the small press and e-publishing, the only market for short novels seems to be category romance.

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Re: Understanding narratives

not_your_real
2008-04-29 02:02 am UTC (link)

Despite my many years of majoring in English lit, both graduate and undergraduate, however, I can't stand a narrative in which it isn't eventually made clear exactly what happened.

This is probably a personal style difference - in short story format, if a story leaves me aching with one emotion or another, if they pull it off, it is ok with me that I never understand exactly what happened. If I don't get either an emotional payoff or an explanation, however, I am disgruntled.

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Re: Understanding narratives

leora
2008-04-29 08:39 am UTC (link)

The first book that I tried to read that made me truly angry was The Hobbit. I was very young, and I was a good bit of the way through, and I simply could not keep track of the characters. They weren't very distinguishable and the author had deliberately given them names that made them hard to tell apart. I was young enough that I was mad at the author for that. I stopped reading, concluding that if the author didn't care enough to make the characters distinguishable then the book didn't matter. I refused to touch anything by Tolkien for a long time after that. I've been told The Simarillion is better, and I do mean to give it a chance. I read a few pages, and it was okay. But I still remember how furious I was at an author for doing that to me. I wouldn't be now... but as a child, it felt like a betrayal to not make the characters worth reading about.

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	Re: Understanding narratives rosalux 2008-04-29 06:27 pm UTC (link)
	Totally me too - I never finished any of Tolkein's books all the way through until after I had seen Lord of the Rings, because having faces to put with names made it easier for me to remember the different characters. (Reply to this)(Parent)

That is, my statement presupposes....

mtz322
2008-04-28 04:03 pm UTC (link)

This part of your post brings out something I've been wishing to ask you to address but haven't been able to think of how to ask the question.

You, in retrospect, identify a presupposition you made, but you are an expert. Many of us need to be able, at least after the fact, be able to do this. Better yet would be to learn how to do such before jamming both feet in mouth up to the knees!

With written communication, and particularly email, we do have that opportunity although very few of us seem to even realize that.

I also am thinking that it isn't major blunders that I worry about. I don't think I am likely to make the sort of really offensive blunders you wrote about in the written communications book. It is the little things that slip by that seem to cause the most trouble. Sort of like paper cuts, small but very, very irritating.

Also, you mention thinking that the writers deliberately made it confusing and concluding that it isn't so much deliberate as it is what they are used to. (A poor paraphrase, but....)

So many times I hear people use the "I'm just blunt" or "That's just how I am" statements and I sense somehow that they are bewildered by the reactions and have given up on trying to avoid the pitfalls rather than deliberately seeking attention.

Not sure if this makes any sense but it is the closest I can come, at this time.

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Re: That is, my statement presupposes.... response to mtz322...

ozarque
2008-04-28 06:17 pm UTC (link)

It makes very good sense, and I think I understand the question you're asking. It's a question a lot of doctors have asked me over the years .... with their arms spread wide and their palms upturned ... basically, "What on earth did I say???" And it's a very good question. The problem is that I don't know how to go about answering it without wandering off into thickets of incomprehensible jargon -- which would be no help at all. I'll give it some thought; maybe I can think of a way to go about it.

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Re: That is, my statement presupposes....
(Anonymous)
2008-04-28 08:25 pm UTC (link)

All my life I've been frequently surprised when people get offended by remarks I make that wouldn't bother me a bit if someone made them to me. Tortuously thinking out statements before uttering them doesn't often help and sometimes makes matters worse. (I'm referring to oral conversation; in writing, I have plenty of time to revise and get things right.) So the best solution, when I can remember to employ it instead of blurting out the first thing that comes to mind, is just to say as little as possible. Which I do have trouble remembering, because I do like to run off at the mouth. Sigh. Ever since I first heard the term, I've wondered whether I might have a mild form of Asperger's. But probably that's only grasping at a convenient excuse for my social ineptitude.

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ladyvorkosigan
2008-04-28 05:04 pm UTC (link)

I've always felt like some of it as a matter of a writer's own skillfulness - to have us jump around but still have it be completely clear. I always said I got annoyed by fantasy novels that played games to have the ending work (Robin McKinley, whose books I often love anyway, is a major example of this for me), but then I read Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, which absolutely shattered the time frame/paradigm we thought were reading about but had it make perfect sense.

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dagoski
2008-04-28 05:07 pm UTC (link)

I'm not sure that this kind narrative is all that new. There's a lot of Victorian fiction that's presented as letters between the characters. Brahm Stoker's Dracula comes to mind. Also, I think some of the sci-fi presented as serials in the early sci-fi magazines might also have done somewhat nonlinear plots. Can't think of one just yet, though. Also, the space available for monthly comic books has also forced the fragmentation of narratives to focus on different groupings of the characters. I guess, it's not new to me

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	Response to dagoski... ozarque 2008-04-28 06:19 pm UTC (link)
	Perhaps the fashion comes and goes .... like hemlines. I guess I'm at least consistent; I have always disliked those "epistolary" novels. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: epistolary novels (Anonymous) 2008-04-28 08:17 pm UTC (link)
	I've always loved epistolary novels, mainly because my first introduction to horror fiction was through the Victorian classics, and DRACULA is my favorite novel of all time, the book that inspired me to start writing. As a teenage aspiring author, at first I thought the epistolary technique was the ONLY legitimate structure for a horror story. :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

dteleki
2008-04-28 05:07 pm UTC (link)

You young people have grown up with media where narratives are presented in bits and pieces, flipping back and forth from one character and setting and time to another, in a way that is baffling to an elderly reader/viewer like me.

This multi-tasking multi-camera multi-viewpoint story-telling thing is not entirely new. My favorite examples of this in s.f. are Dune (1965) and Stand on Zanzibar (1968).

In my (currently stalled) novel-in-progress, the narrative structure is itself part of the story.

The Earthian way to tell a story is:
. start at the beginning;
. proceed through the middle until you reach then end;
. then stop.

The alien way to tell a story is:
. start somewhere convenient or interesting, it doesn't matter where;
. starting from there, wander around in the general neighborhood;
. keep wandering until you've personally covered enough of the territory to guess at the rest of it;
. then stop.
. It doesn't matter if there are unexplored holes or gaps, that you have missed, within the explored territory; so long as you can reasonably guess at what is in them.

So, the entire novel is told from the viewpoint of the aliens, and begins with first contact between Earthians and aliens during the aliens' first interstellar journey. The first 3 (very short) stories are in linear Earthian style, the next 2 (somewhat longer) are in wandering-around alien style, and the last 1 (very long) story is in a synthesis of the two styles. This reflects the progressive cultural diffusion (Earthian term) a.k.a. cultural hybridization (alien term) between the two cultures, and the unexpected and unwanted side-effects of that process -- and that process, and its unwanted side-effects, are the theme of the novel.

I got this idea of structure-follows-theme from the Native Tongue series (disorder in the narrative structure reflects disorder in the characters' culture).

As for where this is all heading, there was an incident in the Accelerando stories that I found striking. Our Hero has just been mugged, and the mugger has stolen a portable computer that amplifies Our Hero's brain. Suddenly, Our Hero feels much stupider than he's accustomed to being, and in his frustration, he has the thought: "Is this what consciousness used to be like, where you couldn't sort of swarm around an idea from a hundred sides at once?"

Now there's an s.f.-ish sentence!

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leora
2008-04-29 08:50 am UTC (link)

That's my problem communicating right there! At least, one big one I have. I use the start somewhere interesting and wander around approach, but I keep trying to interact with linear people.

I love multi-layered, non-linear things. I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books, and the only thing that annoyed me was that the universe was not consistent. I didn't like how you could have a choice that leads to a disaster, like walking into an event that if you chose B wouldn't be there at that same point in time. I started working on a choose your own adventure that kept track of time in each thread to try to make one that would be completely consistent, you'd just be choosing which paths to take. The only differences would be based on the choices you made.

I dreamed about hypertext before it existed. I figured something like that would exist someday in the far future, but I didn't expect to see it. I love applications like Wikipedia, where you can browse through knowledge going from link to link, popping down a layer to learn more about one bit, then popping back up to continue on your main path.

Maybe it's partly generational and partly individual variation. But I've been this way since long before I had computer access or cable TV.

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starcat_jewel
2008-04-28 05:15 pm UTC (link)

I'm going to take a certain amount of issue with this as well. I was born in 1956, so I hardly qualify as "you young people"; and I don't multitask well, so expecting me to follow a genuinely non-linear narrative is... not a good idea. (For example, I hate IM because I can't keep track of what's going on; but Usenet was a delight in the days before it was entirely taken over by trolls, because it let me follow a dozen different conversations one at a time.)

I wonder if the difference between us might be that I read a lot of mystery novels? In the mystery genre, it's expected that the author will drop clues for the reader to pick up -- and some of them are going to be red herrings, so the reader's mental projection of what's likely to happen next changes over the course of the book.

Do you find it difficult to follow a story that's told from the POV of more than one person in widely-separated locations? Does it make a difference if the sections are clearly labeled as to when/where they're occurring?

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Response to starcat_jewel...

ozarque
2008-04-28 06:03 pm UTC (link)

My perception of whether you qualify as part of "you young people" is certain to be different from your own, because you are the same age as my oldest son. Like you, however, when I can find time for leisure reading, mystery novels are high on my list of choices.

I suspect that what I do when I'm reading one of those novels that keeps switching point of view from character to character [or from one batch of characters to another batch] would horrify their authors. George R. R. Martin, for example, would probably not be pleased by the method I've used for reading the wonderful novels in his "Song of Ice and Fire" series. I marked all the chapters that went with one POV with Post-Its, and read all those chapters. Then I marked all the chapters that went with some other POV and read all of those, and so on till I had read the whole book. That's not likely to be what the author has in mind; it's a sort of Reader Mutiny.

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Re: Response to starcat_jewel...

starcat_jewel
2008-04-28 07:12 pm UTC (link)

Interesting! I haven't read those books, but if they are anything like other books I've read with multi-character viewpoints*, that style of reading would completely destroy the linearity for me. By the time I started reading the second set of chapters, I'd already know enough about the "future" from the first set that I'd be like the person who yells at the Dumb Kid in the horror movie, "Don't go down there! Don't open that door! Don't pick that thing up!"

OTOH, I don't mind flashbacks -- even intercut ones -- if they're clearly marked. I guess the point is that I can keep track of several lines of narrative in my head as long as I only have to deal with one of them at a time.

* The specific books I'm thinking about here are the Mageworlds books by Debra Doyle and James D. McDonald. Watching each set of characters move forward in turn, over the same timeline, is part of what I mean by "linear narrative".

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ahistoricality
2008-04-28 08:09 pm UTC (link)

That is, my statement presupposes that the writers/screenwriters are deliberately trying to make the reader/viewer struggle to understand the narrative, and that's probably false.

I disagree, based both on my experience with F/SF materials and my experience as a professor who works, sometimes closely, with modern literary types. There is a fashion in literary fiction for ambiguity, fracture, inconclusiveness, and generally tortured approaches to "writing" (most of which are intended to torture the reader rather than the writer).

I love a well-done fractured narrative -- someone above mentioned West Wing; I'd cite Harlan Ellison's "Deathbird" and the recent writings of Haruki Murakami as extraordinarily successful literary examples -- but there comes a point beyond which the "play" of the text goes well beyond the payoff of following its vagaries. And sometimes there is no payoff: the postmodern critique of language and literature allows authors to do immensely unfair things to their readers in the name of "destabilizing" and "deconstructing."

The modernist idea, first established in the early 20th century, that artists were, by necessity, people who challenged their audiences, broke new ground and violated conventions, has evolved into a generation or two of writers who are trained -- by grades and feedback -- to avoid anything like storytelling.

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a GenX perspective

sapience
2008-04-28 08:29 pm UTC (link)

I recently finished Joan D. Vinge's Snow Queen. It won the Hugo in 1981 and was nominated for the Nebula. And yet I struggled through the entire book, threatening to give up on it altogether several times. The POV shifted so frequently that I was unable to develop a relationship with any of the characters. As a result, I had difficulty recognizing the characters as individuals and so I was often confused about what was going on. Because of this, I found it difficult to care about the characters or the events of the novel.

I don't mind a non-linear narrative once I am familiar with the main characters and the context their stories are being told within. I particularly appreciate a speculative fiction series in which the first book is told from a single perspective (allowing the world and characters ample time to coalesce in my mind), and then later books explore and develop characters who were introduced in the first book but not given primary focus at the time.

A Game of Thrones is in my soon-to-be-read pile right now, and after your above comment about the "Song of Ice and Fire" novels, I'm interested to see what my experience of reading it will be like.

Edited at 2008-04-28 08:39 pm UTC

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Re: a GenX perspective

rosalux
2008-04-28 10:38 pm UTC (link)

The amount of work definitely goes down once you have the backstory - I think I ran into this with Mieville, where I like each of his books more consecutively, in the order I read them. The less effort, the more I enjoy whatever is in the work to be enjoyed.

But sometimes the sense of mastery gained going through the work is part of the enjoyment of it - I think Fingersmith was like that for me, and Gayl Jones' work. And sometimes the fractured-ness is part of what the work is trying to impart. I'd say Dhalgren is definitely in that camp, for example.

There is a certain almost quaint quality to a very linear story with straightforward characterization, especially in science fiction stories. There is a certain type of story where the characters serve the plot, and the plot is laid out to illustrate some idea and also move linearly from A to B to C, that feels very dated to me. (which may point to ozarque's idea of it as a fashion). Not that it doesn't happen in recent fiction - Eric Flint fits right in here - but that it always reminds me of the 1960s paperbacks I scoured the used book store for when I was a kid in the '80s.

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archangelbeth
2008-04-28 11:09 pm UTC (link)

Oh! Jumping around! AH!

Hm! I wonder if it is encouraged, also, by ensemble casts -- such as Star Trek, the Next Generation (more-so, I think, than the original) -- and... Hm, a number of more recent anime series. The concept being that there's not just ONE star, or even a star and a co-star, but a lot of secondary characters who have their own stories and... if some aspect of the story arc is better-served by making THAT secondary character the "star" of the episode, then hey, already paying the actor.

And then there's soap operas, which I try to avoid because I don't watch them religiously enough to cope with the lack of beginning or closure in any given episode.

(That said, there was recently a comic book I was reading that was jumping back and forth with dates, flashbacks, present time, flashback to something else, sideflash, all over the place. I didn't really string it together as a coherent "this happened then, then this happened" so much as "this story is not told in order; if it matters, go back and actually look at the dates, and if it doesn't matter... just hold the data in mind." Not the best comic in that series, though.)

I don't actually like reading jumping-around-stuff, much of the time. Though, for my sins, I've written some fanfic stuff that's... Well, sort of "here's a story that establishes the setting, and there's a story that comes next, and there's a story, and we'll jump to here for this story, and oh foo I just realized that this story should go back there..." I should try to update the chronological-order time, though it's hard when some of the stories gloss over huge chunks of time that other stories are fitting into.

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starcat_jewel
2008-04-30 06:50 pm UTC (link)

Good point! I love ensemble-cast TV shows; although I don't watch much TV at all, the last few things I've gotten into enough to actively follow are Bones, BTVS, B5, and DS9 -- all of which rely on ensembles and occasionally spotlight someone other than the "star". So yeah, I can follow print stories that switch viewpoints between different characters without it seeming strange.

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not_your_real
2008-04-29 01:39 am UTC (link)

As the pro-narrative-struggle voice above, I should clarify:

I don't watch jump-cut video if I can possibly avoid it. I left TV partly for their annoying tendencies in this direction. I was born in 1972. And when I think about SF that makes the reader struggle for comprehension, the first thing I think of is the time in 7th grade when we were assigned some Ray Bradbury to read, and I was amazed that one of my classmates had a complete brain meltdown over it; she was confronted with a collection of words that just didn't resolve into any sensible form for her.

Perhaps my inclusion of Bradbury in the category means that I am misinterpreting the trend you were referring to? But I do read F&SF, lately, and I haven't found anything profoundly difficult there.

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kelsied
2008-04-29 02:06 am UTC (link)

Maybe smarter, maybe just busier. I'm remembering studies showing that multitasking actually slows your brain down, and it's more efficient (and less exhausting, if I recall correctly) if you focus on one thing at a time. You can pull up a whole slew of articles if you search on "multitasking research."

Which (the inefficient multitasking) makes sense to me. I handle multiple threads by putting a "bookmark" in place, so I can come back to that idea when I've closed up the previous one. Every so often, my brain gets full, and then I have to chase down all the bookmarks I forgot were still open... *grins* To that end, Livejournal is wonderful, because I can write down whatever it is, and it will be on my journal when I'm ready to come back to it. (Yes, I'm also a very very listy person.)

I should do some mental sweeping out while I'm thinking about it... (Whoops, there goes another bookmark!)

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metasilk
2008-04-29 02:10 pm UTC (link)

It seems a little bit like the contrast in narrative your describe is rather like that between spinning (fewer threads clearly revolving together to one whole) and weaving (especially of a complicated ins and outs in multiple colors and types of fiber, that makes .. eventually ... a fabric with a single overall pattern).

Kinda. Sorta. Maybe? Not meant to imply one is better than the other.

I wonder what older (century or more) literature has as examples of multi-threaded episodic storytelling. James Joyce isn't old enough, nor Thomas Pyncheon -- who were their precursors?

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farrandy
2008-04-30 02:02 am UTC (link)

Just a thought on non-linear storytelling. I'm rather surprised that so far no one has mentioned one of the most famous movies ever made: CITIZEN KANE. You get the end of the story first, and then the story of Kane's life as viewed by different people. Most people seem to either love it or hate it and I suppose that the way the story is told is the reason why. I remember the first time I saw it I was amazed; I'd never seen or read anything told in a fashion like that. It's a difficult way to tell a story--or at least difficult to do it well.

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fallenpegasus
2008-04-30 05:48 am UTC (link)

I've noticed the "more complex" for some time.

Compare and contrast the very simple plots (with maybe one or two small sidebars, one of them being the romantic one) of classic movies from the 30s to the 50s, with Hollywood's output today.

Even an utter piece of crap, like "Mission Impossible", will have complex interwoving plots and a much larger cast of characters.

Older folks can't seem to keep up.

The day is going to come when I am one of those "older folks that can't keep up"...

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ingulf
2008-04-30 08:37 pm UTC (link)

I remember seeing a documentary on early TV, and apparently they could barely use any camera changes At All, because viewers would feel dislocated if they did. You couldn't have, for example, someone entering a room and then jump to them sitting on a chair, which even older viewers today wouldn't blink at; you had to show them walk to the chair and sit down.

On the other hand, I'm not particularly pleased with the hyperactive camera action you get on shows for the young (and spreading to others). I multitask on the computer, but then I'M in control, dammit.

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aenodia
2008-04-30 10:00 pm UTC (link)

I'm late to the discussion as usual. In reading the posts and discussion I am reminded of Sesame Street. When it was introduced in the late 60's people were concerned with the short segments and jumping from one thing to another and no narrative. We were told that research showed that children's audience it was designed for had short attention spans and they would watch the whole show because of the rapid shifts. The Electric Company was to be for an older audience. Now I wonder if people of 42 and under are still at the Sesame Street age in viewing and expect short segments and jumps to seemingly unconnected material. I think there is some generational effect going on here.
Another example is my book group who read the graphic novel Maus. Most were uncomfortable with that format and said they preferred text. The members were older than me by a few years and did not grow up with comics the way I did.

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	scodiddly 2008-05-01 12:47 am UTC (link)
	The Internet has spoiled my attention span for television. No, seriously. So I don't even have a TV now, I either fool around online, read, or play musical instruments. Sitting around waiting for the narrative to happen (at the same speed for all the viewers, regardless of comprehension speed) is tedious. (Reply to this)(Parent)

scodiddly
2008-05-01 12:46 am UTC (link)

I'm late also, but what the heck.

I think to sum this up from a music perspective... "99% of all music is crap" became "99% of everything is crap". A small number of good authors manage to do the multi-layered story well and so make it popular, so a lot of lesser authors jump on the bandwagon. That's the main problem, which existed long before multi-layered stories became popular. SF stories which have a completely mundane story centered around a novel new idea... or worse, "let's show how clever the author is!" with a huge new alien artifact to explore.

I've learned to dump the books that are weak on the writing and character department - about a year ago I got a couple hundred pages into a book that still leaves me feeling stupid for having read that far. (so now I spend about half my reading time on history - much better characters!).

What I like about good multi-layered (multi-viewpoint? multi-timeline?) books is that I'm essentially reading 2-4 books which all wind up coming together by the end. I'm no stranger to having several books on the nightstand anyway, so a really good book (Neal Stephenson comes to mind here) is no big change. To some extent it's like the classic detective novel. The reader has all the same information as the fictional detective, so it's fun to try to figure out what's really happening. At the worst you get a nice revelation at the end.

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