Prelude to Revision: Unity of Composition
Is the tale one thing, or is it many? If it's many, how do they add up to one tale after all, and what does that mean for it?
Some stories are seamless - Terry Pratchett's later Discworld books are mostly like this: they charge right in, and don't stop until they come out the other side. Further along, covering the vast majority of books to some degree or other, we get stories that are articulated out of parts, each being a thing in itself with a certain degree of closure, and often a name. Lord of the Rings has several levels of this - and so, most brilliantly and beautifully down to a fine level of structure, does John Crowley's Little, Big.
Considering the top level of Little, Big, we arrive at something a bit different - still a single flowing tale, but divided now into movements which may be set years apart and have very different flavours. This is a thought we are going to need shortly.
Finally, we get to tales that are essentially fix-ups of loosely-related sub-tales into one grander narrative arc. Tanith Lee's Night's Master is a fix-up of the closed kind, whose arc definitely concludes; Ryk E Spoor's Digital Knight offers the loosest kind of all, a simple serial fix-up whose tales progress but do not particularly conclude, the line of the arc passing over the book's horizon. Beyond there lie things that are not exactly tales at all, like Jack Vance's Dying Earth - a self-anthology united only by setting, whose order is a thing of theme and mood only. Here ends my survey. Where is my book?
At the lower level, suffice for now to note that it's like most of my stuff: articulated into chapters strongly defined and significantly named. This may be something to consider later. For now, I want to consider the top level. This is where Three Katherines starts to get peculiar. I don't have anything to which I can compare its structure directly, so I'll have to reason by feel and analogy.
My sense of 'musical movement' from Little, Big is the closest thing I have to work with, here. Overtly, Three Katherines has two 'movements', and they are neither equal nor of the same kind. Here is my immediate attempt to describe what I think is going on, written in my other blog just after completion of the first draft:
... asymmetrically divided treatment, the enchantment-shot realistic fantasy of Killer-Kate developing and resolving the themes propounded in the grounded fairy-tale of Katy Elflocks.
Katy Elflocks is about a 40,000 word novella, which I expect to expand slightly in the course of the revision. Killer-Kate is about a 180,000 word novel, which I expect to contract significantly, but not to anything remotely near parity. The important thing for me to hold in mind here seems to be this: they are not just separate movements, they are movements that are doing different kinds of things. Katy's summer song - sharp, bright, finding its way to fairy-tellable happy endings by some elvish grace almost despite itself - gives way to Kate's winter's tale, of old age and old happy endings long come to catastrophe, and a revisiting and invocation of the one happy ending that was right and true.
But Katy is about individual triumph and salvation: in Kate there is no longer any individual escape possible, and the feudal oppressions that bred the injustices of Katy must be overthrown for whole populations, or triumph over all and sink into a dreamless blood-glutted slumber. It turns out to be a thoroughly political work, albeit of its own time and place - and fairy-tale solutions to political problems are not the kind of lies I like to breathe, even through silver.
Then again, Katy is about going forth in the morning, and Kate is about coming home in the evening, to fulfil a long day's tale of promises before being free to lie down with one's lover at last. The second movement differs greatly in tone, complexity, and purpose from the first; and this I have as much to bear in mind in the revision, as the fact that they are two movements of a single music which must sound out complete.
This is the tale talking now. This is not at all what I meant in the first place, when I was putting it together. The collapse of my originally intended structure has left a very definite shadow - if I prove unlucky or unskilful, an actual and devouring void - close to the heart of my composition. To this problem, which in my previous post I flippantly dubbed the Kitty Clause, I must next turn.
This entry originally posted on Dreamwidth at http://caper-est.dreamwidth.org/73015.html - comments preferred there, if you have a foot in both camps.
Some stories are seamless - Terry Pratchett's later Discworld books are mostly like this: they charge right in, and don't stop until they come out the other side. Further along, covering the vast majority of books to some degree or other, we get stories that are articulated out of parts, each being a thing in itself with a certain degree of closure, and often a name. Lord of the Rings has several levels of this - and so, most brilliantly and beautifully down to a fine level of structure, does John Crowley's Little, Big.
Considering the top level of Little, Big, we arrive at something a bit different - still a single flowing tale, but divided now into movements which may be set years apart and have very different flavours. This is a thought we are going to need shortly.
Finally, we get to tales that are essentially fix-ups of loosely-related sub-tales into one grander narrative arc. Tanith Lee's Night's Master is a fix-up of the closed kind, whose arc definitely concludes; Ryk E Spoor's Digital Knight offers the loosest kind of all, a simple serial fix-up whose tales progress but do not particularly conclude, the line of the arc passing over the book's horizon. Beyond there lie things that are not exactly tales at all, like Jack Vance's Dying Earth - a self-anthology united only by setting, whose order is a thing of theme and mood only. Here ends my survey. Where is my book?
At the lower level, suffice for now to note that it's like most of my stuff: articulated into chapters strongly defined and significantly named. This may be something to consider later. For now, I want to consider the top level. This is where Three Katherines starts to get peculiar. I don't have anything to which I can compare its structure directly, so I'll have to reason by feel and analogy.
My sense of 'musical movement' from Little, Big is the closest thing I have to work with, here. Overtly, Three Katherines has two 'movements', and they are neither equal nor of the same kind. Here is my immediate attempt to describe what I think is going on, written in my other blog just after completion of the first draft:
... asymmetrically divided treatment, the enchantment-shot realistic fantasy of Killer-Kate developing and resolving the themes propounded in the grounded fairy-tale of Katy Elflocks.
Katy Elflocks is about a 40,000 word novella, which I expect to expand slightly in the course of the revision. Killer-Kate is about a 180,000 word novel, which I expect to contract significantly, but not to anything remotely near parity. The important thing for me to hold in mind here seems to be this: they are not just separate movements, they are movements that are doing different kinds of things. Katy's summer song - sharp, bright, finding its way to fairy-tellable happy endings by some elvish grace almost despite itself - gives way to Kate's winter's tale, of old age and old happy endings long come to catastrophe, and a revisiting and invocation of the one happy ending that was right and true.
But Katy is about individual triumph and salvation: in Kate there is no longer any individual escape possible, and the feudal oppressions that bred the injustices of Katy must be overthrown for whole populations, or triumph over all and sink into a dreamless blood-glutted slumber. It turns out to be a thoroughly political work, albeit of its own time and place - and fairy-tale solutions to political problems are not the kind of lies I like to breathe, even through silver.
Then again, Katy is about going forth in the morning, and Kate is about coming home in the evening, to fulfil a long day's tale of promises before being free to lie down with one's lover at last. The second movement differs greatly in tone, complexity, and purpose from the first; and this I have as much to bear in mind in the revision, as the fact that they are two movements of a single music which must sound out complete.
This is the tale talking now. This is not at all what I meant in the first place, when I was putting it together. The collapse of my originally intended structure has left a very definite shadow - if I prove unlucky or unskilful, an actual and devouring void - close to the heart of my composition. To this problem, which in my previous post I flippantly dubbed the Kitty Clause, I must next turn.
This entry originally posted on Dreamwidth at http://caper-est.dreamwidth.org/73015.html - comments preferred there, if you have a foot in both camps.