Until I started this comb-through of Lord of the Rings, I'd forgotten just how much of this Tolkien manages to pack in. You can hardly turn around at any point in the first book without falling into another bout of it. The fact that this impression never particularly lingered until I went looking for it, suggests that it's very well integrated ( Read more... )

"Last night you began to tell me strange things about my ring, Gandalf," said Frodo. "And then you stopped, because you said that it was getting late, and we still had another sixteen pages to go..."

Well, nearly ( Read more... )

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has so many intricately detailed secondary stories which require exposition, that he uses just about every single expository technique on Earth, and several in some pretty exotic orbits. I think this variety is one of his strengths, because of all narrative techniques, exposition is one of those which get oldest ( Read more... )

First off, I'm killing that extended metaphor of complex composition as mapping its real and untold 'imaginary' stories to the mathematical complex plane. Nice provocation but useless visualization. I'll keep the term 'complex' for the use of untold or very partially told implicit stories as critical elements of a whole tale, until I've a ( Read more... )

How can anybody tell a tale without telling it?

The main techniques I know for telling the implicit imaginary tales, without which the explicit real tale is incomplete, are as follows: incluing, exposition, reduction, and re-ordering. This post is for identifying them and their functions in complex composition. Virtues, pitfalls, and examples will ( Read more... )

How can I tell a tale without telling it?

In my last revision post, I laid out my notion of real composition as the bringing together of multiple told tales to make a single greater tale; and complex composition as a similar exercise, but including some tales that are untold or imaginary.  All the component tales of the work are necessary (or they ( Read more... )

In my last revision post, I discussed various ways of adding multiple complete or partial tales together, to compose a single work.  Along these lines, I sketched out the peculiar real structure of Three Katherines of Allingdale: a short subverted fairy-tale, The Deed of Katy Elflocks, whose themes are redeveloped and resolved in a long enchanted ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

"Little book, what are you?"

Three Katherines of Allingdale is my book - a single work, a unity, one made thing in itself. But, looking at and listening to it, my first question is: what kind of single thing is that?

In the simplest possible sense, the answer would be: this is a story, and there is nothing outside the story, and now the story is ( Read more... )