Wednesday 13 August 2014

The structure of ENGRAVITATION

A mostly serial narrative, interleaved with fragments of the chronologically penultimate chapter.  I lifted the "penultimate first" idea from (among others) Roger Zelazny's Lord Of Light, in which the protagonist is introduced at a high point of the action and then "remembers" in even-sized chapters the earlier events that brought him to this pass, before continuing to the final conclusion and a little bit of postscript that will make you cry.  If you read LOL in strict chronological order, it doesn't work half so well.

Splitting a whole chapter into fragments no more than a page long allows me to bring in the McGuffin of which my own protagonist is unaware for much of the narrative.  For most of this chapter, he is in hospital, drifting in and out of sleep, doing not very much except dream.  You've been there too.

ENGRAVITATION has its own postscript, which in a book with a musical background I choose to call Encore.  This encore is quite long, and if you stay to the end you may miss your last bus home.  Feel free to cry if you want.

No comments:

Post a Comment