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Order! Order in the…Book?
I write books. Yeah, I know. It’s a bad habit, but I can’t help myself.
Fiction or non-fiction, any writing the size of a book needs order. It doesn’t have to be an order that is easily understood by the reader, although that generally helps. Roger Zelazny once wrote a book where all the chapters were labeled “One” or “Two.” The Ones had a specific order, but given the book dealt with time travel, the Twos did not have a specific order, so he threw them up in the air and determined the order by where they came down. Not every book is amenable to that sort of ordering, so authors must find other ways of ordering the chapters or subjects within their books.
I’m editing a book right now that will soon be going out. It is a work of fiction. I’m never quite sure what to call it, though. It’s not really a novel. The whole series might be considered a super-novel. A novel has a general theme, at least, and should be telling one story. This series is more of a family saga with characters weaving their ways through multiple volumes, and as with Zelazny’s book, there is time travel involved, thus one of the threads starts at the end of this third volume and shows up in the beginning of the first volume. Time travel can make one plan ahead. Most of the order in the series has been determined by time at which something is happening, at least in the first two volumes.
But then I was writing this third volume, and something happened. I wanted to squeeze everything into the third volume that happens over a two-and-a-half year period. The problem is that a lot is happening. The first volume covered sixty-three years. The second volume covered fifteen years. The family the saga is about is growing, and as it does, the number of adventures in a given time period expand. I divided what was supposed to be the third volume into six major themes, each of which split into its own volume. The themes are: the time-traveling family lines, the original family line, naval warfare, land warfare, science and technology, and explorers (sort of). Within these six volumes, everything is done sequentially, but the six volumes are covering the same two-and-a-half years. The characters might be in more than one volume, or a character might be major in one volume while his brother is a major player under another theme.
Sequence is probably the most used organizing principle within fiction. Perspective can be another. A book can be presented as chapters alternating between points of view of different characters. This can be quite fun when none of the characters are reliable witnesses or narrators. Some books even have all of one character’s perspective, and then go to another character to present the whole book in a different light. A third way perspective can be used is in weaving the sub-plots together into the one grand plot. Characters might start on opposite sides of the world, and come together over several chapters to accomplish whatever needs to be accomplished. Usually, perspective is a sub-organizing factor under sequence, but not always. As mentioned, a book can be written with the opposite hierarchy.
In non-fiction, things might be arranged any way that is logical. I have a set of books on writing that I have been working on that use sequence as a main organizing principle. So, the book has multiple chapters each on learning to write, coming up with ideas, writing, editing, publishing, etc.
I have another book on serving on boards of directors where it is grouped by topic, with the topics being the eight functions of a board of directors.
A book of recipes might be organized by the course: soups, salads, meats, cheeses, desserts, etc. Of course, the courses will usually be organized by sequence within a meal or within the day.
Can you think of any other organizing principles in books you have read or written, other than sequence, perspective, or theme/topic/subject?
When you write your next book, what will the organizing principle be?
Published in Group Writing
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under Spetember’s theme of Order.
Roadmarks. Good read .
I was lazy and didn’t confirm whether it was the Ones that had sequence and the Twos that were random or vice versa. But it was one or the other.
I haven’t read it since college, but I think that you got it right. The first chapter was definitely labeled “2.”
History is often presented in an alternation between the historical narrative — that is, what is happening in sequence — with discussions of society, military technology, art, etc. A good history book or lecture maintains a good balance between these approaches in my opinion.
About time you knocked out that third volume. You’ve got a line of customers coming out the door here.
Thackeray’s 1844 The Luck of Barry Lyndon has a very different tone than Stanley Kubrick’s magnificent-looking 1975 film. The story is told first person by a narrator who it gradually reveals as unreliable.
You must’ve borrowed my keyboard, Gary…
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a book in nine volumes that I keep starting but never manage to finish. The main character — who is also the narrator — has a very hard time finishing a story, so much so that his own birth doesn’t occur until Volume 3.
I think some of the stories about an object that changes hands, and how it affects different lives are interesting.
Nice post, @arahant. Made me think :-)
Ever read Stand on Zanzibar? It has a blurb at the beginning on “The Innis Mode”, which describes the basic construction of the book.
The Red Violin, Accordion Crimes, works like that?
I saw a movie version once. That was enough for me.
I have it here somewhere…but could you describe it?
The table of contents is divided into about six categories. Two or three of them are standard narrative storytelling. The rest are not. For example, one of the types is “The Happening World”, which will be a classified ad, or the script for a TV commercial, or a police or newspaper report. The idea is to be able to create a picture of what the world is like, but in a compressed format. If you tried to include all of that background detail in narrative form, it would be two or three times as long.
Interesting approach, interesting book, although the over population theme is a bit dated. Worth your time.
That movie version is, um, interesting. It’s more about making a movie about making a movie of an unfilmable book, and it’s not bad for what it does.
Since one entire page of Tristram Shandy is simply black ink, and it, um, meanders a lot the narrative is really more like a series of vignettes.
It’s one of my favorite books, but I’ve never finished it.
I was going to say: I never heard about the film version, but God help the screenwriter.
Slaughterhouse-Five is another book with a scattered narrative ordering.
I first encountered it on an Air New Zealand flight, of all places. Not normal airline fare, since a character gets his, um, nether regions trapped in a window within the first five minutes or so. I watched the whole film later on, and as I said it’s not actually bad for what it is. But it’s far from an accurate portrayal of the book (which I keep meaning to finish one of these days).
On the same flight I watched The World’s Fastest Indian, which is the true story of a man from Dunedin travelling to the Bonneville Salt Flats, in Utah, to try to set a speed record on his motorcycle. It stars Anthony Hopkins as the Kiwi who is very taken aback by 1960s America. (Dunedin is both at the end of the world, pretty literally, and very Scotskirk Presbyterian, or at least it was in those days. Nobody makes their way to Dunedin unless they have to. I’ve been all over Australia and New Zealand and never come close to Dunedin.)
Billy Pilgrim had come unstuck in time.
One of my favorites is Catch-22, a book that largely ignores chronological order. It jumps all over the place, and only gradually do you piece together the overall story of Yossarian’s life. What I find most effective is the way Heller tends to return to certain events over and over again, and you gradually come to understand that these events are pivotal ones.
Peter F. Hamilton’s science fiction novels tend to be sprawling epics with many characters in different places. You might read six or seven chapters, each following a different storyline, before you finally come back to one you’ve seen before. But eventually all of these storylines intersect in some way.
The novel that I’ve had in my head for about twenty-five years is a science-fiction story. If I ever write it, it will consist of two storylines: the “today” story, following the protagonist in a traditional narrative style; and the “historical backdrop” story, revealing events that happened 70-100 years ago, in the form of various original documents the protagonist has collected (newspaper articles, interviews, unpublished memoirs, legal documents, and so forth).
I’ll admit that part of my inspiration comes from Tolkien, where you have Frodo’s present-day story taking place against a backdrop of deep history that he learns about as he goes along. Part of my problem is that, in the case of my unwritten story, I find the historical-backdrop story much more interesting and compelling than the protagonist’s story, which might lead to a rather lopsided structure.
Start further back with short stories about the deep history.
That is how I start the story within a story of a frame story in the book I am finishing right now. A guy walks into the offices of a magazine, leaves behind a story, which the publisher realizes is anonymous after the guy leaves, so he reads the story and from some clues, figures out who the author was, although he keeps that to himself, and decides how best to make money off the story.
I have another book I’m working on where the narrator is an Archivist Detective in the Archives of Time. He is presenting stories of time travelers who have messed things up or gotten lost, etc. His narration is the frame for several stories, some of which do not seem to come from the same universe.
That’s the plan, actually. Somewhere I have a half-written story set during the historical time period, the main character of which might turn up in the later story as an old man. And I have a few other story ideas that are set at various points in the same timeline. I’ll probably never finish any of them, but they’re fun to think about while I’m waiting to fall asleep.
I’m reading Cat’s Cradle right now and there doesn’t seem to be any of those mechanisms you listed. Each chapter title tells about that scenes topic, which may or may not be relevant to the story.
Thank you for mentioning Roger Zelazny, my hero. Roadmarks is a fascinating experiment in several ways, since the main character turns out to be a creature that is born old and gets younger as he ages. The Doc Savage cameo is priceless.
If you like that sort of adventuresomeness, Creatures of Light and Darkness has chapters written in completely different forms: one is a poem, one is a play. A Night in the Lonesome October is a calendar; every chapter is another day of the month.
One thing I love dearly about all of Zelazny’s work is his total inability to resist a gut-wrenching pun. “You came to Heaven without a fortune? Unfortunate.” “I stuck my hand in, hoping offhandedly there were no booby traps.” And of course, using two entire chapters to set up “Then the fit hit the Shan.”
Roger Zelazny signed some books for me; as I recall, he was wearing his trademark sheepskin vest.
I told a friend of mine about him and she realized that she had babysat for his child(ren?) in New Mexico.
Walter Jon Williams (also worth reading) is generally considered to be his protégé.
And that is the sum total of everything I know about Zelazny except that I’ve enjoyed reading his books, though his second Amber series was only slightly less disappointing than the Star Wars prequels.