How Far Can I Push the Bounds Of Narration?

[GreenInkling]

the_true_iori

Narration through images strikes me as excessive. People who say that certain things are indescribable simply don't know enough words.

Good point. At any rate, it's certainly very commendable to try.

[schizophrenic_ai]

Great Lakes haze

I'd say, just write the damn thing

The hardest part of writing for me is beginning. My torque is low in value, but my top speed is high.

[schizophrenic_ai]

the_true_iori

Narration through images strikes me as excessive. People who say that certain things are indescribable simply don't know enough words.

It's not that I won't be able to describe what's going on- it's my narrators who will have trouble describing. People rarely tend to make sense under the influence, but I feel that the words my narrator would use would be too abstract to serve another purpose. I agree that images seem excessive. Honestly, I want to take both routes and see where they take me.

[Great Lakes haze]

schizophrenic_ai

Great Lakes haze

I'd say, just write the damn thing

The hardest part of writing for me is beginning. My torque is low in value, but my top speed is high.

I can relate to that. (And I like your mechanical metaphor.)

[princessMeep]

the_true_iori

Narration through images strikes me as excessive. People who say that certain things are indescribable simply don't know enough words.

The Invention of Hugo Carbet uses images for narration, because it's supposed to be like a movie and a book at the same time. The story is about early filmmaking; it makes sense in context, and the result is a really beautiful, fascinating novel. It's like that to test the boundaries of the medium and the relationship between film and print, not because the author lacked enough vocabulary to describe what was happening.

The author has written another book, Wonderstruck, which uses pictures (the film-as-book conceit from Hugo Carbet) to narrate one story (the girl's story, set in the 1920s) and text to narrate another (the boy's, set in the 1970s).

[phantomkitsune]

It sounds like Howl by Allen Ginsberg would be a good thing for you to read (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1530 cool . Deliberately delirious, it's also pretty allusive to events of the period. Any of the Beat writers, really, could inform your style choices.

Including images isn't particularly avant-garde: it'd mostly be a matter of structure and format and getting an artist you could work with.

As for the dual narration, alternating chapters or giving 00 interludes between each chapter (not chapters themselves, and so probably shorter, to emphasize through structure that he doesn't exist in real space) could both work well.

[schizophrenic_ai]

phantomkitsune

As for the dual narration, alternating chapters or giving 00 interludes between each chapter (not chapters themselves, and so probably shorter, to emphasize through structure that he doesn't exist in real space) could both work well.

I considered giving 00 interludes, but I felt like separating the narratives would not live up to my expectation of a dual narrative. The 00 interludes would seem more like flashbacks seeing as the narratives in real space would be read first and then the interludes would come after. The intended play by play commentary would be non-existent.