Novel narrative devices

[anthrodisiac]

Honey, if you're reading my sex journal without my consent, you're just begging for me to take you tie you up to bed and blindfold you at this point. Maybe rub some cold metal on your skin while I narrate you an entry?

Look, if you want me to read your sex journal, you don't need to bribe me with a good time, okay?

 

[Stanfield2025]

Look. There are people here writing characters who ghost their girlfriends for over a month and then end up HAE. And I'm totally not mad about it so stop asking. I'm not deflecting you're deflecting.

There's a lot of cowardly characters here. What's ten more?

A protagonist of mine who tends to be avoidant would feel personally attacked by this.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

novel plot devices that you can copy without just sounding derivative is a bit trickier.

norafares has an ASD woman who talks to her plants and interprets their behavior a bit like a horoscope to make life decisions.

I don't want anyone to steal that though. But if you tried to make something like that, it would probably just look like you were basing it on horoscopes or tarot. And maybe that's okay.

But it's hard to keep readers invested in a story that seems to involve randomness. They're hoping they are following a person making decisions that they understand even if they don't condone them. But they say tarot is down to making the cards say what you want them to say anyway, so maybe there's a target you can hit.

I didn't publish it. I'm not sure if I lost it?

But I've written a few stories with dice. The key to working with randomness is to give it the connective tissue required to make it make sense.

However, the Tarot isn't as random as you would believe. Actually, divination methods like the Tarot aren't exactly future predictors or magic, and thinking of them as such is both falling into the marketing scam around them, and completely misunderstanding their actual power. The Tarot, in this case, functions more like a mirror. When you know what the symbolism around the Arcana means, which are symbols based around things older than us, symbols that would be ingrained in our Collective Unconscious, you can actually use this as a guide to solve whatever problem is freezing you up at that moment. It's more around intuition and mythology rather than magic, or randomness.

Don't take it from me, take it from both Crowley and Jung. They arrived at the very same conclusion, they just went through different paths.

But I can see someone using divination practices to see where the story leads to. It's the same thing as just rolling dice on random tables and let fate decide.

It's also how Trevor Duvall managed to make a series that is just him playing with himself into one of the most awesome pieces of oral storytelling fantasy out there online.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Look, if you want me to read your sex journal, you don't need to bribe me with a good time, okay?

I'll read it to you while holding a Domi® 2 on your cloaca. There's two tomes and a pocket notebook to it as of yet; pick one.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Acceptably handsome is the most I will boast. 'Octopi' has such a clinical sound, and I love anything that ends in 'puses'.

When I went to biology school, the plural was "octopodes" (because it's Greek, and the Greek word for foot is pus sometimes and pod others). I'm not the sort of person who insists that we have to follow Greek pluralization rules when speaking English, but my old professors can't say that.

 

[StillStunned]

Narrative devices I've used or have in my WIP folder: 2P POV, stream of consciousness, main character narrating the story to an off-screen audience, monologue (i.e. none of the actions are given, or any other characters' dialogue), epistolary, and of course that greatest of literary devices, the unfinished novel.

 

[anthrodisiac]

and of course that greatest of literary devices, the unfinished novel.

Which also happens to be most of what's in your WIP folder.

 

[StillStunned]

Which also happens to be most of what's in your WIP folder.

I'd argue that about half could be typified as "unstarted".

 

[TheLobster]

That would be epic. Reminds me of SCP files.

Since you can use the whole gamut of Unicode in Lit submissions, it’s perfectly possible to include blacked-out squares like these: ◼◼◼◼◼◼ (code point U+25FC).

Rumors also have it that there exists a better way, which entails [DATA EXPUNGED].

 

[SimonDoom]

I've tried this a few times, usually for comic purposes.

One of my stories was presented as a class assignment in which a man and a woman take turns writing a tandem erotic story, and they quickly begin to sabotage each other's version of the story.

In another, I wanted to make fun of the silliness of Literotica comments, so I wrote a very short Loving Wives/cuckold story and then wrote a bunch of comments after the story.

I wrote a Loving Wives/Hot Wife type story in the form of a letter from the wife to the husband, telling him what she had done, and it did pretty well. By putting it in the Letters category I probably sacrificed views but got a much higher score for the story than I would have had it been published in Loving Wives.

Because of the omnipresence of social media, I think texting and direct messaging can be used effectively as devices for a story.

 

[yowser]

One bit Jennifer Egan did (in the Goon Squad? can't remember) was one chapter 'written' in powerpoint slides. Totally niche, totally dated, back when it was still a relatively new technology but popular technology (and people would leave conferences complaining about 'powerpoint poisoning.') This sort of thing certainly ends up being a gimmick, but if you're someone of her level of talent, you can probably pull it off.

I've written not one, but two stories from a penis POV. Certainly rank as examples of my more juvenile efforts.

 

[RetroFan]

I used a different sort of narrative device when writing my Titanic story two years ago. The first part is obviously on the Titanic, narrated in first person by the main character John, starting from when they board the ship at Southhampton England on Wednesday 10th April 1912 and concluding when the rescue ship Carpathia docks in New York in teeming rain on the night of Thursday 18th April 1912.

Then the action shifts to the present day (2024) and a third person narrative where an Australian family find a message in a bottle - written by John while aboard the Titanic - in the Mersey River in the city of Devonport Tasmania when they are watching one of the massive car ferries depart for Geelong on the mainland, the long lost bottle having been at sea for 112 years. The find becomes the subject of international news headlines, and from there we learn the fates of the now long dead fictional characters who survived the sinking. I thought it was an interesting and practical way to wrap up the story, take the readers for a trip to the beautiful island state of Tasmania and have a laugh at the expense of the shallow and not overly bright eldest daughter of the family, the aspiring social media influencer asking no end of dumb questions about the Titanic, starting with her assertion that she 'thought the Titanic was like some fictional ship from some like really old movie from the 90s.'

Another different sort of narrative I employed was with 'Bridget the Bossy Bridezilla', which featured different stories that come together at the end. There were quite a few movies with this structure made in the 2000s and 2010s, for the most part romantic comedies like 'Love Actually', but with some of the later movies of this type not being successful and the death of the Rom-Com genre anyway, I haven't seen a movie like this for a decade or more.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I used a different sort of narrative device when writing my Titanic story two years ago. The first part is obviously on the Titanic, narrated in first person by the main character...

I 100% thought you were going to say "The Titanic" or "The Iceberg."

Plot bunny...

 

[Bramblethorn]

Hey everyone,

What are some unique, niche and novel literary devices to tell stories? I've heard of stories being told through letters and text messages etc. and I've also heard of the unreliable narrator device, but what other ways are there to tell stories that are novel?

I've read one short story told largely through edit notes on a document.

Iain M. Banks' "Use of Weapons" has a very clever device in it which I won't spoil.

I would caution that novelty can be a trap. Too many authors get caught up in trying to show how clever they are, to the point where it detracts from the story. In something like Use of Weapons, the gimmick strengthens the story because it takes the reader on the same journey as the characters within that story; in a different story it could easily have gotten in the way.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I've always been fascinated by the device where the story ends where it starts, so it's a loop.

There's a cracking film called Tale of Cinema where, half way through the film, the film seems to stop and it's revealed that everything you've seen so far is in fact a film, which the characters are watching. Moreover, one of the people watching the film is the main actress in the film-within-the-film, who you see exiting the screening of that film and you then follow for the rest of the story. Not sure how you'd pull that off as a novelistic device but it would pretty niche if you could, I'm sure.

Short story, but Heinlein did a loop story with "All You Zombies".

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Italo Calvino wrote two collections of entwined short stories. The Castle of Crossed Destinies and The Inn of Crossed Destinies, in which each member of the group of people must tell their personal story through a lay of Tarot cards, so each tale intersects with others.

William S. Burroughs wrote a "novel" of 256 independent pages that could be shuffled and reshuffled to make new stories: every page could lead seamlessly to any other page.

There's also the possibility of writing a story about itself. I've read a few clever self-reflective tales, and Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is about reading it. The first chapter covers buying the book and then trying to read it; the protagonists are the Reader (a male) and the Other Reader (a female).

 

[THBGato]

I quite like the device of an interview where the reader only sees the answers and has to guess at the questions. "Orange" by Neil Gaiman is a good example, as much as it grates to recommend him these days.

 

[StillStunned]

I quite like the device of an interview where the reader only sees the answers and has to guess at the questions. "Orange" by Neil Gaiman is a good example, as much as it grates to recommend him these days.

This could work well for a cam show. (I took an online workshop the other day, and the host kept interrupting the lessons to answer questions that only she could see.) You could do it as a monologue or something. Occasionally add an explanation. "Sexymama1958 is asking whether I like older men. Yes, I-- Sorry, whether I like older women. Of course, Sexymama, I love older women!"

 

[Kumquatqueen]

William S. Burroughs wrote a "novel" of 256 independent pages that could be shuffled and reshuffled to make new stories: every page could lead seamlessly to any other page.

That may have inspired Geoff Ryman's 253, an oringinally-online book where each page represents one passenger on a Bakerloo Line train (one per seat) plus the driver, on a five-minute journey from Waterloo to Elephant. Many of the passengers are in groups who know each other, some know other people on the same train. Some you get a description and their intentions, some get more of their inner thoughts.

You can read it in any order and in the online version, click from one passenger to others that they are linked to. I've only read the paperback but it's rather good.

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

That may have inspired Geoff Ryman's 253, an oringinally-online book where each page represents one passenger on a Bakerloo Line train (one per seat) plus the driver, on a five-minute journey from Waterloo to Elephant. Many of the passengers are in groups who know each other, some know other people on the same train. Some you get a description and their intentions, some get more of their inner thoughts.

You can read it in any order and in the online version, click from one passenger to others that they are linked to. I've only read the paperback but it's rather good.

This sounds absolutely fantastic.

It reminds me a little of an online map of London that someone made back in the mid-2000s, where people could click on a particular location and add a memory they had from from that place. It was an extraordinarily rich compendium of Londoner's inner lives and shared histories.

The only one I vaguely remember is a man who worked night shifts in the 1950s and used to walk down the Euston Road every morning after his night's work just as dawn was breaking and somehow he met his wife doing this. For most people, the Euston Road means traffic, but for this person it meant dawn, the 1950s and falling in love with his wife.

Just reminds you that cities are made of flesh and not concrete.