Musings on Multiple Volumes

Didn’t manage to get organized enough for a newsletter swap this week, but next week I’ve got two. I’m sure you miss them….

I’m finally making some progress with The Chapterhouse of Elith, which is volume 4 part 2 of Swords In Darkness, or alternatively volume 5, or…. So a couple of things—and I’d be interested in feedback on this, if anyone is listening out there.

The original idea was that Volume 4 would consist of three novellas, following the more-or-less-simultaneous adventures of Cagtlan and Flannyrd in the Everdark, Avren in Gerran, and Riobard in Sinar. This as opposed to shuffling back and forth among streams every few chapters, which is pretty popular in modern fantasy but usually drives me crazy. For starters, then, why does it drive me crazy?

In my view, a tale has a narrative style as well as a structure, plot, characters, and all that. I’ve been yapping about style in this blog for some time, so this will come as no surprise. But when you cut up one tale into a number of concurrent streams, you have several different tales, or alternatively one very complex one. Those two options entail strikingly different sorts of writing, and of course utterly different books.

If you go the big-complex route, you have a large structural problem. However many distinct streams and lines you have running, the reader has to be able to hold all of them perfectly in their head. Even more importantly, the reader has to understand quite deeply how these concurrent stories affect one another.

In The Lord of the Rings, the split (in The Two Towers) into many concurrent lines soon coalesces into two: Frodo and Sam on the one hand, everybody else on the other. The latter group never entirely re-gels, as Merry and Pippin have their own small tales which provide perspective on things like the Ride of the Rohirrim and the Siege of Gondor. But despite the potential confusion of the thing, it’s all held together by one crucial fact that’s been central to everything from the start: it’s all just a sideshow, however locally significant, because in the end the only thing that matters is the fate of the One Ring. And Tolkien keeps giving us check-ins: the encounter with Faramir, for instance, or periodic references, “wonder what’s happening with Frodo, he can’t have been caught yet or it’d all be over,” etc. What’s more, however you may recall the book, in fact the parallel-running split is only Book 5, i.e., the first half of The Return of the King. Before that, The Two Towers is really two shortish novels whose events run concurrently, and Book 6 is all hobbits, all the time.

In The Odyssey, to take a rather different sort of example, the Telemakeia (books 1-4) is all about Odysseus, but nobody knows where he is, and we get a lot of setup (what’s doing in Ithaka and how mad Telemachus is about it) that foreshadows the death of the suitors at the end. Then we get Odysseus released by the nymph and crash-landing among the Phaiakians, and then off we go with him telling his tall tales. Now although there is an element of concurrent stories here, in fact it doesn’t matter, because we’re just getting a different perspective on a single set of events, and we know—even from the start, when Odysseus is presumed lost and possibly dead—that this whole thing is going to be about Odysseus.

So if you’re going to go the multiple-stream route, these examples would seem to suggest that we need a very clear sense of a core sequence or focal character/event/object. This anchors the whole thing, so that even when we skip around a certain amount, we always know where we’re going, and don’t lose track in minutiae. This is a great approach if your fantasy series is a single gigantic novel, and you can keep the readers consistently focused on something in particular.

But that’s not true of every series.

Fairly often, in fact, each volume is its own novel, with a complete structure unto itself. The focal elements of volume 2 might turn out, in volume 5, to mean something different than they did, but nevertheless what’s focal in 2 isn’t focal (or not in the same way) in 5, and so forth.

In that case, taking a One Series To Rule Them All approach is dangerous. All too easily, the reader loses track of what’s supposed to be at stake, and gets lost in the weeds. (Interestingly, this is one of the many cunning devices used by John Crowley in Little, Big, whereby he gets us so interested in the weeds that we rarely remember quite where we’re going in terms of grand plot, so that when the final surprise hits, we can think, “I knew that, he told me that, but I didn’t notice that he told me.” Particularly brilliant, too, is the way in which this getting-lost-in-the-weeds is precisely the point of the plot and not just the structure. Elegant, wonderful, and not terribly useful for most novels—and I for one would be very hesitant to attempt the kind of high-wire acts of Crowley at his best!)

Another solution, rather less common but in my view usually superior, is to let each volume be its own novel entire, from soup to nuts. And that means each is its own tale, and has its own narrative style. This makes each unit more readable as a volume.

So the idea with Volume 4 was to string together three novellas, each in its own distinct style. I’d release each separately, as they got written, and then at the end re-compile as a single fat volume. That’s still the plan, sort of, but now each sub-volume is getting relatively long, so I’m worried that the re-compiled volume will be fat in the way Nero Wolfe is fat, i.e., gargantuan.

Well. Enough dull musing for the week. As I say, Chapterhouse is making good progress, and I hope to get it released next month. (7 months late by my original schedule, but hey.)