How much does this inform your fiction-writing? In most story-telling there is some pretense of unpredictability. Some TV shows are exceptions, the kind where the producers basically promise the audience that nothing will change over the half-hour.
Another sort of exception is history. Some readers might be upset to have events of The Surgeon of Crowthorne spoiled for them, but for the most part it is not regarded as cheating to put down a history book to look up a character bio on Wikipedia. I think it would be an interesting constrained writing experiment to structure a novel in the same way, where the author couldn’t rely on suspense to keep you interested in the plot. Perhaps there could be appendices with an encyclopedia style entry for each main character and each main event in the book, that the reader was encouraged to skip to as they pleased.
Oh, I’m perfectly capable of inflicting suspense on other people. I’ve seen it done enough. (But there are spoilers available to be clicked open on all the character pages on http://elcenia.com and I’ll provide spoilers to anyone who asks nicely.)
How much does this inform your fiction-writing? In most story-telling there is some pretense of unpredictability. Some TV shows are exceptions, the kind where the producers basically promise the audience that nothing will change over the half-hour.
Another sort of exception is history. Some readers might be upset to have events of The Surgeon of Crowthorne spoiled for them, but for the most part it is not regarded as cheating to put down a history book to look up a character bio on Wikipedia. I think it would be an interesting constrained writing experiment to structure a novel in the same way, where the author couldn’t rely on suspense to keep you interested in the plot. Perhaps there could be appendices with an encyclopedia style entry for each main character and each main event in the book, that the reader was encouraged to skip to as they pleased.
Oh, I’m perfectly capable of inflicting suspense on other people. I’ve seen it done enough. (But there are spoilers available to be clicked open on all the character pages on http://elcenia.com and I’ll provide spoilers to anyone who asks nicely.)