Ariadn’s Thread

How the immersive point-of-view character makes for longer tales

In the ancient legend of Theseus and his adventures on Crete, the young hero had braved the Labyrinth, to slay the Minotaur and end King Minos’ reign. In this exploit he was helped by the King’s own daughter, Princess Ariadne, who had fallen in love with the hero. She gave him a skein of her thread, and he was able to use the thread to find his way back out of the Labyrinth when he had slain the monster.

But a thread had to be followed in a line, from one end to the other. You can’t skip ahead when you follow a thread…

Bardelys had been thinking about the immersive point-of-view character. This might be done in the third person or the first, but the dangers of the technique were greater when a talesman chose the first person immersive point-of-view character.

In some respects, Bardelys thought, the first person narrator was prone to this anyway: the first person point of view was almost ‘immersive’ by definition.

But not really.

First person narratives had been told as long as tales were told, Bardelys suspected. But the idea that the audience should become one with the characters in a tale was recent. In fact, he considered the immersive narrative to be an outgrowth of the tale-as-experience school, and a mark of a declining art form. Whenever art ceases to comment on and interpret or record the experiences of life, and whenever it lost its moral message, and devolved into mere entertainment, mere ‘experience,’ that art was declining in power, and its practitioners were partaking of a decadent society.

Decadence has its uses, Bardelys reflected. Nothing wrong with decadence.

But surely, he thought, when a whole culture was in decline (as could be seen and measured in its art), then surely it wasn’t a good sign for the culture or its future.

Be that as it may, his main thought now lay in something quite a bit more technical.

Because, as Bardelys saw it, once a talesman starts in on the immersive point of view character, first- or third-person, he will find its greatest strength in a recreation of experienced reality. This means that each scene is strongest when it is told moment by moment. And then, when a scene ends, how do you snap the line?

How do you skip ahead down Ariadne’s Thread?

Usually this was done by a summary paragraph or two, a sort of ‘fast-forwarding’ through the line. But even this threatened to break the spell of enchantment that the immersion into the character’s thoughts, feelings, his very soul, could wreak. This enchantment lay at the bottom of what an audience wanted from an immersive, experiential tale.

So Bardelys set about conjuring up some antidotes to the spell, ways to maintain it while breaking its rules.

First he thought about the structural breaks. Chapter breaks, part breaks, even so-called ‘thought breaks’ where lines are skipped or a trio of asterisks occupy a blank space, indicating a gap in space or time. Such structural breaks are so well established that the readers will only blink, and carry on.

But structural breaks were a bit of a cheat. They were not available to the oral or radio talesman, for example, and in film or television scripts they would, in fact, break the spell. So structural breaks would work, but surely there was some other way?

The experiential tale was a sort of dream, Bardelys thought. And dreams jumped around plenty; some dreams did nothing but jump around. Maybe the key lay here.

Well, how did dreams get away with it? Part of their secret lay in the nature of dreams. They represent the workings of the mind (or the brain, Bardelys added) which was both talesman and audience. That mind went where it wanted to go, and jumped when it wanted, and where it wanted. But there were surely ways a sly talesman could direct his audience’s wishes from behind the scenes?

In film, for example, when we see a closeup of a character looking offscreen and reacting, we want to see what that character sees. A cut to a different space, which we presume represents the point of view of the staring character, gives us just what we wanted.

In more general terms, when another time and place is mentioned, this gives the talesman an excuse to take us there.

And when some question is raised, its answer is desired, even if it takes us far away to another time.

The question technique led Bardelys on to the broader topic of suspense. Any sort of suspense is a kind of question, whose answer is the resolution of the suspense. So there must be something in suspense techniques that will let the talesman jump us over time and space.

It might also be wise of any talesman, Bardelys thought, when he began his tale, to jump around on purpose, a good deal. This might get the audience accustomed to the jumps. Any beginning serves to answer several questions the audience might have of a tale, and one of those questions is, ‘What kind of a tale is this?’ — and its answer lies both in the matter of the tale and the manner in which it will be told.

Bardelys went so far as to propose to any student talesman the following challenge:

Take up any of the final 3 Harry Potter novels by J K Rowling, and rewrite them so they are no more than half their published length. (The final volume should be trimmed to one-third its published length.)

Bardelys considered the only way to shorten these tales considerably, and still preserve their characters, mysteries, clues, and action, would be to break Ariadne’s Thread constantly, and keep skipping the action forward.

Now, there lay a challenge that should train a talesman to most excellent effect!

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday 12 August 2008)