Thread "QUACKCAST 253 - Starting in the middle : narrative order and the flashback." in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 9:12AM, Dec. 30, 2015

Non-fiction works that do that piss me off. In fact almost all non-fiction with a narative does. Especially articles. I once met a woman who worked with the guy who was said to have originated and popularised that style of writing for the New York Times (she was some kind of journalist bigwig… very arogant, massive name dropper!). She was saying how great he was and all I could think was that the man was a monster.

Posted at 9:12AM, Dec. 30, 2015

I read one where the author noted the style in the forward and that if you wanted to follow the narrative chronologically to read every other chapter to the end , then repeat for the skipped chapters then read the conclusion. It defeats the purpose of comparing and contrasting the parallel stories but it is easier to understand. It actually requires more effort from the writer as you have to finish the whole manuscript first and then reorder it. Then there's the novelist who finished the book through all the chapter headings into the air and reordered them in the order he picked them back up.

Posted at 10:12AM, Dec. 30, 2015

Off-topic, narratives in any order in non-fiction artices are horrible, especially when the author inserts themselves INTO the piece… Wait a minute. I remember who the guy was that that lady was blabbering about all those years ago- Hunter S Thompson. Jebus.

Posted at 12:01PM, Jan. 1, 2016

Sometimes, it can feel like cheating… like, "Hey, the first two-thirds of this story is hella boring, so here's a taste of the good part. Cool, now here's the boring part, SUCKER!" The story oughtta be interesting throughout, and shouldn't need gimmicks to reel you in.

That said, I don't really have a preference for storytelling order. You can do interesting things with any kind of story structure. You can have a character die at the beginning, and then go back and show events which make that death more significant, and even completely change the audience's perception of the opening events. You could show a story that begins with a disastrous conclusion… then go back and show all the good intentions which led to it. You can use it as a tool, not just as a gimmick. So it all depends on how it's used.

My previous comic 'Death P#rn' had some flashback elements to it, because parts of the narrative referenced things which had happened before the story's timeline, and in some cases in a separate comic which the readers likely hadn't read. So it was the most creative and interesting way for me to get that information into the narrative. Originally, the ending of the comic was also supposed to include an epilogue that was in fact a prequel. After the end credits, the two main characters walk out onto a dirt road and are run over by a car being driven by themselves some years earlier, in a sequence which details the harrowing day they first met. Thankfully, I chose instead to end the comic where I did.

My current comic may include some switching around in timelines, but only because it's a space opera where the locations are in some cases sixty days away from each other or more, and so rather than using the '30 DAYS LATER' text boxes, I'll probably just shift between narratives at different locations. I haven't entirely worked out how I'm going to make that work yet.