Let me see if I can be more specific. In chronological order... 10th century MCs : King, Queen, General, and an Oracle. 16th century: a pair of thieves that witness an incident 18th century: villian is creating a time travel device 21st century: MC with his 2 schoolmates, and a host of other characters. So as you can see, these are all different people. They span a long length of time. The storyline has a common thread and logical connections between them all, but per my earlier post, how can I develop any feelings for the King/Queen that will only survive for a brief period of time? Hope this helps to clarify - otherwise be specific on what information is required. Thanks in advance.
with good writing! there's no magic formula for this... if you have the talent and skills it takes to make it work, you'll do it... if you don't, you won't... sorry to seem unsympathetic, but that's the bottom line and the awful truth...
How are the people connected? Are they in the same family? Are they all associated with some artifact? That is what you should look for, some unnifying element that the reader can follow and form an attachment to. When George Lucas envisioned his Star Wars saga, he planned it to largely be told through the eyes of two droids, C3PO and R2D2. The Skywalker family was also a unifying thread, and that ended up dominating. However, whether that would have carried the story through the final trilogy, we may never know. A bloodline may seem hokey, but it's still a good common thread to carry though a time travel saga, especially given the threat of a paradox if something were to happen to an ancestor.
The question is this ; Given that the novel spans many centuries, and has a host of "different" characters in each time period, is it 1. a good idea to start a novel at its chronological start? 2. or, reduce the no. of characters I read somewhere that The Lord of the Rings is a good example of a story spanning centuries. I havent read it yet, anyone who has, can you give answer MapleLeafs question from LOTG viewpoint? Anyone who has something useful and constructive to add, welcome ! your thoughts.
The Lord of the Rings doesn't span centuries. Most of it takes place over a single year. There are only a few central characters tat the story focuses on, primarily Frodo and Samwise. There is a rich history built into the story, but that history is the backdrop, not the story itself.
The question is this ; Given that the novel spans many centuries, and has a host of "different" characters in each time period, is it 1. a good idea to start a novel at its chronological start? 2. or, reduce the no. of characters Anyone ?
Presenting the story in chronological order is one option, but it isn't the only one. Your questions don't have any real answer. The only question is how you will choose to write the story. You may need a lot of characters to tell your story, or only a few. Any answers you get will omly tell you how someone else would approach a story with the same few story elements. Those would be different stories than the one you are writing.
It depends on what you are envisioning, or the way you want to approach the story. Given that the story shifts between four different time periods, you might focus on your 2032 period as the "main" one, with occasional chapters detailing the other periods so to give us the information we need, and to see the connection between these periods.
my ideas for you If your novel is say 100,000 words, you can break it into four parts, and write it in chronological order. You can also reduce the amount of characters in each section. This would give you about 25,000 words for each section, which is more than enough to make us care about the character. But something needs to move us from story to story, otherwise it will feel like we are reading 4 separate novellas. What happens in 2033? Now, here are some of my thoughts. You could have someone in 2032 telling the story about the past events. Let him be the narrator. He can start by telling you about the present, making you care about him. Then he can go to the past to show how the past has affected his present. Maybe his voice and a blood relation to these people will be enough to make us care about the past events. Another option is reincarnation. Have him telling the story about the present, and then he begins to remember past lives. He was the MC in each of the past stories. Another option, if your story permits such a thing, is for a time traveler to be telling the story. He is observing each time and telling the story. You can jump around as you please if this were the case. If the time traveler is viewing these character because he is trying to solve a mystery, or is trying to prevent what might happen in 2032, then we will cheer him on. He is motivated to achieve a goal. A similar idea is to have a spirit, demon, angel, or something telling the story. He is part one of the MC's lives in each story. If that spirit is motivated to reach a goal, we will care about him in each story he is present it. He can be an invisible observer and perhaps he interferes sometimes and the characters aren't aware of it. So the spirit will be how you link each story, to get us to care when all the characters change but the spirit. Then as we get into the next story, because the MC in that story is motivated to reach a goal, we follow along. A MC is trying to calm his horse down. He has no idea why it is acting up. We know because the horse sees the spirit. Those are some of my ideas. I have been working on a plot for a novel that spans about 2 billion years. He is a powerful entity that has reincarnated many times. Presently he is in an alien body and is planning on converting planet earth. All of his 2-billion-year history is needed to understand why he is converting earth. How he has become who he is, aka the slanderer, the adversary of heaven as Christians call it. But heaven is a physical place.
Thanks Architectus. Your feedback was very helpful. I have taken a few notes and will put them to use.
Hi, I'm suffering from having to many ways that I could end a story. Basically I have four (maybe five) different endings that all work well and I feel whichever one I choose I'll always wish I'd used a different one. Is it feasible to write a story and maybe have that last four chapters as four alternative endings? Do you think it would work? Does anyone know of anything that's been written along those lines?
And have it published? Not that I know of... I have never read a book with multiple endings. I've seen a movie that had one: Clue.
Depends....certain genres are more lenient with experimental structures and narrative forms than others....so if you're writing literay fiction, then yeah, you could try it...if the experiment is successful and well-written, it could fly, but if you're writing fantasy or crime, those genres seem to be less willing to publish more experimental forms...
Tons of movies have alternate endings. But then I suppose books and movies are different. Never seen a book with an alternate ending. But I suppose you could always try and release them online or something. Though I don't know if there would be any problems with that.
I had a bunch of ways I could end mine, all sounded equally appealing, but always felt kind of awkward - none felt quite 'right'. Then I was snuck up on and smacked in the face by the way it absolutely must be. So excitement and inspiration chose for me. Good luck with your decision. Let it come.
I think that if you wanted to have multiple endings, that would be something you would have to write a book around. for example, multiple timelines/dimensions/character to interpret how it really ended... I think it's possible to make it fit, but in the end, i'm pretty sure you'd need a tie-together chapter to appease most readers. Sounds like a fun exercise though!
How different are the endings? if you ahve completely different ideas then the ending will change the whole crux of the story, the bets idea would be to use each ending for a different copy and get advice from people as to what tehy believe to be the best ending is, as alternate endings all in one book will not work. (the reason films have them is becuase something didn;t quite work in one version and so a better version was chosen, and very rarely do the versions actually differ by any great amount.
The endings are quite different but the events that lead up to the ending would remain constant until I get to the end. So I don't feel the crux of the story changes. If you were to think of the original Italian Job film you have the ending where the bus is hanging over the cliff, so you're left wondering. But for example you could have endings where 1. They escape the country. 2. They get caught on the road. All the events that have gone before leading to them driving through the mountains though remain the same regardless of the ending.
Well, why not pick a single ending, the one you favor the most, and write it. Then, after the story is nicely polished and publishable, you write the many other endings and put them elsewhere in the story - the back would probably be the best, I would imagine the reader would be angry if the first page was the seventh ending. You can write your story and your ending and still have some fun. Unless, of course, the literature police show up and refuse to let you experiment. Literature police are such pains.
i don't see any paying publisher putting out such a book... and i don't see many readers being happy with having to plow through several endings...
I don't see the use of this unless your story features time travel and/or time paradoxes, and even if you were to include those things, it would be more a case of varying posible outcomes rather than multiple endings.
When I read this, first thing that came to mind were the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books xD Maybe you could make the character dreaming, near the end of the story? Just floating along, and then they start to live out all of these different endings you have planned out, and in the end you could have the character wake up and the book ends? I've never really thought about doing an alt. ending style book^^; But there's a first time for everything.
