Neither of the stories above say outright what they’re about. Valente’s “ Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” told as a series of auction catalogue items, or Howard Waldrop’s “Passing of the Western,” which collects reviews of movies about a fantastical event.) But what really drives stories like these is subtext: what isn’t on the page. Verisimilitude, or believability, can be greatly enhanced by a story that sounds like a work of nonfiction, like a piece of long-form journalism that comes from an alternate reality in which these things are actually true. Or mosaic novels that are built up from several distinct, standalone pieces.Īt their best, non-traditional narrative forms are all about verisimilitude and subtext. Or Dos Passos-influenced novels that intermix factual-seeming documents with nonlinear narrative, such as John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, Joe Haldeman’s Mindbridge, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway or Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2012. That can mean the epistolary novel, based on correspondence, diary entries or other documents (or Flowers for Algernon’s progress reports). If you really want to get my attention, tell your story in a fashion that doesn’t rely on the first- or third-person limited point of view. I’m a sucker for non-traditional narrative forms.
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