{"id":2216,"date":"2021-06-14T09:08:55","date_gmt":"2021-06-13T21:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/?p=2216"},"modified":"2021-06-14T09:08:55","modified_gmt":"2021-06-13T21:08:55","slug":"distributed-protagonism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/2021\/06\/14\/distributed-protagonism\/","title":{"rendered":"Distributed Protagonism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quick placeholder until I have more thoughts and more leisure to write a full article in response to this piece in Uncanny<\/em> by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton<\/a>, which talks about how it’s not always been the case that stories have a single protagonist; it’s just the current fashion. And can we maybe write more books where teams and multiple protagonists and people who don’t have arcs, but do have agency<\/a>, are present? Given that this is the world we live in, and we’re more and more aware of the fact? And that there are (as I’ve noted myself<\/a>) big issues with the single special protagonist?<\/p>\n

Writing ensemble books is a thing I’ve been doing for a while. It’s difficult, and I’m choosing a particularly difficult approach: I’m currently working (slowly) on the final Auckland Allies book, and the approach of that series is to take the first-person narration convention of urban fantasy, but have multiple first-person narrators, a team, of whom none is more central than any of the others.<\/p>\n

The Uncanny<\/em> piece gives me some directions to potentially explore in, including what they call “tapestry” (lots of POV characters, who are not necessarily protagonists with arcs, but can still have agency); “braid” (lots of POV characters, who do mostly have protagonism and arcs); and the now-old-fashioned but maybe-due-for-revival out-and-out omniscient narrator.<\/p>\n

I get the feeling that maybe I need to read some older fiction and get to grips with what these people were doing, and then think about how it could be updated and re-skinned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quick placeholder until I have more thoughts and more leisure to write a full article in response to this piece in Uncanny by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton, which talks about how it’s not always been the case that stories … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2216"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2219,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216\/revisions\/2219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}