Multi-narrative

Chapter 116 Multi-narrative

This is both a strength and a weakness of his novels.

He writes novels at the pace of a movie screenplay, with at least two or three plot twists in each 3,000-word chapter. Basically, before the aftermath of the previous conflict has even settled, the next crisis has already hit the protagonist. Even the transitional paragraphs that should be used to explain the characters' emotions are replaced with new clues to advance the plot.

When David watched "Rebirth of a Prodigy" all night, it felt like watching a dozen high-density crime films without any intermissions. His brain was constantly pulled by the tense dramatic tension, leaving no room to process the emotions.

The moment the phone is turned off, the fatigue from reading intensifies.

The kind of reading pleasure that peaks in a short period of time, but after reading continuously for more than three hours, attention is continuously consumed, and it is easy to experience "aesthetic overload". You will close the book and not want to open it again for several days.

This can be considered a unique side effect of his "movie-quality online novels." You can always believe that his plot will not be padded, but you will never find the sense of relaxation in his books where you can "easily read a couple of chapters without getting distracted."

Shorter pieces are acceptable, but longer ones are not.

""

As he spoke, David began eating the stewed beef that the waiter had just brought over.

The dish boasts a visually rich and layered presentation. The base is a thick, glossy red tomato sauce, while large chunks of dark brown beef are clearly marinated and glistening with the sauce. It's complemented by creamy white mushroom pieces and warm orange carrot cubes.

Light yellow potato chunks.

It looks so appetizing and makes one's mouth water.

"Do you mean short stories and novels?" Seeing how much he was enjoying his food, Catherine tried some herself. Hmm, it was indeed quite good. The potatoes and carrots were covered in a thick sauce, soft and fluffy, and the mushrooms were soaked in meat juices, releasing a burst of fresh juice when bitten into them. It was like a xiaolongbao, but not as hot as the latter.

"No," David swallowed a piece of milky white mushroom and explained, "In my opinion, a story that can be finished in under two hours is a short story, and only stories that take more than two hours are considered long stories."

"Why two hours?"

"Because Americans typically spend about this much time on a flight."

David was referring to pocket-sized popular paperback novels that were very popular in the American air travel scene in the mid-20th century. These books were perfectly suited to the reading needs of short-haul flights and were a very typical consumption phenomenon in the American civil aviation travel culture at that time.

Most of these are thin, small-format books of 100-200 pages, priced at only 25 cents, which is only one-tenth the price of hardcover books of the same period. They are lightweight and compact, and can be easily stuffed into a coat pocket, allowing you to finish reading them on the plane.

They generally consist of fast-paced crime thrillers, adventure stories, and popular romance short stories. You can easily follow the plot without having to think too deeply, making them perfect for passing the time during a flight without being distracted by obscure content.

Many classic works in this category, such as short crime novels from the paperback era like "FlyPaper," were typical choices that were very popular with air travelers at the time. The thin volume was just the right size to be read in one ordinary flight, and you wouldn't feel bad about throwing it away after you finished reading it.

Although all this talk is about the fast pacing of the film's narrative, a fast pace doesn't necessarily mean keeping the audience on the edge of their seats. A good film should be able to steadily advance the plot while also providing a sense of tension and relaxation for the audience.

For example, the scene David is about to film is very fun and even hilarious.

"The lights weren't on inside, and they were making a huge ruckus under the Christmas tree."

,

"Put the camera here." Upon hearing this, Kevin Spacey, dressed in a beige suit, gave this order to his subordinates.

"After I come out, I will walk here."

The plot here picks up where Kevin Spacey left off in the previous scene, where he, along with his staff and the newspaper's editor, comes to expose the scandals of two Hollywood stars.

Yes, it's a very standard multi-narrative technique. However, multi-narrative is not entirely the same as non-linear narrative; the two are intersecting under the relationship of inclusion and being included.

Non-linear narrative is characterized by "disrupting the chronological order," which means breaking the traditional linear chronological logic of "cause-process-result" and reorganizing the story through flashbacks, interludes, time jumps, etc. Multiple parallel storylines are one of its common types. In layman's terms, non-linear narratives are generally multi-line narratives, where the line refers to the timeline.

The core of multi-narrative is to set up two or more independent story lines. Based on the time attributes of the lines, they can be divided into two categories: one is the "linear multiple lines" that maintain a unified linear time frame, and the other is the "non-linear multiple lines" that break the linear time.

In simpler terms, multi-narrative structures may or may not be non-linear. The narrative threads can be either character-driven or time-based, and generally, these two threads will not appear simultaneously in the same story.

Because if multiple timelines and multiple character storylines appear at the same time, the audience can easily get confused. Even if a director really wants to challenge this difficult narrative method when making a film, he usually only uses it once at the beginning or end.

For example, the opening of "Identity" shows a man carrying his blood-covered wife and rushing into a hotel to ask the owner for help, thus creating suspense.

Then the timeline is reversed to tell how the woman was injured. This is a clear example of flashback and dual timeline narrative.

After explaining that the woman was injured because she was hit by a car, the timeline was moved forward and the story was told from the perspective of the driver who hit her, explaining how the driver accidentally hit her.

This is another obvious flashback, and while changing the timeline, it also changes the character storylines, which is a case of multiple timelines and multiple character storylines appearing simultaneously.

However, thanks to the director's control of the story's pacing, the audience not only didn't feel confused, but also gained a clearer and more complete understanding of the ins and outs and cause and effect of this incident.

Hmm, the opening of Ning Hao's movie "Crazy Stone" feels quite similar to this.

In fact, Ning Hao used this technique not only at the beginning of the film, but also at the end.

The most amazing part of the movie "Breakup Buddies" when I first watched it was the cross-cutting montage of the past and present at the end.

When David first watched this movie, he always thought it was a multi-character narrative with Xu Zheng and Huang Bo in one storyline and Yuan Quan in another.

As a result, more than half of the movie had passed, and the two storylines had not intersected at all, leading him to believe that Ning Hao had only included Yuan Quan's storyline to pad out the runtime.

It wasn't until the very end that a montage revealed that these were two different timelines. When I first saw it, I was truly amazed, but upon closer inspection, it seems that there was some padding involved.

The director portrayed Yuan Quan's storyline as an innocent, kind, and straightforward white lotus flower, making it impossible to connect her with the materialistic ex-wife described by Geng Hao, played by Huang Bo, who cheated on her husband and was materialistic. Isn't this a typical example of a plot twist for the sake of a plot twist?

Moreover, apart from Shen Teng, who was not yet famous at the time, contributing a few laughs and jokes, Yuan Quan's storyline didn't seem to have much else to offer. It felt like it was simply setting the stage for the montage twist at the end of the movie.

No wonder some film critics at the time criticized the director for using a multi-narrative structure in this film, which they felt was a show of technical skill compared to his previous works.