fabula vs syuzhet
Apr. 25th, 2005 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321In my last post, I mentioned fabula and syuzhet, so now I'm going off on a tangent on this subject. These things are also called story vs plot; I prefer the Russian words because they sound so wonderful and exotic, and also because the English words can be confused with more everyday usages of the word 'story' but here are my problems regarding these.
Fabula (story) refers to the story events as they happen in chronological order.
Syuzhet (plot) refers to the events as they are presented in the actual text, i.e. in the fic. So in the 'story', a may happen and then b happens and then c, but in the actual 'plot' you are thrown in medias res with event c, and then there's a flashback to b, and maybe you don't find out a until the very end in another memory or flashback (or some other form of analepsis).
Nearly all of my fics so far have been fairly chronological. I didn't scramble story events massively, and only had the odd flashback. I didn't withhold events from readers until readers. Story and plot were more or less homologous.
But in this HP opus there is much more scrambling of events. And one of my difficulties is figuring out when to reveal any of the events to the reader and when to another character in the fic. Say that event x happened to Dudley at point y in his life. Do I tell the reader straight off? Do I tell a reader a little way into the fic, and if so, when? And when the hell do I allow Dudley to tell Draco?
I realise that I had this a bit in Desert Prince, but in DP I know the plot very well. And I've realised that it's much easier writing a complex plot with analepses if the narrator is first person. Because a first-person narrator is automatically an external narrator and a narrator who knows much more than the first-person character. Because Orli who tells the DP story in first person is telling it all, of course, in retrospect; he knows things at the time of narrating that he didn't know at the time when they were happening, so there's a whole lot of 'but I was young then and didn't know better' and 'little did I know what would come of this later'. It's like an in-built plot and tension generator.
HP doesn't have this one single pov. I'm trying my hand at Bakhtinian poly-dialogue and it's hard! It's very hard for me, and it's also hard fanfic-wise because it's not a mode much favouried in fanfic so there are few models to emulate. Most fanfics are restricted to one pov, or they are experimental, and I am also finding it very difficult not being experimental.
Anyway, the whole syuzhet/fabula/my own writing time is doing my head in.
I need to write my fabula events down on little pieces of paper now and stop rambling into LJ!!!!
Fabula (story) refers to the story events as they happen in chronological order.
Syuzhet (plot) refers to the events as they are presented in the actual text, i.e. in the fic. So in the 'story', a may happen and then b happens and then c, but in the actual 'plot' you are thrown in medias res with event c, and then there's a flashback to b, and maybe you don't find out a until the very end in another memory or flashback (or some other form of analepsis).
Nearly all of my fics so far have been fairly chronological. I didn't scramble story events massively, and only had the odd flashback. I didn't withhold events from readers until readers. Story and plot were more or less homologous.
But in this HP opus there is much more scrambling of events. And one of my difficulties is figuring out when to reveal any of the events to the reader and when to another character in the fic. Say that event x happened to Dudley at point y in his life. Do I tell the reader straight off? Do I tell a reader a little way into the fic, and if so, when? And when the hell do I allow Dudley to tell Draco?
I realise that I had this a bit in Desert Prince, but in DP I know the plot very well. And I've realised that it's much easier writing a complex plot with analepses if the narrator is first person. Because a first-person narrator is automatically an external narrator and a narrator who knows much more than the first-person character. Because Orli who tells the DP story in first person is telling it all, of course, in retrospect; he knows things at the time of narrating that he didn't know at the time when they were happening, so there's a whole lot of 'but I was young then and didn't know better' and 'little did I know what would come of this later'. It's like an in-built plot and tension generator.
HP doesn't have this one single pov. I'm trying my hand at Bakhtinian poly-dialogue and it's hard! It's very hard for me, and it's also hard fanfic-wise because it's not a mode much favouried in fanfic so there are few models to emulate. Most fanfics are restricted to one pov, or they are experimental, and I am also finding it very difficult not being experimental.
Anyway, the whole syuzhet/fabula/my own writing time is doing my head in.
I need to write my fabula events down on little pieces of paper now and stop rambling into LJ!!!!