Being a voracious reader, it's appropriate for me to one day add my modest contribution to the world of writing. And the revolutionary idea for my first novel is to disregard the artificial conventions that have constrained literature for too long. My unfamiliarity with postmodernism probably means I'm reinventing the wheel, but nevertheless, here are my ideas so far:
1. Ditch conventional chapters. Is real-life divided neatly into chapters? No.
2. Don't start at the start. In your life, how often do you encounter a narrative that's presented neatly in chronological order to you? Yes, if you're the centre of the story, but otherwise it doesn't happen that way. Normally you hear bits and pieces of the story out of sequence from different sources.
3. Repeated names. Novels usually contain uniquely-named characters for ease of identification. My novel will contain Alan, Alain, another Alan and Alna. In real life, people have matching names and you need to rely on context to identify people. So my readers will be faced with the same challenge.
4. Ditch the ending.
5. Add mumbles and malapropisms. In real-life, 30% of dialogue consists of undecipherable mumbling, and sentences that are abandoned halfway through as the speaker loses their train of thought. And there are mistakes in grammar every five seconds if you pay close attention to what people say. So I'll incorporate all these imperfections in my dialogue. Writing mumbling will be a challenge, but expect to read something like this "yeah, err the umm chrmstnfrmnnbmthsfl lf ten, okay."
So now that everyone is looking forward to my book, I should probably get started.
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