: Re: Examples of Successful Rule-Breaking in Novels I just finished "The House of the Seven Gables" by Hawthorne. I was struck by how often he switched tenses. Mostly the narration was in past

I could suggest the Water! trilogy by Gael Baudino, but it's not well-known and I found the experimental format exhausting. Still, Your Mileage May Vary.

In the three books (O Greenest Branch, The Dove Looked In, Branch and Crown) she kept switching not merely narrator and POV, but the entire narrative style: parts were standard narration, then parts were being told by a marketing guy as he was getting mugged, then parts were a stone-cutting manual which was increasingly crossed out and being used as a religious text.... I guess in the end the story was told, but it was kind of painful after a while. And I really loved Baudino's other works (The Elven series, Gossamer Axe), so this was a letdown for me.

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: No, you can only do that if you're making some sort of break or shift in narrative style. If the story switches to a dream, for instance, or if the characters enter a Fae realm or another

@Debbie451

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: If you can't boil down your novel into a logline (or "elevator pitch," which is how I learned it), then you may actually have a problem with your novel. You've provided the structure of

@Debbie451

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: "Literary criticism" and "editing feedback" are two entirely different beasts. Litcrit is about looking at an existing text and analyzing it. You look at the author's intent, you look at symbolism,

@Debbie451

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: In narration, stay in one tense. "She had green eyes" is fine, because your entire story is in the past tense — the "present-past," if that makes sense. If she had green eyes as a

: Re: Examples of Successful Rule-Breaking in Novels I just finished "The House of the Seven Gables" by Hawthorne. I was struck by how often he switched tenses. Mostly the narration was in past

More posts by @Debbie451

: No, you can only do that if you're making some sort of break or shift in narrative style. If the story switches to a dream, for instance, or if the characters enter a Fae realm or another

: If you can't boil down your novel into a logline (or "elevator pitch," which is how I learned it), then you may actually have a problem with your novel. You've provided the structure of

: "Literary criticism" and "editing feedback" are two entirely different beasts. Litcrit is about looking at an existing text and analyzing it. You look at the author's intent, you look at symbolism,

: In narration, stay in one tense. "She had green eyes" is fine, because your entire story is in the past tense — the "present-past," if that makes sense. If she had green eyes as a

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