Iron Fist: The Living Weapon, Vol. 1: Rage by Kaare Andrews
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Weird. Kinda sloppy.
I would like to share something I learned in a creative writing class.
One time I wrote this story. It was all scenes that happened out of order because…I can’t totally remember. It was something to do with a musician who found that different orders and sequences in his music caused these interesting effects. Because the songs sounded out of order, and because it’s hard to write about something like songs, I put all these vignettes that made up the story in a jumbled order.
It was a mistake. I worked really hard on it, and honestly, a really good teacher convinced me to keep the draft I brought in, but to put the whole thing in order and see what it was like.
In order, it was a lot better. It made more sense. There was a building of tension instead of having this sort of taffy machine going, stretching and compressing not the story, but the tension in a way that caused it to lose impact.
There are two things I learned from this.
First, if you want to tell a story out of order, it has to work in order as well. If the story sucks, scrambling the scenes doesn’t help. Don’t mistake this for re-ordering the events of a story. That can be a great thing. I’m talking about just putting the last part first, the middle at the front, and so on, and doing it mostly to make the story feel like it has more motion than it really does.
Second, you really have to consider how the re-ordering of a story changes that story. For example, if Danny Rand is TELLING me the story of his past, then I know he’s not dead. If I know he was trained in an ancient city, and then we flash back to a part where it’s unclear if he’ll make it through the snow to the ancient city, I’m bored. I know he makes it. Let’s get there already. If you change the order, you have to make sure that the tension and the real story are not dependent on the order.
I think that lots of writers take to heart the idea of starting somewhere near the present, hooking the reader and getting them interested before flashing back and filling in the details. I think that’s a very accepted and normal way to write.
But I also think, if you want to do that, do it honestly. Start the story where the reader wants to start reading it, and don’t use that show of good faith to convince me to then march through unneeded backstory. If you know that I don’t want to start at the beginning and go through chronologically, listen to that instinct, and don’t make me do it at all.