Archive for March 17th, 2012|Daily archive page
Why Finish Books?
This got me thinking about narrative engagement by the reader in fiction. Two things come immediately to mind: One is those old Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to love as a kid. The other is Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy.
I mention The Hunger Games because I loved books one and (especially) two. But Mockingjay just didn’t work for me. I kind of hated how the series ended. Someone I found on Goodreads went ahead and rewrote the ending (WARNING: Hunger Games spoilers abound!) and I found it to be much improved (though still not exactly how I would have like it to end).
But I was thinking, what if Collins had allowed the readers to select how Katniss acted at the end? Choose Your Own Adventure, as far as I recall, was always written in the second person, but I think an interesting idea would be to simply engage the reader in a normal first- or third-person narrative.
It wouldn’t even have to be as pervasive as CYOA: Maybe at a couple of key moments the narrative could say, “If you’d like this character to do A, continue to the next page; if you’d prefer to read about them doing B, skip over to page N.”
Obviously this is something that would be handled better by ebook than a print novel, but the idea that readers, who are being asked to engage with the writer’s stories, should have a voice in how that story unfolds, is one that I think warrants some additional attention.
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