Are You Writing Serious Fantasy?

[littlemanpoet]

Do you use interlacing in your story? You know, two or more plot threads running through your story simultaneously and you skip back and forth between them. Tolkien used it in Two Towers and the first half of Return of the King. His was more spread out, a hundred or more pages spent on one thread at a time. If you do interlacing, how do you do it and how do recommend doing it? What about interspersing every other chapter (I'm experimenting with that right now)? What are the dangers? Pitfalls? Benefits? Some of this has been dealt with on the "Interlacing" thread on Books II. Some comments from that thread are:

Me:

If Tolkien had NOT done interlacing, but had resorted to the OTHER ways of telling the same story (EITHER by an omniscient author perspective which pulls you out of the story too much OR by leaving you hanging until the end and finding out everything else that fed into the climax only at the denouement), it would have been very unsatisfactory, and important characters like Merry, Pippin, Legolas and Gimli, not to mention Theoden, Eowyn, and all the rest that were not directly about Frodo, Sam and Gollum, would never have received the character development Tolkien gave them.

Nar said:

...it drove me crazy every time the action switched...Today, a writer would probably organize the story into shorter segmants and do rapid cutting as in movies. Those long books had a certain hypnotic effect-- particularly the Frodo and Sam and Gollum story. I think on the whole that that effect was worth a little frusteration.

Akhtene said:

It allowed to create a really whole historical picture, not just describe the adventures of a group of characters. And even if it drives somebody mad, first of all it whips up curiosity, desire to know what is happening to other characters at the time of some other events described. You sort of find yourself in several places at one and the same time.
I'm only too happy that Tolkien didn't use this interlacing from the very start of the first book (or maybe he didn't need to?..) I don't believe it can make a good beginning, when the reader is absolutely confused by unrelated characters,places and situations, starts making wild guesses or simply can't understand what it is all about.

Problem is, I'm starting it right off in the beginning. First chapter's about big brother, second about little brother, third about big brother again...

Kuruharan said:

Be glad he didn't alternate between the groups every couple of chapters. If he had it probably would have destroyed any sense of continuity in the story.

Uh-oh. Like, that's exactly what I'm doing. How do I NOT break the sense of continuity? How do YOU handle it?

NyteSky said: [QUOTE] [/If it's driving you crazy to find out what happens next but then you get really involved in the part that you're in only to have it switch back, then the author did it perfectly. That way you keep reading because to stop would cause the built up curiousity to slowly eat away at your brain until you go raving mad. It's a tricky line to walk though. Too much space between parts, or one boring part and the author can lose the audience. It's risky, but worth it if done well.QUOTE]
Ah. That one makes me feel a little better. So waddaya think, friends?

And Happy Writing!