Hopscotch

Anyone remember that show J. J. Abrams did before Lost? Where we had Jennifer Gardner as an uber-cool kick-butt and take names secret agent embedded in a world where conspiracies nested like Russian dolls and at least every major character was a double agent in some sense. Alias was a good series for at least the first two seasons (it got progressively weaker toward the end, but that’s not what I’m posting about.) and during those first two seasons it introduced (or re-introduced) a narrative technique that was somewhat radical for series television. While we’re used to long multi-episode (in the case of Lost, multi-season) story arcs now, the twist Alias started with, and unfortunately abandoned, was the idea of ending each episode in medias res, at some cliffhanger moment.  The next episode would pick up, possibly backtracking a minute or so, then continuing with the action until the immediate storyline was wrapped up, and some point around the middle of the episode, a new thread would be picked up and carried to the end of the episode where again, we break off in medias res.

The execution was complicated and required significant skill in braiding the overarching arc of the series, as well as two partial stories, all into a coherent whole, which was probably why they didn’t carry it through past the first couple of seasons.  But it is illustrative of how to keep someone involved in a long story, by throwing plot balls across the divisions between successive segments of our narrative, be they episodes, chapters, or whole books.

One series of novels I’ve been reading lately that illustrates this concept are the Kitty Norville books by Carrie Vaughn. Through the first four we see two things going on, one is a typical story arc that forms the backbone of the novel, the other is a series of these long plot arcs that reach past the end and into subsequent books. The first novel seems a bit episodic because of this, which doesn’t come across as a fault since it’s largely character-driven and enough of the episodic bits tie together at the end to make it all satisfying. But halfway into the second book, just like the first season of Alias, we see the resolution of one of the threads from book one in rather dramatic fashion.  As the series progresses (I’m on book four.) It becomes clearer that were looking at a series of long plot threads carrying across multiple books.  Done well, it is a recipe for seriously hooking a reader.