On the nature of art

Writing, both poetry and prose. It's one-dimensional, and that one dimension is time. The reader experiences the art form one word at a time, in a single long string. It is up to the writer to present the words, sentences, and thoughts in an order that makes sense to the reader. (Although with poetry, I've seen where you sometimes make pictures out of the words as well. Which leads into ...)

Visual arts, such as paintings and sculptures. The viewer sees three spatial dimensions, and experiences the entirety of the work all at once. There is no time component; it is static.

Music. There's a time component, because the listener hears each note in a sequential order. But music has layers; one can hear more than one note simultaneously. You can follow each instrument or part as a separate thread, or listen to the whole thing taken together as a greater whole.

Performance arts, such as dance and theater, TV and movies. Eventually, virtual reality and holodecks - where the experience involves being surrounded and immersed in the art form.

All of these along a gradation of different numbers and types of dimensional components. Space, time, layers.

My Nano novel has layers, like in music. There are three of them. The main one revolves around the circle of the king. As he travels around the meadow where the battle occurred, each of his advisors comes to him and tells their tale on how they were involved in the events that led up to the battle. The king travels in a circle around the temple rubble from dawn to dusk, listening to these puzzle pieces.

Then there's a second circle. There are shadowy forces behind the scenes in the city, who influence in many subtle ways the others, including the king. So there are puzzle pieces that the king cannot know. An unimportant knave* travels the same circle as the king, but at midnight, after everyone else has gone. These missing pieces are told to the reader in conversation between this knave and one other minion of the nightlord. The knave mocks the other characters, the novel, and also himself.

At the moment I have this second layer after the first one, so it'll be the end of the book.

The third layer, I haven't a clue really how to work that one in, because it floats on top of the first layer. All of the characters mentioned thus far belong to a group of supernatural beings known as the "Tainted Ones." They are the main characters of the story, and so it is told mainly through their eyes. There are also the "Blessed" - and their perspectives are told because some of the Tainted talk to some of the Blessed (it's complicated :p). Anyway, there is also a key mortal involved in all of it, that is neither Tainted nor Blessed nor anything else. She's just a regular human.

Right now her scenes are kind of interspersed with the scenes of the king's circle, but I haven't the foggiest idea how to transition or explain why those scenes are there. They need to float in a layer atop the first one. But you can't do that in a novel, because novels are one-dimensional. So all of these layers need to somehow collapse back down into the one.

Hmm. That sums up one of the key problems with the structure of my first novel.

*knave: I don't have any clue what else to call him. The word fits for this blog entry, though that's not even slightly what he is ...