Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/25169
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I have two characters, Alice and Bob. They have just met and each is trying to deceive the other. But their thought processes and the nature of their deceptions are very different from one another, and I would like to contrast these things.

Alice is engaged in some legally or ethically dubious activity. Bob has arrived suddenly and with little explanation. Her primary goal is to maintain control of the situation and prevent Bob from learning anything incriminating. Her secondary goal is to learn who Bob is and what he is doing there.

Bob has a very limited understanding of how he arrived and where he is. His primary goal is to figure those things out. When Alice initially spoke to him, she asked him a question which betrayed a profound and suspicious lack of knowledge. As a result, Bob's secondary goal is to prevent Alice from learning anything which might be dangerous until he knows why she lacks this information. That includes not giving away his own suspicion as well as accounting for himself.

Both characters are quite intelligent and carefully consider their every word. They also hang on each others' every word. When I conceptualize their interaction, both characters have a great deal of narrative voice, fretting about what might be inferred from one sentence or another. These narratives are, in my opinion, more important to the plot than the actual dialog, which largely consists of evasions and pretexts.

I like the idea of contrasting their asymmetrical approaches to the situation. But I don't want to write two instances of the scene with a flashback, because I feel it would dilute the contrast. I specifically want to juxtapose Alice's thoughts on saying something with Bob's thoughts on hearing that same thing, and vice-versa. If I write a flashback, these things would be too far apart from one another and the contrast would not have the same immediacy.

Another thought I had was to tell the reader about the conversation, in third-person omniscient, instead of showing them every line of dialog in third-person limited. But this breaks mimesis, and it just feels wrong. I found the narratives entertaining because the characters sometimes jump to wildly incorrect conclusions which are logical based on the available evidence. I find it difficult to tell the reader about these mistakes in a way which is still amusing. I'm sure it's possible, but it seems like a lot of work for something I get "for free" if I stick with third-person limited. I can just drop "Obviously, [something absurd]" into the running narrative, instead of having to go through the whole spiel of diegetically summarizing the conversation, the character's reasoning, how they are wrong, etc., and somehow still making the reader laugh. Terry Pratchett could do that and it would be hilarious, but I'm not him and I have no idea how to pull it off.

I'm seriously considering just putting both narrative voices in and alternating between them along with the dialog. I would differentiate them enough to avoid confusion (perhaps with paragraph separation, severe variances in diction or tone, or some other reasonably unambiguous factor). This is certainly unorthodox, but my real question is **can I get away with it?** If not, what should I do instead?

(I'm not a professional writer. I don't care what the editor will think, because I have no editor. By "get away with it," I mean "write like this without it being confusing or otherwise bad," rather than "make it past the editor's desk.")

Original score: 5