A novel consisting of three separate stories joined only by a theme. A bad idea?
I'm writing a novel where a person who has decided to commit suicide can hire some murderers to kill he/him in the way he/she prefers. There are only two members running this service. A man and a woman.
The first chapters (20,000 words) are told from the eyes of a girl who wants to die in the arms of the boy she loves. Once her wish is fulfilled her POV ends.
The middle chapters (20,000 words) are seen from the eyes of the man I mentioned before (when he was young). Turns out he also had a death wish: to die saving someone. Once his wish is fulfilled his POV ends.
The last chapters (20,000 words) are seen from the eyes of the woman I mentioned before (turns out she also wanted to die in the past). The novel ends with her.
My concern is this: the reader will invest emotionally in the character of the first chapters, only to see her disappear in the middle of the novel.
Will this be an issue? If so, what can I do to fix it?
Note: the man and the woman running the service appear throughout the novel (the middle and end of the novel focus on their backstory).
Note 2: some characters don't die.
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1 answer
There are examples of separate stories connected thematically. I think the question is, when is such a work a collection of independent stories on the same theme and when is it a single novel.
One example that springs to mind is Alan Garner's Red Shift, in which the same story plays out three times, at three different times in history, all involving the same artefact. But in that case the telling of the three tales is intertwined, and the whole telling of the novel hangs on that intertwining. I don't think anyone would question whether Red Shift is one novel.
Having the three stories in succession will certainly suggest linked stories rather than one novel, unless there is something stronger than theme connecting them. I think there is also the question of whether and how the theme develops from one story to the next. Does the first story feel incomplete in itself, and do the second and third stories seem to complete it. Or is each one complete in itself. With intertwined stories, you don't face questions like this, or at least not to the same degree. But intertwined stories also work differently, the three stories don't so much build on one another as reinforce and/or counterpoint each other.
A reader's investment in a story does not have to rest on emotional investment in a single character. Novels are fundamentally about experience, but they can work either by involvement or by standing back and observing. A more detached approach might make it easier to have the reader follow the theme rather than the character.
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