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rmc28'You're not too tired to silflay, are you?' asked Dandelion.
[This post is part of my Watership Down read through. You are welcome to join in at any time; please read my introduction post first.]
[This post is part of my Watership Down read through. You are welcome to join in at any time; please read my introduction post first.]
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Date: 2016-03-06 22:01 (UTC)(Blackberry immediately identifies additional resource required, i.e. Fiver)
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Date: 2016-03-07 13:03 (UTC)Narrative convention positively requires that once you're in the position of seriously making plans to do something that obviously impossible, it has to turn out that you're going to at least give the problem a run for its money. And, for some reason, this goes double if we haven't been told what the plan is, and triple if all we do know is that Blackberry has ideas and Fiver doesn't have a bad feeling!
(Of course I am as yet unspoiled for the rest of the book, so I'm at least giving it a sporting chance to prove me wrong when I say this – I'll take it on the chin if it turns out this is the one exception to the laws of narrative inevitability :-)
For those who've read it, I'm reminded of Kelsier's blackboard planning session early on in the Mistborn trilogy. Very much the same dynamic of the leader listing all the impossible things that need to be pulled off, and everyone else boggling and yet somehow getting drawn in...
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Date: 2016-03-07 15:23 (UTC)I haven't read Mistborn but in both cases I think what the leader is doing is:
- breaking The Impossible Task into smaller, more comprehensible, possibly more soluble parts
- conveying the belief that *if* each part can be solved, then the whole thing *can* succeed, providing real incentive to solve each part on its own
And I think this is a really important thing that good leaders do. It's practically a cliche of the heist movie isn't it? But on a less dramatic scale, it's how pretty much every big problem gets solved, by breaking it down into smaller parts, and getting the right person or people to work on each part.
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Date: 2016-03-07 16:14 (UTC)In this case, yes, I agree that nobody actually has a plan yet – but Blackberry is making at least some confident noises (he can see how to do one of the three impossible things, and apparently knows enough about the other two to know that Fiver will be able to help).
And perhaps that's what struck me so noticeably: the narrative convention seems to be that the less the readers have been told about the plan, the more likely it is to succeed, and usually the most extreme case of this is that the character has a plan and doesn't tell us anything about it, but in this case even the characters don't have one yet, which surely means the rule applies even more so :-)