When everything falls: Finding Beauty in a Broken World

It's a good think I put off reading Terry Tempest Williams' Finding Beauty in a Broken World until after I finished my thesis because she does what I was trying to do better than I could. She takes the idea of mosaic and weaves actual mosaic making and art into her story of trying to piece together something meaningful out of the fragments that are left of our lives when everything falls apart. As soon as I finish the memoir I'm reading right now, I will dive in to this, and I will have plenty of tissues.

When life shatters you, make a mosaic.  Good advice.  :)

When the past creeps up on the present

I just read Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, and it made me think of Kristen Britain's First Rider's Call from the first page, which is interesting since they're not really similar at all.  I think the reason was the way that someone's diary from the past was used as at the beginning of each chapter to tell a different story that had a bearing on the main story.


I would just like to point out here that you should start from the last entry whenever you get a mysterious diary.  Just saying.

Orson Scott Card used a similar device in Ender's Game, although that was more of a parallel story giving insight outside the point-of-view character's sphere of knowledge.  I really liked that way of getting around the proscriptions of a limited POV.  It keeps the rest of the story more unified than varying the POV for each chapter, another structure I've been considering.

I've been paying attention to this device because I like what it can do, and I'm considering using it in The Napkin Epic somehow.  I thought it was quite effective in FRC, a tad less so in Mistborn.  If I do it, I'd kind of want my attempt to be more like FRC.  Although, for people like my sister who "read ahead" and try to figure out the twists, such a device could ruin the story.  Not so with Sanderson's use of it, which I guess is a strenth and a weakness . . .

So many ways to write a story!  It's quite overwhelming sometimes.

Have you read any other books that use this snatch-of-a-diary-to-head-each-chapter device well (or poorly)?