As a refresher from my copywork blogpost (click here to read the full post), here is the color coding on the highlights:
- Orange for Action beats
- Green for Descriptions
- No highlights for Dialogue
- Yellow for Summary/Transition
- Blue for Thoughts
- Pink for Authorial/Narrator Intrusion
- Purple for Exposition
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Shogun is told from a third-person omniscient POV. On the exercise below, you will notice that the narrator dips inside one of the character's head other than Blackthorne. It is brief, but it is telling that the work is told in omniscient POV.
I've only copied a fragment of the chapter. It will take lots of pages to finish it, so I stopped at a natural transition, ending at the sixth page.
The rhythm is discernible at a glance. Concrete beats begin the chapter with Blackthorne waking up, interacting with his environment and then interacting with a servant. Blackthorne notices that he's naked, so he attempts to convey this predicament with gestures at the servant.
This sets off the abstract beats where Blackthorne begins to piece things together at how he came ashore. He recounts fragments of his memories, hitting a shoal, blacking out, hearing English and then Portuguese. His thoughts get interrupted as he realized that the comforting sensation was not of the sea but of the silken bed he was sleeping on.
Blackthorne dozes off and wakes up with his clothes on the side. He notices that his weapons were missing. This prompts him to think about the richness and treasures that awaits outside. He had heard about stories of the Japans, and if the stories were true, then he's in peril from the Catholics.
These thoughts prompts him to arm himself as soon as possible. Concrete beats dominate the rest of the exercise as Blackthorne gets up from his bed and accidentally destroys a sliding door. After this, he goes to the garden, encounters more characters and interacts with them.
Below is a graph of the narrative modes of the copied scene. This shows the rhythm between abstract and concrete beats. It scales from -3 to +3 with the following sequence respectively: Exposition (as -3), Intrusion, Thought, Transition (as 0.5), Description, Dialogue and Action (as +3).
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