odd_buttons (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
odd_buttons) wrote2004-11-03 08:55 am
odd_buttons) wrote2004-11-03 08:55 am
Frame Story
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Frame Story
A frame story is a story within a story. In a classic frame you have a character tell a story, usually to another character or to a group of listeners. This device is popular for tales of supernatural or otherwise difficult-to-believe events. It's also a way of assembling many stories under one title. Boccaccio's Decameron has ten characters, each telling ten stories over the ten days they spend together. Some frame stories complicate matters by having a storyteller tell a story about a storyteller telling a story and so on in the manner of Chinese boxes.
The frame story also has the distinction of being one of the oldest and most clichéd of fictional forms:
In sophisticated frame stories, the teller is not simply a narrative device, but someone with a psychologically complex relation to the tale. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlowe tells a story about the terrifying adventures of Kurtz. But Marlowe's telling reveals how his own life was changed by what happened to Kurtz. There is a subtle psychological relationship between the frame and the picture -- that relationship turns out to be the real story.
The frame story can be useful in other ways. An adult narrator can recall childhood experiences. Since your teller is older, he can have reflections, memories, and psychological distance. At the same time, what you put in the frame has immediacy: I was just eight that summer. I didn't realize it then but my parents must have silently decided to drink themselves to death, and only got up from their blue recliners to call Buford's for more vodka and beer. My brother, who was eleven, would go off and leave me in other people's yards. That's how I met Matilda. It was not until many years later that I began to understand what happened to all of us.
Your frame can create a transition to the past, to the future, or to strange other worlds. Writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Somerset Maugham liked the way frames combine distance and immediacy. It's an old-fashioned device, and therefore particularly interesting today as we explore layers of fictionality.
Other stories need no frame at all. A swift beginning plunges readers into the midst of action. Writers often think they need to frame when thy really do not. You ought to try unframing your framed stories and see how they look bare. They might surprise you and your readers.
See Beginnings, Blue Moon, Metafiction, Narrator, Point of View, Premise.
Frame Story
A frame story is a story within a story. In a classic frame you have a character tell a story, usually to another character or to a group of listeners. This device is popular for tales of supernatural or otherwise difficult-to-believe events. It's also a way of assembling many stories under one title. Boccaccio's Decameron has ten characters, each telling ten stories over the ten days they spend together. Some frame stories complicate matters by having a storyteller tell a story about a storyteller telling a story and so on in the manner of Chinese boxes.
The frame story also has the distinction of being one of the oldest and most clichéd of fictional forms:
It was a dark and stormy night and all the men were gathered around the campfire and the captain said, "Julius, tell us a story." And Julius said, "It was a dark and stormy night. . . "
In sophisticated frame stories, the teller is not simply a narrative device, but someone with a psychologically complex relation to the tale. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlowe tells a story about the terrifying adventures of Kurtz. But Marlowe's telling reveals how his own life was changed by what happened to Kurtz. There is a subtle psychological relationship between the frame and the picture -- that relationship turns out to be the real story.
The frame story can be useful in other ways. An adult narrator can recall childhood experiences. Since your teller is older, he can have reflections, memories, and psychological distance. At the same time, what you put in the frame has immediacy: I was just eight that summer. I didn't realize it then but my parents must have silently decided to drink themselves to death, and only got up from their blue recliners to call Buford's for more vodka and beer. My brother, who was eleven, would go off and leave me in other people's yards. That's how I met Matilda. It was not until many years later that I began to understand what happened to all of us.
Your frame can create a transition to the past, to the future, or to strange other worlds. Writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Somerset Maugham liked the way frames combine distance and immediacy. It's an old-fashioned device, and therefore particularly interesting today as we explore layers of fictionality.
Other stories need no frame at all. A swift beginning plunges readers into the midst of action. Writers often think they need to frame when thy really do not. You ought to try unframing your framed stories and see how they look bare. They might surprise you and your readers.
See Beginnings, Blue Moon, Metafiction, Narrator, Point of View, Premise.