Add a Little Spice to Your Storytelling: Unique Structures and Framing Devices
By Heather Webb | July 27, 2023 |
I’m a sucker for interesting novel structures, but I so rarely see craft articles out there about them. It’s as if they belong only to film and TV series, and yet, that’s entirely untrue. There are many experimental novels out there from greats like Chuck Palahniuk, Kurt Vonnegut, and Kate Atkinson. Ariel Lawhon’s I Was Anastasia tells the story of the woman who faked being Anastasia Romanov, starting from the end of her tale moving toward her beginnings, interspersed with chapters about the real Anastasia whose story starts at the beginning of her tale moving toward her end. The two stories collide in the climax. Talk about a different method of storytelling! And it’s brilliantly done. John Green’s Looking for Alaska is a five-act tragic structure that uses a “before” countdown to a major event midstory and an “after” to the end.
The authors’ aims vary but in the end, they’re all about delivering a story in a way that underscores the book’s themes, as well as makes a direct impact on the plot or the character’s emotional journey.
One of my favorite, simpler ways to add a little spice to a story is to use a framing device. They’re a story within a story, or, more aptly put, a literary tool that acts both outside of and in tandem with the main story. Framing devices are a clever and handy way to make certain elements of your novel pop.
Framing devices can be used quite creatively, but often serve one of these purposes:
- To set the tone for the main story
- To create structure by dividing the main story into sections to help with narrative flow
- To add tension
- To bring in multiple voices
- To plant clues or foreshadowing
- To illuminate backstory of the main character(s) in a way that sheds light on the present day events or character traits/traumas
As you can see, framing devices are handy and can be used in a myriad of ways. Here are a few kinds you might try:
- Newspaper articles
- Letters
- Poems
- Songs
- Interviews
- Nested stories, or dual timelines where one main timeline is dominant
- legends
If you’re unsure which device to use, experiment! That’s part of the fun of writing; trying on different styles and attempting something bold or challenging with each new book to keep things fresh for you as the writer.
In my novel, The Next Ship Home, a novel of Ellis Island, I played around with several devices. Initially, I wanted to use excerpts of immigrant interviews from the Oral History project to bring in the essence of multiple voices that surround my two main characters, a first generation German-American woman who works at Ellis Island, and an Italian immigrant who attempts to pass through the immigration center quickly and begin a new life, only to meet many obstacles. I thought that by incorporating various immigrant voices in these snippets between chapters would give the reader the sense of the millions of people that passed through Ellis Island, and how vastly different they were from each other. And yet, how similar their needs and hopes and dreams were.
Problem is, it didn’t work! The interviews wound up giving the narrative a cluttered feel and it was confusing to switch from a random person’s voice that didn’t appear in the story at all, to those of my main characters. I tried incorporating the secondary characters into the stories, too, to no avail. The story became unwieldy. I was bummed to lose them, but it was the right call. Instead, I tried something else: I framed the main story in short fictional newspaper clippings based on real ones found in the NYT archives that showed what the conditions were like at Ellis Island. I also used them to foreshadow what was to come for my protagonists. Additionally, the articles helped add tension. I’d call that success!
In my current work-in-progress, I’m framing the story in a legend linked to a curse, both to add tension and to add intrigue to the story.
Another novel that uses interviews very effectively is Big, Little, Lies by Liane Moriarty. A detective interviews a cast of characters that were in attendance at a party that turned into a disaster—and into a crime scene. Each interview sheds light on the various characters and their personality/motivations/intentions, giving the detective—and the reader—a view into what happened that disastrous night in tiny bites of information. They’re perfect at adding insight into the characters’ minds, but also at creating a lot of tension. This is what you want your framing device to achieve.
The trickiest part of using a framing device, or any other creative structure, is not only to make sure it’s working, but its actual construction. You might try one of these methods while creating them:
- Using storyboards or a notecard/bulletin board system
- Playing with Scrivener. (I’m a new convert! My book coming next year is four POVs and it was really challenging to untangle them all and make sure each character had an arc, etc, in a Word Doc, so I jumped on this wagon and now I’m in love.)
- Studying novels that do it well and using them as a model
A note of caution: be careful of writing novel parts separately with the plan to integrate them later. This can be a real nightmare. Some authors do this, but they almost always say they regret this method later as it requires an enormous amount of rewriting and hair-pulling later.
While it isn’t necessary to use framing devices or to play with your structure to tell a unique and wonderful story, it can certainly add a little something and sometimes it can add a big something that makes the book more emotional, more exciting or tense, or more resonance for your reader. So experiment! Be bold. Introduce story elements in different ways. In the end, it may offer your readers a richer reading experience and it can give you, the writer, a more challenging and satisfying journey to the finish line.
Have you experimented with different storytelling structures? Do you have a favorite novel that wowed you with its unique technique?
Heather Webb is the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of historical fiction. As a freelance editor and an adjunct in a MFA in Creative Writing program, Heather has helped many writers sign with agents and go on to sell at market. When not writing, she feeds her cookbook addiction, geeks out on history and pop culture, and looks for excuses to head to the other side of the world. To date, her books have been translated to seventeen languages.
I loved the story structure in The Rabbit Hutch. It includes an online obituary of an actress (written by the actress) with comments by her biggest, most wacko fans, her haters and her deranged son. It’s absolutely hilarious and also a mirror of online content at its best and worst.
I’ve been playing with story structure in my WIP. Besides a dual time-line and multiple POVs there are newspaper clippings, Gaming Commission Investigation reports, bedtime stories, song lyrics and fortune teller readings.
It’s refreshing to see your post about these structures today, as you mentioned, it’s rarely covered. I’ve been searching for a post on how to write a synopsis for a query when the story is in unconventional structures. Is the structure only mentioned in the query? Is it ignored in the synopsis or shown? So many more questions. But thank you for bringing up the topic today.
Alternate structures have a puzzle aspect that lights up reader brains—when they work. They also can be gimmicky, flat or like clippings in a waste basket.
I love innovative story patterns but something to keep in mind is that a story is about people, mostly but not always one person, and unless and until we feel involved with that person or people then we have little to no investment, no reason to read.
So, ask me, as exciting as a structure trick can be, the greater challenge and a parallel one is to create characters we are intrigued by if not care about. That said, your post today lit up my brain plenty, Heather, and you’re right: it’s a topic too little discussed!
Don Quixote is a wow. As the two protagonists venture on their journey, we experience the myriad tales they share. It is a masterful polyphony of fictive narration.
Such a great topic, Heather. As Don said earlier, if done well, it’s like a puzzle. One of my favorites is Audrey N’s Time Traveller’s Wife. Not having it in chronological order really gave you the same sense of what it was like for the characters themselves. Another story I enjoyed is How to Love by Katie Cotugno is about a couple falling in love with each other twice, there are before and after chapters. I’m toying with newspaper clippings for my historical, but it’s not easy finding the just right bits. I started with a perfect one so perhaps I just need to stick with that one. We shall see–everything must serve the story. Thanks for helping me think about this more.
I always love your posts, Heather! They offer such wonderful insights, backed by examples and helpful practical guidance.
I laughed a bit when I reached the part about being careful not to write separate parts with the idea that you’ll integrate them later. My first novel, and only published at this point, was comprised of two timelines woven together — a young man setting off for war and the same young man returning home. From the start I had this idea of the main mystery beneath the drama of the plot was not knowing why he arrived home in such overwhelming mental and physical anquish. Along the way, the framing technique took on additional importance, such as my realization that the year-long timeframe offered opportunities for contrasts, including seasonal ones. It was exciting, and held my own interest while writing the draft. The structure allowed me to shift gears as well on a rather heavy topic, since I could pull from the two evolving lists of scenes (wartime and postwar) I felt would best propel the story, culminating in parallel climaxes to resolve the central trauma.
It wasn’t until the end of my initial draft that I felt sudden panic that perhaps the two timeframes wouldn’t fit. Fortunately for me, they zippered together well, with minimal tweaks. As I recall, the only notable adjustment was a need to stick with one timeline for two chapters at one point, rather than alternate one-by-one as I had first imagined.
But it still sticks with me that the result could have been heartbreaking, setting me back months if it had not panned out.
Word to the wise — from your wise caution — don’t always expect complex structures to pan out unless you plot very carefully each step of the way.
My mainstream trilogy is about Hollywood – and three people enmeshed with it. The outside structure, in various ways, is how the outside world comments on relationships in that real/unreal medium – everything from a New Yorker article which is the frame to print and online comments from the outside looking in. Including gossip columnists.
Inside of the envelope, each main character is intensely involved – and there are secrets the reader gets to know that way that the outside world will never see. Only the reader can, for example, evaluate at the end of the story how much of the New Yorker article is true.
Those involved will never tell.
Heather, I’m halfway through Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” and it’s a marvel of a framing device—an ancient story—linking the lives of characters centuries apart, all in dramatic circumstances. The unfolding of the framing story is found in short passages through the book, and the the reader is taken to the worlds of the characters, and back again. It’s a splendidly inventive book.
The odd thing is, a month or so ago I finished “The Golden Ass,” one of the few extant full novels written in Latin from Roman Empire times, and its story is one of the sources for the ancient story in Doerr’s book. My Latin is shaky though, so I read it in English.
My English is shaky too: that’s supposed to be “… and then the reader is taken …”
I love those moments of synchronicity.