Hi, fellow scribes! At the request of mettle fatigue, who excels in diligence and ubiquity, but whose superpowers should never be taken for granted, I'm for once stepping in to host this evening.
The downside, for you: I'm not qualified to teach, guide or in any way mentor fiction writers.
While I did teach high school English for three years, creative writing was no part of that; in fact, I never took a class of that sort myself.
I wrote and edited professionally, for almost 40 years, strictly nonfiction: engineering publications, accident investigation reports, press releases, annual reviews, speeches, letters, endless memoranda, feature stories, minutes, statements, Congressional testimony, training manuals, opinion pieces, and more than a decade's worth of specialist news articles.
In common with fiction, some of this amounted to, or incorporated, storytelling -- but always tethered to fact.
You could select, order and reorder, detail or summarize, emphasize or qualify or write-around known facts. There was room for artistry of a sort. To hone techniques, to try and make each assignment -- however pedestrian -- rise just a little above its genre. Keep readers reading to the end. When possible, make them feel something, in spite of themselves. Make them think.
But Just Making Stuff Up was Right Out.
On retirement, and with encouragement here, I tried National Novel Writing Month. It was interesting to work on a new skill, but shockingly difficult.
Reality is my scaffolding, safety harness and hard hat! Fiction means trying to fly on Leonardo's wings.
I haven't finished any fiction but a couple of very short stories written at white heat, based on literal dreams. Bits of three (four?) novels languish. There's a spooky story I'm hoping to finish for Halloween, but don't get up any expectations, please! Apprentice labor. So…
What I could, and arguably should, do here might be a reminder about something basic on which I do have decades of practice. Like the First Commandment: Thou shalt oOmit needless words. I can always use more drill there too, myself.
But, yawn…not today.
Who feels like being that pedestrian?
And besides, there's a certain thing I'm fussing about, concerning my would-be short story:
The search for a framing device
So how about that for a topic?
NOTE: The usual R&BL schedule will be absent this time from the end of the diary. My tablet got indigestion from it; also I ran out of time to assemble better pictures. Sorry!
To be sure most stories these days just begin, bang, in media res, with action already in progress, and the action has to keep coming -- or, it is assumed, at any dozen-word gap in activity, readers will wander off to TikTok.
For example: Hilary Mantel's lauded Wolf Hall opens with the main character face-down on the cobbles of a stableyard, suffering from concussion. In the first paragraphs his confusion mirrors our own. As in pain he maneuvers to avoid his attacker administering a final, fatal kick with a hobnail boot, his social matrix begins unfolding. By the first chapter's end, we have tons of background, conveyed through action, dialogue, and the MC's current thoughts. And now he's escaping his mother country, in a hurry, secretively, and we thoroughly get the why.
SensibleShoes, founder of WriteOn!, was very good at teaching this, demonstrating it, and getting us to practice minimalism in everything else: no exposition but in action. (Nod to William Carlos Williams,1883-1963: "No ideas but in things.")
At the same time, as I struggled with this one particular spooky story, I could not seem to make that principle work. There was no obvious moment to enter in the middle of action that did not seem to entail a raft of exposition later.
A solution seemed to present itself: having the main character tell the tale. The MC could summarize the lead-up very quickly in his own words, much conveyed by just his attitude and voice.
I got the first few paragraphs down (in fact, trialled them here), and they seemed pretty good. Terse enough too.
But an issue: this was, clearly, a speaking voice. Who is he talking to? What context?
This MC is not, I think, the type of man who would ever tell this type of story to anyone. (Unless, perhaps, he was very drunk, isolated with a single companion, unable to take any action in the moment, possibly facing death as well....lot of complications.)
Further -- though I have a detailed plot plan, with only the coda uncertain -- I'm not quite sure the MC's going to be around, after events, to tell it. (And for the sake of suspense -- assuming the story works -- that shouldn't be obvious to the reader from the outset, either.)
Final objection, the possible conversation in a barroom (with whom?), or in bed (more complications!), or trapped in a sunken submarine (no), or whatever, just doesn't appeal as a vehicle; it seems so 1960s, at best.
Can he be talking one-on-one to the reader in an unspecified context, without all that apparatus? I took a shot at it, was unconvinced.
Could the story be something the main character wrote down? What type of documentation? A letter? To whom? The lover he'd just parted from at the outset, not definitively but in a definite state of irritation?
But do people even write anything lengthy to lovers or ex-lovers any more? Email? So cold. A TikTok to the world? (Too short.) A podcast? LOL.
Does this need to be retro, perhaps set in the 70s-80s when people still communicated in writing? (Any earlier, I don't see it hooking readers at all.)
And when he writes, his voice, which attracted me in that early trial and so neatly seemed to present his character and state of mind? Not the same if he's writing.
And then: if it's a document, who's reading it? Do I simply plop it in front of the reader, or is there another character who is reading it? The disgruntled lover? Someone else? How much later? And why does it matter to that reader?
All this apparatus just to get started?
I got stuck, stuck, stuck. And for more than two years, the outline has sat. All due to a frame problem.
Some of the middle is actually drafted in one form or another, but not much more can be done with it, absent a decision about the POV, the voice, the frame.
I'm going back this summer to try and finish it for Halloween. Hope I can still understand my own notes and outline!
Meanwhile, this conundrum has had me meditating in general, on stories with framing devices and stories without them.
One value of framing
Framing devices around a narrative, such as a barroom conversation or a document, are these days out of fashion. Yet they've had their more recent moments.
Well, maybe not that recent. Honestly, I don't read as much fiction as I should.
Still, one successful example that comes to mind is Anne Rice's debut novel and best-seller, Interview With the Vampire (my God, 1976, a thousand years ago, and has since birthed a whole sequence of novels, a film and, most lately, a TV series, while contributing to a general re-vision and renaissance of the whole vampire genre).
Briefly, at the start of Interview With the Vampire -- introductory segment of the frame -- a reporter walks into a dimly lit bar (yes!), simply looking for someone interesting to interview. The reporter ends up tape-recording a book-length verbal narrative by a 200-year-old undead blood-drinker, who turns out to be a far more complex and sympathetic character than Dracula.
In the novel's coda -- the end piece of the frame -- the reporter has to decide whether to follow up on the vampire's invitation to, er, come on up and see him sometime.
That framing device worked. And, while further novels and offshoots dropped it, I suspect the device was one key to Rice's success.
In 1976, vampires were virtually a "dead horse" trope (except in parody, humor, or Hammer Films, even there being popular largely as camp). Asking readers to accept a full-on, serious vampire premise from the very first chapter would, I suspect, have been too much.
The barroom scene made for a "soft opening" where the reader, along with the reporter, could gradually be "sucked in." (Groan.) Or to drop the snark, the frame created a small early window in the narrative where suspension of disbelief had a chance to be earned. (And amply, was.)
So here is still one possible use for a "barroom conversation" frame, even today. Especially if we're trying something really new. Or raising something from the dead. ;-)
A few other framing devices
Chatty author
A frame can be as simple as an author directly letting you know what kind of story to expect.
"Sing, goddess," was a very old one: you were about to hear a divine voice merely transmitted through the vocal apparatus of the bard. "Once upon a time." "Dear reader." Or the less clunky but still authorial, "It is a truth universally acknowledged..."
Storytelling session
Several cultures have produced short-story compilations anchored by one or more tale-tellers.
For instance, One Thousand and One Nights, a huge collection of folk tales compiled and added-to from probably the 700s to the 1500s or 1600s, are nested and twined together by the story of Scheherazade, literally narrating away for her life in a marathon that makes National Novel Writing Month seem like a station break in comparison.
Boccaccio's Decameron (about 1353), 100 stories told over a 10-day period by a group of noblewomen who have fled to the countryside escaping an epidemic of plague. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (about 1387-1400).
More modern writers have used the storytelling session format too. Here for example is the opening of "A School Story" from The Collected Stories of M.R. James (1931).
Two men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. "At our school," said A., "we had a ghost's footmark on the staircase. What was it like? Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square toe, if I remember right. The staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn't somebody invent one, I wonder?"…
..."I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories...which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books."…
"You never heard, did you, of a real ghost at a private school? I thought not; nobody has that ever I came across."
"From the way in which you said that, I gather that you have."
"I really don't know; but this is what was in my mind. It happened at my private school thirty odd years ago, and I haven't any explanation of it."
And the anonymous narrator goes on to tell his very spooky experience.
Documents
Perhaps before the novel genre was thoroughly acceptable and accepted, and personal writings such as letters and diaries were ubiquitous, a document-based framing needed such a device to accept a book-length, character-centered narrative that was neither literal history, parable, heroic epic, or satire.
So the classic early novel (often described as the first), Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson (1740) was presented in the form of letters and diary entries written by the main character, narrating her trials for the benefit of her parents, while at a distance from home.
The letter or diary format also can make the characters more relatable.
Although by the early 1800s Jane Austen was gently poking fun at the device as overused in fashionable Gothic romances, it's remained serviceable, witness for example Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding (1996) -- perhaps ironically, a takeoff on Austen's Pride and Prejudice. (And Fielding's novel is another work that spawned a thousand offshoots.)
Or the funny-sad Secret Diary of Adrian Mole series by Sue Townsend (1982-2009).
Another use of the form, especially clear with Mole, is deliberately to present an unreliable narrator, and/or one in comparison to whom the reader can feel in some way, at least partly, superior.
"Document-based" framings can mix together different kinds from different sources with different viewpoints, challenging readers to piece the action and other facts together. In other words, enhancing involvement.
One such novel opens:
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
(Kept in shorthand)
3 May. Bistritz.--Left Munich at 8:35 p.m., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible.
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is presented entirely as a patchwork of direct quotation from several people's personal journals, letters, newspaper clippings, and the odd telegram or medical record. References to shorthand, typewriting, train and ferry schedules, telegraph communication, journalism, modern (for its time) medivine, details of real estate transactions, and the like successfully lent both modern contrast and down-to-earth credibility to a series of events straight out of the Gothic horrors of Austen's era.
Witness all the children of the night who have followed--including Rice.
Hybrid
Henry James (no relation of M. R.) used an even more elaborate hybrid variation of a frame in the famously ambiguous horror novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898). A group at a Christmas house party are telling ghost stories in front of a cosy fire, enjoying the shivers. One guest hints that he knows of something more dreadful yet. Pressed, he explains that it happened to a former governess in his family, who wrote her experience down, and rather than trying to tell it himself, he would prefer to send home for the manuscript.
This takes a few days, by which time the party has diminished and his hearers are the more eager, from the suspense. So are we. And with the actual events at an extra remove, though documented by a vouched-for person, what actually happened is rendered even more spooky and sinister.
Apparatus
I think the word "framing" could justly be applied as well to certain stories that provide extensive background material to bolster their narrative.
For instance, Tolkein's LOTR (even without the Silmarillion, which IIRC he had no plans to publish) featured detailed maps, historical chronologies, genealogies, coherent invented languages, and in-universe folklore -- more than strictly what would be needed for the narrative, which stands on its own.
Another fantasy example I recall along the same lines: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke (2004), with the alt-history of its magical wainscot society thoroughly worked out and supported by abstruse footnotes.
Like the other framing devices, not really meant to fool us, but adding depth that enhances the effect.
A more pedestrian example would be a certain types of classic mystery whose opening pages display maps of the Shotwell Manor grounds, its floor plan, and the neighboring town of Nethermarsh, and a Cast of Characters with thumbnail personal histories. Besides adding detail, these inform us what kind of story-puzzle to expect and theoretically, help keep us from getting confused.
The most sophisticated version of this is to appropriate real history...not merely as painted scenery but a scaffolding. "Creative nonfiction" it's sometimes called...taking liberties with a true history, or true memoir in order to "make a better story" or, in theory, sometimes to bring out an underlying truth.
The video series The Crown was blatant about this, and in the opinion of many, without justification. But so were Shakespeare's history plays, tbh -- true history made serviceable as Tudor propaganda.
Author self-insert has been among the consequences as, controversially, with Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil (John Berrndt, 1994); what is that book, is it a fine story extensively framed by real people and real events, or is it history bewrayed? Artfully ambiguous. (Less forgiveable, and unforgiven, was the author self-insert in what was once supposed-to-be an actual biography of Ronald Reagan.)
But the author self-insert into real is not really new and not necessarily a sketchy or tricky technique.
It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbors, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some say from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods, which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others that it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus.
So begins Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, which presents a memoir of that particular outbreak with full details in the form of personal recollections of that period in London, official records, interviews with others, and harrowing (or occasionally humorous) anecdotes. It's true history and completely convincing; and terrifying. The only hitch being that Defoe (who published it under pseudonymous initials in 1722) had been only five years old at the time.
Critics agree it's better than the actual contemporary diary of Samual Pepys. :-/
Suggested exercise
Just for the heck of it, drop down to the list of framing devices below (quiz). Pick any one that you wouldn't normally use. Compose an opening paragraph or two for something, using that device, nothing very lengthy. Any character(s), stock, your own, or made up for this. Just have fun. And let us know your thoughts afterwards.
And now, for something completely different
The video that follows -- which I happened to run across last week -- is not specifically about writing and not attached to the "framing" theme either. It is about art, any art. In the parlance of the Quaker faith, it won't speak to everybody's condition. But it might, especially to some, in any field of art or craft, for whom chasing acceptability may have at some point become a but of a joy-stealing grind.
Just a little break, dream maybe, for what it is worth to you, if anything. For some reason I found it rather beautiful.
Will not be on the exam. ;-)
YouTube channel: DSA Threads Costuming
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