Reasonable question. No video to go with this, just a quick and I hope clear answer.
In a frame story, you begin the story by showing a character or characters settling in to:
- Watch a play
- Listen to a story
- See old slides
- Read a diary
In the frame story, the characters as they are in the present are NOT participants in the actual story you wish to tell. They could be getting ready to tell us a story of their younger selves as main characters in your main story, they could have been minor participants in that main story, or they could have no relationship to the main story whatsover.
The real story—the story that has been framed—is whatever happens once the writer cuts from the observers to the action. Once the real story ends, the writer cuts back to the frame, shows the audience getting up and leaving, or the diary reader putting the book away and going on with his life, or whatever fits.
In every case, however, the reader is reminded from the beginning that your MAIN story happened in some other place, to different people, and he is forced to see himself as a member of an audience getting the story fed to him through a presenter of some sort, rather than experiencing it himself firsthand. This is distancing, and does not make for great fiction, though writers still use the device from time to time.
Including diary entries, storytellers telling stories, or people watching plays within the body of the story, where those items are not the main story, is not creating a frame story.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I know you won’t agree, but I like frame stories. “The Good Soldier,” for example, is a story within a story within a story….the revelation of how wrong the narrator is about everything is much more interesting to me than a straight line story which doesn’t vary from a predictable plot. I really think “The Good Soldier” is great fiction even though it would not be considered so by you. That’s just me…and I comment as a reader only. This idea that people don’t know they are reading an illusion is pretty silly…no one buys fiction with the idea that they are reading something true. They buy fiction to get out of a pedestrian world and go to a many layered place where it is possible to gain insight beyond the usual limits. Why not use the form that best suits the story rather than insist every story fits a straight line story? That means that I like the frames, the dreams, diaries, letters, the storytellers within the pages—what I don’t like is endless descriptions of things like sunrises and sunsets and moons. But that’s just me. Probably why I was destined never to be a writer. Don’t worry…this really is my last comment. In the future I’ll read and keep my opinions to myself since you are the expert and I am not.
While I agree that the frame story has potential to be distancing, I’ve always enjoyed reading frame stories, and still do. They’re probably some of my favorites, in fact. I’ve also written one, although that was one of the first stories I wrote and if I were writing it today, I might have chosen to write only the “main” story, without the frame, for the purpose of immersing the reader directly into the action of the main story.
My goal was to “start in the middle” with a mother-daughter relationship as it existed at the “frame” point in time; the main story showed how the relationship began, following a path that led to the frame’s starting point. Rereading recently, I still thought it worked although I could see many weaknesses in the storytelling.
Two things occur to me re: frames. 1) It’s a useful way of introducing conflict in a story from one character’s POV, and exploring the conflict from another character’s POV. Resolution may occur when the story switches back to the original POV/ the action switches to the present/ the sleeper awakes/ the movie ends, etc. 2) If a story is being told from a particular characater’s POV anyway, the frame sets it up and the main story delves more deeply into that character’s mind – or vice-versa, the story may be framed in first-person and the main story step back from that intensely personal POV even if it retains the same character’s POV in third-person. So, for me, the frame is a very useful way of exploring POV and how it colors the characters’ reactions.
How do you feel about stories which contain a prologue and/or epilogue, which I think may be considered a kind of frame?
I’ve never taken a writing class, so I’m asking to learn here, not to argue
So – would you classify Stoker’s DRACULA as a frame story? or not?
Thanks for that, Holly, I didn’t know this was what they were called!
I instantly thought of “The Princess Bride” and “The Borrowers” as examples of frame story novels that work – but on reflection, as a reader, I prefer not to have that extra barrier between me and the story.
Especially when I was a child, a much older protagonist looking back to deeds of his youth was quite off-putting – I didn’t relate to the older version of the hero at all. I still feel this now, come to think of it…
For a truly extraordinary example – one of my favorite books of any type – see Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin”. A masterful use of this technique.
I usually would agree that I don’t want an extra frame between me and a book or between my story and my readers. But since there is an exception to every rule, my exception is “The Landlord’s Daughter” by Monica Dickens. She weaves the frame through the story a little bit, actually increasing your heartache for all of the major characters. As with any technique, if you’re going to do it, do it right or find another ingenious way to grab your readers.
I agree with Holly that frame stories are, for the most part, distancing and distracting. One of the reasons many people read is to be transported. They put themselves in the place of the main character and live through him or her. A frame is an abrupt reminder that the world they’ve entered is only fantasy. I think perhaps this is especially true for mass market stories–romance or adventure–where readers are living vicariously through the hero or heroine.
Frames, if you plan to use them, work better in literary stories where readers are more aware that they’re reading fiction. Tragedies, in particular, where readers might want to be reminded that what they’re reading is not real, can be framed. That said, I still prefer a frameless story.
If you’ve written one, ask yourself why. What is the purpose of the character who is telling the story? Why not just tell the story itself? Only if you have a strong rationale for it should you frame your story.
Actually, I like framed stories a lot. There’s something magical in them. It’s like “OK, I know that fiction isn’t true, but perhaps that framed story just could be?”
What I think are the best uses of a framed story:
- the narrator’s pose is backed-up (in 1st person POV stories). Usually, the narrator has some point from which the story is told, and I’ve never seen it as “11 seconds from what’s happening” (I mean gee, what sort of moron would he be to tell stuff that’s happening?) and this can be a major flaw (like I know he’ll never die or he knows how this will end) but it can also be used as a “second storyline”, like “I know how it ended and I think of it differently now than I did then”, and frame stories often exploit this well (as often as they exploit it bad)
- this allows for good flash-forwards, not the lame “if only I knew what a mistake that was” but a cool “How I met your mother” series flash-forward (“this is a girl I liked but it’s not the one I got kids with, na-na-na!”)
However, the aforementioned case is a 1st POV narrator telling about somebody else telling a story, I think this is why this didn’t work.
I might be biased though. Gee, I pre-ordered “The Name of the Wind” *because* it’s a framed story. I adore “The Baby of Mâcon” because it’s a framed movie, executed with supreme skill (and it doesn’t distance us from the content of the movie at all, actually the idea that it’s a stage play somehow made me feel both for the main story *and* for the actors *and* for the audience). And I nearly always think of “where does the narrator stand” when reading a story, I grumble when it’s done sloppy but I just faint and scream in delight when it’s done brilliantly.
There are three main problems overlooked in the majority of the comments above, and all of them will screw up the majority of writers who take these comments to heart.
The first is that people in general think that the fact that they like something makes it good.
If this were true, bad porn would be high art, and reality TV would be the equivalent of the best Shakespearean tragedy. People in vast numbers like both. If you waste my time by arguing that either porn in general or reality TV at all is art, I’ll delete your comment.
You are welcome to like frame stories in general. This does not make them good.
There are some points about writing fiction that you can state objectively, and one of these points is that any technique that takes the reader out of the story and distances him or her from involvement in the action is a bad technique.
The sole purpose of the frame story is to distance the reader from the main story, to point out that the main story is not here, not now, not real in the way that the frame is here, now, and real.
Since the entire point of fiction is to create a story and a world that engages the reader’s attention and imagination and immerses him completely in the world the writer has created, the frame story is, objectively, and by definition, a bad technique.
Finally, there is no bad technique that a sufficiently brilliant writer cannot turn into good fiction.
In the same way that professional stunt drivers can do things with a car that would kill any average driver—and make doing these things look easy—so any very good writer can take even something as inherently flawed as the frame technique and do something amazing with it.
The problem for the majority of writers who fail to miss the brilliance behind making a bad technique look good is that they assume the technique itself is sound. And sort of like an ordinary driver jumping a car over an alligator-filled river, the average writer will end up wrecked from the attempt.
Moving the reader around in place and time certainly sounds like a good thing, so long as there are solid hooks for entrance and exit. If I have to think about how the main character made it from page 23 to 46, it breaks the spell…
This Crash Test inspired me to write a sequence for my own novel and while I’m not sure it is the picture-perfect example of a frame, it seems to flow well and adds immersion to the setting. I was disappointed when I was unable to post my efforts here for others to critique, but this is your site.
And Holly, while I’ll never intimate that Survivor or porn is art, I believe they require some level of talent to produce. Perhaps those venues are the “dark side” of the industry, attracting people filled with the desire to produce but lacking in self-confidence and maturity?
I pity them. Using the tools and techniques you describe on this site have set my inner muse free.
Although it is off-target for novel writing, as far as writing in general goes: Holly, what do you think of the framing story as a device for binding short stories into a novel-like whole? I can think of (modern) examples which in my opinion worked (City, by Clifford Simak) and also some that didn’t work so well (Niven’s Crashlander). To the extent that you’d work with short story writers (I know your target is The Novel), would you recommend a frame for this purpose, and if not, what would you use in its place?
I like GOOD framed stories. Clearly, a lot of writers and would-be writers like the idea of framing a story; I base that on the resistance I’ve read to your statement that it’s a fundamentally bad technique, and the fact that it’s a hot enough topic to get two threads (the crash test and this one).
Could it be that we love the idea of the framing story so much BECAUSE it’s generally a bad idea, and it only works well enough to get into print (and to be remembered as a good read) when the author was, as you say, brilliant enough to make it work anyway? So that as readers, we remember the times it’s been made to work despite its inherent flaws, and we mistakenly think the story was great because of the frame — when actually, it was a great story DESPITE the device.
Yeah, that pretty well sums it up.