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.

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.

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.

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.