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Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

plotting

Narrative Mode ~ #15 Sleeping Beauty

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I like sleeping beauty because I always felt my own mother
lived a life that fit a large part of this framework. She was a classic good
girl who thought life as a secretary would be made to order.  It had some challenge, and she did well and
even did some modeling on the side.  But
life lost excitement, had no adventure for her. She did travel, but it was
basically from her parents to her grandparents. 
Boredom set in ,and she felt trapped, almost asleep while life went on
around her.  And then the dashing
engineer arrived interviewing for a position at the company where she worked.
They grew close and soon she was learning how to pilot a plane and traveling to
Cuba and other South American countries. 
After five years of adventuring, they married, had children and well,
lived  happily every after.
The basic plot is easy to lay out:

  • A girl is born and the family sees danger in her
    future.
  • They protect the girl by limiting her
    interaction with others
  • She is innocent of the danger and trusts
    everyone
  •  
    The dangerous situation takes place and…
  • She falls into a deep sleep due to the backlash
    of the measures taken to protect her. 
  •  Another stranger arrives and breaks through the
    protection to awaken her
  • She then lives happily ever after.

Simplest way to adapt this to a modern story is to make the
protection and its affects a metaphor. 
Imagine her innocence as a type of sleep.  She is unaware of life outside a set locale
and group of people.  The protection is a
valid and necessary one, and she will face that danger too, but she can also come
out of that sleep through an activity, through meeting someone or through a
physical or mental challenge.  She will
struggle to gain a sense of understanding and then finally reach the moment of
complete awareness.
This one is not particularly demanding as frameworks go, but
for simple bones and easy adjustments to bring in complications, it is a nice
one.



The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode: #13 Beauty and the Beast

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I cannot say I saved the best for last, but I can say this is one of the most familiar of the narrative modes.  Everyone knows this story, but we love the ones we’re familiar with, so it is not one to ignore.  Beauty and the beast: a simple story of redemption, forgiveness and true love.  As familiar as it is, one cannot claim it is simple.  Look at the requirements.

  • A young beauty who gives without reserve and is appreciated by her parent but mistreated by others close to her.
  • A father who cannot fulfill the exterior needs of his children though he does supply that which none can live without: love
  • Difficulties which make the young beauty and her father falter and fear they may not survive economically, spiritually or physically if things go on.
  • Opportunity to gain what is needed either through outside pressure to agree to an unsatisfactory contract, one that involves the daughter as servant or companion to a person or creature recognized as dangerous, unrelenting, unforgiving and cruel or through being driven by need to apply for a position with those same characteristics.
  • Refusal and then acceptance when there is no other solution.  The young beauty must sacrifice her happiness to save her father.
  • She gets to know the monster who holds the power over her and her father’s chances for  survival.  And he gains understanding, even appreciation for her kindness, constant forgiveness and obvious personal strength.
  • He risks her denial of him as a worthwhile individual, while struggling for his own self-acceptance.  She guides him out of his imposed purgatory (self-projected or a judgement placed on him by another force).  He reveals the person he has been desiring to be: good, kind, worthy of love.
  • The other shoe drops: he is running out of time and she needs to return to a much greater obligation than being his companion.  
  • Another sacrifice: only this time it is his.  He must give up his chance for redemption to prove his love for her (unselfishly, and outside of her awareness) by releasing her from the agreement seemingly temporarily though he is aware that it is permanent if she leaves.
  • She leaves and realizes, perhaps too late, that he needs her for his own survival.
  • Acceptance, redemption, happiness.

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode #10: Heinlein’s Three-stage character

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Though examining what Panshin coined as the Heinlein individual (see Heinlein in Dimension by Alexei Panshin) is largely a discussion of character development, the process of the development is a narrative mode that one can use to design a novel around.  So to start, I’ll list the features of this three-stage character of Heinlein’s.

  •  Young Innocent
  1. Stage one is the young but competent innocent. He doesn’t know his way around the situation he is in, but that is mere youth and inexperience.  He frequently is taken advantage of and abused before he gets angry enough to respond.  
  2. It is at that time that he meets his mentor, who is an elder who recognizes in this upstart a youthful version of himself.  So Young Innocent gains a mentor who is non-too-gentle in his teaching practices.  “Life is not patient, so why should I be?” is the philosophy.  And life isn’t patient, giving Young Innocent plenty of further knock and nicks which Mentor then trains him to respond to properly.  Young Innocent is known to ignore the early lessons but soon comes to appreciate the efforts of his taskmaster.
  3. Young innocent still has rather naive views, but he is learning and values Mentor’s guidance, even comes to depend, respect and love Mentor.
  • Grown up and sporting thick skin and questioning mind
  1. Stage 2 is the now experienced, ready-to-take-on-anything loner who has gotten over the loss of his mentor (everybody has to go sometime) though it nearly broke him when the loss was fresh.  But he is beyond that now, capable, quick in the moment, has the world by the string and is swinging it gaily while wrestling alligators and counting his loose change.  
  2. Most books end with this stage as the finished product.  Some let him grow old enough to find his own Young Innocent to foster.
  • The elder statesmen of the Heinlein Individual
  1. This is the quick-handed, quick-tempered elder we will see at the early part of the book as the mentor for Young Innocent.  
  2. He is highly knowledgeable, understands the society he lives in and how to manipulate it to fit his needs and has a world view that is highly cynical.  
  3. That world view alters when he finds the young innocent, an emotional connection he has managed to avoid for a long time.  But time is limited, and he needs entertainment for his remaining days, which have been rather charmed and therefore boring. 
  4. And so the circle is closed.

This now brings us to examples.  Heinlein’s Orphans in the Sky and Citizen of the Galaxy are good plots to examine.  But I am going to be quick about it. In Orphans Hugh Hoyland finds himself in the upper levels of a lost-in-space generation ship that has long ago also lost sight of its purpose, and he is now in the clutches of undesirables.  Hugh is our Young Innocent, and the main undesirable is Joe/Jim the soon to be Mentor for Hugh.  He teaches Hugh the truth behind the mysteries, in his very cynical way, and in time becomes attached to Hugh, which means he needs to stop playing king of the hill and nanny to Hugh and make change.  And the circle is closed (yup, don’t want to completely give away a good story).

As for Citizen, Thorby is Young Innocent, a slave boy that is purchased by a normally disinterested bystander who has been doing fine on his own for years, one Baslim the beggar.  On this new planet, Thorby has no protector, no experience and no value.  So Baslim provides these things, but at a cost: Thorby must accept training.  Baslim has now taken on not only the care and feeding of an innocent, but he no longer can just natter about with no concern about anyone but himself.  Then society gets itchy and …. the circle is closed.

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode #9: Shakespeare’s HAMLET as a narrative plot

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Following the Hamlet narrative brings a lot of tension and mystery to the piece.  The complex changes in the character make for a dramatic, dark plot line.

  • The main character (we’ll call him Fred) suffers the loss of someone important in his life and learns through unlikely or supernatural means that it was caused by someone close.  
  • Fred is conflicted by his loyalty to those close to him and the fact that he also blames them for the tragedy. This gives you plenty of room for contradictory qualities in the character because there is the constant question of madness.  
  • Fred’s desire for revenge, as well as making it public who is responsible, exacerbates his loss of control over his own life and injures others.  And he drops further into madness or perhaps it is all a ruse to flush out the perpetrator.
  • Anger and jealousy are driving forces. 
  • An innocent person suffers, and Fred is so involved in revenge, he considers the injury (mental anguish and later a possible suicide) just collateral damage, which supports the belief that he is going mad.
  • Death is an important feature: death of those important to Fred or who were the cause of the tragedy.  This could be modified to be death of a relationship, death of faith, or death of hope.  But destruction of Fred’s sense of right and fairness is essential.
  • With Hamlet, his efforts to get revenge ended in the death of his mother, his uncle (who killed his father), his girlfriend, her father and brother and Fred himself. 

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode: #7 Cinderella plot

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Cinderella plot: simplicity

Writing a modern Cinderella story is quite popular.  The simplicity of it makes for an easy plot and that increases the opportunity to add complexity to it.

  • Life is good between the two people, and the one dependent they have is healthy and happy.  [I am keeping this vague because like many of the other narrative modes, you can enlarge this one to encompass the business world, economics, politics, etc.  Imagine two political allies and their constituents.]  All is well until one suffers a death (political or personal).  
  • So a separation of some sort pulls the two apart.  The dependent must cling to the one who is left.  But he (or she) takes on a new partner, one certain to embrace the dependent.  All seems well in this change of events.
  • Until the original caretaker also dies.  Now the dependent is at the mercy of the replacement, and that individual is not the trustworthy person (business, system, etc.) that was first assumed.
  • Life gets very difficult for the dependent.  She (he, they) suffer greatly, must complete menial tasks in order to remain in this relatively safe condition.  The dependent loses hope and thinks she will never rise out of this lowly position.
  • Until opportunity arrives.  A young man (or new comer with high ideals) must make a connection and through the acts of individuals or groups who have sympathized with the plight of the dependent finds him or her or it.
  • They struggle with various difficulties that pull them apart. Then the magic moment, and life is sweet and promising again.

It does not take a girl, her father, step-mother, step-sisters and a prince to make this narrative work.  Any number of things can replace this simple story framework and add complexity.

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.

Narrative Mode ~ #5 Frame Narrative

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framed with a strong outer shell

The frame narrative is a fairly difficult format because it requires a fair bit of juggling between the framing story and the story within the frame.  The two must be connected, each enhancing the other by offering interpretive value on the part of the frame, while the inner story offers details and meaningful specifics.  Before I lay out the process, let me give some examples most people will be familiar with.

  • Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ~ Chaucer sets up his frame with a menagerie of characters who are individually or in small groups going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket.  They meet at a tavern and agree, with some finagling by the tavern owner, to travel together and participate in a story-telling challenge.  This is a very complicated frame narrative because not just one story is to be told but several, two by every member heading out on this jaunt and two by everybody on the return trip.  Chaucer never finished all the stories, but it was even more complicated because within the outer frame were several inner frames (various mini prologues and epilogues) which introduced and leapfrogged off each story to the next.  To add to the complication, Chaucer created a character named Chaucer who was the speaker in the outer frame who was retelling each of the stories by presenting it exactly as “he” heard it told by his fellow pilgrims.
  • Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ~  Conrad’s framing was not nearly so complicated as Chaucer’s.  His frame has five characters on a ship on the Thames in England.  One is telling about where they are and who the other characters are.  A second (Marlow) is telling his story about an experience he had on the Congo in Africa, but the story is retold by the original frame speaker who on occasion intrudes on Marlow’s narrative, inferring meaning and commenting on Marlow’s actions and personal interpretation of his experience.
  • Bronte’s Wuthering Heights ~ Bronte sets up a visitor (Lockwood) coming to the region to rent a manor house and its surrounding property from Heathcliff, the unscrupulous owner of side-by-side properties.  The visitor retells for a large part of the story the narrative of Nelly, all-around servant of the Earnshaw/Heathcliff/Linton families.  Nelly shares with Lockwood the activities of the other characters over the past twenty years in several gossip sessions the two hold over the course of his several months stay.  Lockwood picks up near the end of the novel upon revisiting the manor to tell much of the finale of the inner story.  His part in the frame is limited, his character more a foil for Heathcliff and a vehicle for telling the story than anything else.

So those are the popular examples.  The format breaks down in the following manner.

  1. First an outer story which provides an opportunity to tell a story.  This can be two people meeting at a coffee shop or something else equally simple or much more complex. If one of the two characters comes in appearing moody and withdrawn, the other character may wish to know the reason for the emotional condition. 
  2. The second then may agree or not agree to share the problem.  What is essential is that the frame and the inner story must be connected and somehow one of the characters feels free to or is compelled to tell a story.
  3. One option to the example above is that the first speaker tells about his recent experience.  If written ironically, the reader may come to understand that the recent experience of the happy character is the cause of the moody character’s troubles.  A second option might be that the moody character’s telling of an experience leaves him feeling better and the first, happier character is made moody because he is affected by the story told.  In any case, some story of epiphany would tie the two together.
  4. The inner story must be a thorough immersion for the reader whose return to the framing story completes the last piece to understanding the whole story (frame and inner narrative).

 The Little Handbook of Narrative Frameworks available on Smashwords and Amazon.