For the last thirteen weeks, I have been presenting the various modes one can design a story or novel around.
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| Using strong foundation stock. |
Some are common traditional modes, such as the Heroic Journey, Faustian Legend, Cain & Abel, the Christ Figure, Coming of Age, the Dream Vision and the Frame Narrative. There are others which are more directly related to authors’ well-known works: Hemingway’s Code Hero, Heinlein’s Three-stage Character and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Fairy tales had a few to offer, and several more than I mentioned: Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast the most common. The prose essay format is a new form, most notably first used by Virginia Wolf.
The purpose in bringing them up and outlining them as I have, is to remind any writer that our readers often enjoy a tale as much for the author’s unique style and the genre as they do for the return to a format we love to read again and again in its traditional form or a modified version that surprises us with a new twist. These narrative modes make great bones for our imagination to flesh out and clothe in fresh linen.
And mixing them up is not such a bad idea. Throw together a Heroic Journey with Cinderella or write a Coming of Age novel in the form of a prose essay. Those too are out there (take a close look at Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), and those mixes add increased complexity to the story and still maintain familiarity for the reader.
