My memory is failing me and I’m really mad about it.
I’m the friend with the really good memory. The freakishly good memory; I say “freakish” because it freaks people out that I met them once, six years ago, and then when I saw them years later I was like “How’s your husband Bill, did his hip surgery go okay?” and they will be like “Wait, who are you?” My friends appreciate this because I remember stuff like who all went on the road trip to Lollapalooza in 1997 (by all accounts a very poor Lollapalooza) but they also don’t appreciate this because I remember stuff like what happened at Lollapalooza in 1997.
Some of my friends suspect that I claim things happened that didn’t really happen, that I count on everyone trusting in my well-known excellent memory to tell fake stories and get them accepted as true ones by the audience. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I do this.
Here’s my issue: I can’t remember when or where I got this matryoshka doll that I have in my office. There’s a black hole in my memory surrounding this one possession and it’s driving me crazy.
Today’s Shelf Life is about embedded narratives and frame stories. Embedded narratives refers to the literary technique of telling “a story within a story.” The frame story, or frame narrative, is the outer story that has another story (or more stories) inside it: Like my matryoshka doll. The big doll is the frame story and the next smaller doll is both an embedded story and simultaneously the frame of the next story (if there is more than one embedded story). They can be a little bit confusing. If you bear with me I promise an excellent and comprehensive guide to frame narratives and how to execute them.
Note: Do not conflate frame/embedded narratives with epistolary narratives (stories told in the form of letters or other communication); an epistolary narrative may serve as a frame narrative (Frankenstein) but not all epistolary narratives do (Bridget Jones’s Diary, for example).
First, a brief list of some items I have in my office:
Plastic toy tiger
Rubber stamp that reads “Unacceptable”
California license plates
A cool thing about remembering almost everything is you can tell a story about almost anything, for instance, the plastic toy tiger that my brother used to play with when he was just a tiny kid and which, when he lost interest in it, was left behind in the basement of our mother’s home from whence I plucked it as a memento of our childhood. I have had this tiger toy in my possession since the early 1990s and I know I have not had the matryoshka doll that long. It’s really bothering me that I can remember taking this tiger out of a box in the basement in like 1992 but I can’t remember the occasion of acquiring this matryoshka doll.
I’m fairly certain I did not purchase it for myself. It must have been a gift. A traditional Russian nesting doll is not the kind of thing I would buy for myself, even if I happened to see it in a store and found in charming. When you think about it, that’s the best kind of gift, right? The kind of thing you’d never buy yourself but that charms you when you receive it.
My ex-father in law was of Russian descent, which feels like a clue. Was it a gift from him? Do I know anyone who traveled to Russia who would have brought something like this back for me? When I was a toddler my dad’s friend went to Thailand and brought back a little red dress with embroidered flowers for me and I wore it constantly until it wouldn’t fit anymore, and then insisted on keeping it in my closet whenever my mother tried to move it to make room for new clothes. Maybe she still has it. Someone going to Russia might have brought back this doll? But I can’t think of anyone I know who’s been to Russia except my friend Patricia and we’re not gift-exchanging type friends. Did a friend give me this doll as a joke to commemorate marrying into a Russian family?
I’m trying to communicate how disturbing it is that I can look at almost anything I own, no matter how long I’ve had it, and remember the occasion of getting it, but not being able to remember where I got this dang doll.
A story within a story can occur in all kinds of genres and types of media. In film, a traditional example would be The Muppet Movie, which begins with all the Muppets themselves sit down to watch The Muppet Movie together. In that example you have a frame device, The Muppet Movie, which is the movie you, a real person, are watching; then, you have a second movie within that one, The Muppet Movie, a movie the characters are watching. The Muppet Movie is the film equivalent of a novel like Frankenstein, for instance, where the frame story is minimal and most of the story you’re going to absorb is the one nested inside. In these examples the frame kind of bookends the main story.
Then you have something like the Commode Story from Reservoir Dogs (1992). At the risk of spoiling a movie that, were it a person, would be old enough for me to date, one of the characters tells a hilarious story of almost getting caught in a public restroom with marijuana on his person when a police officer accompanied by a K9 unit comes in to relieve himself. The Commode Story (here come your spoilers) actually tells two stories in one, because within the frame story of Reservoir Dogs is the hilarious Commode Story, but during the Commode Story the viewer discovers that the character was in fact trained to tell this exact story as part of his training as an undercover law enforcement agent himself. So you have the story of his training nested within the Commode Story which itself is nested within Reservoir Dogs. In this case the whole Commode Story incident takes only a few minutes and is a side story within the larger narrative.
Get it? The framing (outer) narrative can be the main story with the embedded (inner) narrative acting as a side story, or the framing story can be a simple stage-setting for an embedded narrative that is the main story.
You can have just one frame and one embedded story: For instance, Oberon’s play-within-the-play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare. In high school my brother played Moonshine in the play-within-the-play and stole the whole show with his few lines and his facial expressions—“this lanthorn is the moon!”—which I can remember clearly to this day, but I cannot remember where I got the matryoshka doll.
You can have multiple equivalent narratives nested in parallel within one frame: For instance, The Canterbury Tales. The frame story of The Canterbury Tales is the pilgrimage Chaucer and his fellow travelers are taking to Canterbury, and each of the characters tells a story to entertain the others on the journey. Each of the “tales” is structurally equal to the others (we all know the Wife of Bath’s story is the best one). These stories are like eggs in a paper carton: The carton contains all the eggs but the eggs do not contain one another.
You can also have a story nested inside a story nested inside another story just like traditional graduated matryoshka dolls. The deeper you go the more challenging this structure is to read and write, but it can be done well. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin has a pulp science fiction novel at its core, embedded within Laura Chase’s novel, embedded within Iris Chase’s memoir-like narrative at the top level. Incidentally, I can remember the specific event of acquiring my paperback edition of The Blind Assassin at Barnes & Noble in 2001, when I was still trying to read the Booker Prize winner every year. I’m sure I had that paperback before I had the matryoshka doll.
If I were to narrow down the acquisition of the matryoshka doll to the period of time during which I knew my father in law, then I would have to have received it after I received the rubber stamp that reads “Unacceptable,” a gift that was presented to me with great ceremony in 2006. One of my early publishing jobs was to review camera-ready pages that had been supplied by authors. Camera-ready pages means pages that will be reproduced exactly on the printing press using a camera, rather than digital PDF files. Before desktop publishing became as common and easy as it is today, authors used to typeset—or try to!—their manuscripts using whatever word processor they had and then print them out and mail them to the vanity press and we’d pass along our volume discount with the printing press (less a bit of profit for us). Part of my job was to certify the pages as acceptable to go to press as they were set or . . . not. That stamp was a gift from my father in law’s son to me, early in our relationship, in admiration of my inflexibility on camera-ready sample pages.
What makes an effective frame narrative? and
How do you effect a frame narrative?
These are separate questions.
An effective frame narrative is one that helps the writer tie multiple stories together with a unifying purpose. I think this is universal for frame narratives (although I haven’t read every single one). When you open up a matryoshka doll, you’re going to find another matryoshka doll inside. They won’t all be identical but each one will be another matryoshka doll. That’s why the term matryoshka doll refers to each individual doll but also to the set overall. They are all variations on the same theme. If you opened a matryoshka doll and found inside, let’s say, a plastic toy tiger instead of a slightly smaller matryoshka doll, you would be confused and annoyed. You would immediately know this configuration was incorrect. Matryoshka doll and plastic toy tiger are not variations on the same theme (in that context).
To create a frame narrative with an embedded narrative within, I find it helpful to have the outline of both stories in my mind before I begin. I can’t say how pantsers do it, because I am not one. I can only say that while I don’t need a lot of detail plotted out, I do need to have a sense of the major events of each story so I can map how both narratives will be fitted together. Assuming I’m advising a plotter or at least a pantser with a vague outline of both narratives in mind, the steps I follow are:
First, make sure I understand how the narratives reflect one another. In what ways and places are they parallel? Which significant parts of one story echo the significant parts the other?
Map the places in the outer narrative where the inner narrative (or narratives) will be embedded. Will the outer frame bookend the embedded story? Or will the embedded story (or stories) surface at different intervals inside the frame story?
Find the significant points in each narrative that call back to one another significantly and line them up the best you can; either so that they’re near one another as the reader moves through the story in table-of-contents order or so they parallel one another structurally inside each narrative.
Ensure your narrative theme carries through each story; for instance, consider how Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and Frankenstein’s Creature are each driven toward their goal even as reaching for that goal wrecks their life and destroys the people around them.
A frame narrative with well-executed embedded narratives will structurally resemble a full egg carton (like The Canterbury Tales) or a possibly haunted matryoshka doll of mysterious origin (like The Blind Assassin).
Certainly I must have already had the matryoshka before I moved to Los Angeles and traded out my Maryland license plates for a Cali set, which I still have today. I remember getting them at the DMV in Thousand Oaks and handing my old ones to the clerk, who seemed confused to be receiving them. I now realize that’s because California doesn’t want your old tags back when you’re done with them; she had no idea why I was handing her a set of grimy old Maryland plates. Maryland does, in fact, want your old tags back when you’re done with them. Maryland gets very angry with you if you give your old Maryland tags to a clerk in California who throws them in the dumpster outside the DMV in Thousand Oaks. I remember exactly where I kept the matryoshka doll in my house in California so I must have already had it by then.
Listen, this story does not have a satisfying ending because I really don’t know where the matryoshka doll came from and that’s just something I have to live with and now you do, too. Not that the matryoshka exists and I own it, I mean, but that there are things I can’t remember and I can’t control that. Even I can’t remember everything all the time. I disassembled the doll all the way down to the tiniest interior matryoshka (smaller than my pinkie fingernail) looking for a note or a gift tag but there was not one.
If you ever want to leave someone a cryptic message I recommend hiding it inside a series of nested matryoshka dolls and sneaking the doll into an out-of-the-way place in their house. If you ever want to make someone crazy, I recommend the same thing but without the note.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.
Next episode: hooking readership with unresolved mysteries, or realistic world building through unresolved conundrums? You decide, through a convoluted sequence of fan mail.