muse – Almost An Author

How Academic Articles Can Help You Craft Your Frame Stories

Pilgrims travel to a martyr’s shrine, swapping stories on their journey to pass the time.

The freshly installed tenant of a rundown estate asks his housekeeper about the history of his troubled new home.

A sea captain writes to his sister about a disturbing encounter he had en route to the North Pole.

If you’ve got a taste for classic literature, you might recognize — in broad strokes, at least — the openings to some of English literature’s most notable works: The Canterbury Tales, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein. respectively.

All three of these classics show the power of frame stories at work. Also known as frame narratives, these introductory tales enclose another story (or set of stories), supporting and emphasizing them like gilded wood embracing a painting.

As you might have gathered from the examples above, a good frame story isn’t just a throat-clearing before the author begins to speak in earnest — a preamble to the story they really want to write.

For one thing, frame stories help orient the reader. Their protagonists are often as lost as we are, stumbling into astounding situations they don’t yet have the context to parse. The tenant arrives in the aftermath of Heathcliff and Cathy’s ruinous love; the sea captain rescues Dr. Frankenstein from the cold, long after the monster has already escaped his custody. As strangers to the scene, these baffled observers allow us to nestle into their curiosity and bewilderment, giving us a perspective to latch onto as we ease ourselves into the book.

Done right, frame narratives offer a way into the plots and characters they frame. But beyond that, they also offer occasions for storytelling — justification for each word that follows. Why am I reading this? What makes this important? These are the questions a good frame story will answer.

These days, I often find frame narratives in mystery novels and ghost stories, where they depict a naive outsider’s first encounters with the enigma at the heart of the work. But actually, I tend to stumble on my favorite frame narratives in a less intuitive genre: academic articles.

At its core, academic research isn’t unlike the plotting of mystery novels. The scholar-sleuth, encountering an ambiguity, undertakes an investigation. They work methodically through clues, subjecting them to rigorous analyses and synthesizing them through flashes of insight.

In my field of history, researchers don’t tend to present their findings in the form of conventional frame stories — that is, by narrating the discovery of their sources. However, historians often do deploy a rhetorical strategy that reminds me of the frame narrative at its best. In some of my favorite scholarly articles, the researcher begins with a punchy anecdote, a narrative that orients me to the concepts they’re working with and eases me into the analysis to come.

The book historian Susan Cherniack, for example, uses this technique with spare, elegant style in a classic 1994 study of textual transmission in Song China. The 120-page article opens on the striking story of “five [Song] woodblock-engravers who were struck by lightning after changing the texts of prescriptions in a medical book they had been engraving”. This startling one-liner gets right to the center of Cherniack’s inquiry: how texts change as they’re copied and circulated; which changes are “allowed” and which forbidden.

When Cherniack pulls this anecdote and places it at the beginning of her article, she’s crafting a narrative frame for her ideas, much like Mary Shelley opening Frankenstein on a sea captain’s rescue of a scientist. Cherniack doesn’t belabor her point — she moves on from this opening salvo quickly enough. But she does offer us a striking, narratively rich indication of why we should care about her study.

As fiction writers, we use our frame stories to introduce narrative, not argumentation. But examining how historians contextualize their arguments through storytelling can make us better storytellers too, by keeping frame stories compelling and tight.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish — learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

Why Stealing Characters from History Isn’t Just for Historical Fiction

As writers, we’re generally in the business of creating our own inspiration. When it does strike us unbidden, we know it’s a rare gift that can’t be squandered.

The problem is, even when our muses turn suddenly, spontaneously generous, they rarely shower us with all the inspiration we need to produce a complete work. Some fragment of a story might flare lightning across our minds — a striking premise or a single, unforgettable scene. But in that same Eureka moment, we don’t always get the setting, the conflict, or the characters we need to turn that inner prompt into a rich and powerful story.

If you’re in need of characters to anchor a compelling concept and give it a human touch, you can always opt for the stereotypical solution — writing what you know and transforming all your friends and loved ones into thinly veiled fiction. But if you want a wider, wilder range of characters to play with, why not turn to historical figures?

As a PhD student in history, I got into the discipline for the characters I encountered in textbooks. There was the mystic who wept her way through the Holy Land, disturbing her fellow pilgrims. The historian who chose castration over death, so he could finish the work his father started. The emperor who turned rulership into theater, demanding his subjects applaud him when he sang.

Any of these real-life figures would add depth and color to a novel or short story — whether or not it’s set in their native time and place. In my opinion, writers who don’t specialize in historical fiction can steal characters from history to tremendous effect. They’re not beholden to the strictures of fact, and they can even mix and match — welding, for instance, a famous painter’s precocious childhood to a rakish scientist’s turbulent marriage. Think of this as an act of narrative collage: piecing together, from a rich store of existing materials, the perfect character for your narrative needs.

Some of my favorite, non-historical novels have leaned on characters inspired by history — plucked from our past and transported to new worlds of the author’s creation. Ken Liu’s Nebula-nominated fantasy novel The Grace of Kings, for instance, rewrites material I studied extensively in grad school: an early Chinese historical account of the turbulent transition between the Qin and Han dynasties. (The author of the source text? The castrato-historian I mentioned earlier!)

In Liu’s vivid, imaginative retelling, Liu Bang — the brash and charismatic man who would become the first Han emperor — becomes Kuni Garu. He’s a hard-drinking, fast-talking charmer who shares the historical Liu’s contradictions: beneath each man’s loutish, workaday exterior lurks the potential for majesty.

As my example suggests, historically inspired character development works especially well for speculative fiction — we’ve seen plenty of sci-fi novels in recent years with settings modeled on, say, imperial Rome or the Byzantine Empire. Still, this technique should work just as well for other genres. Can you imagine a contemporary novel that transposes Virginia Woolf onto the world of digital media? Or a mystery series where the sleuth is based on Tanaquil LeClercq, the ballerina whose stage career was cut short by polio — and who reinvented herself as a dance teacher, demonstrating combinations with her arms and hands?

In the end, the figures you’ll encounter in history are more than lists of dates. They were human beings, with formative influences and inner conflicts, immortal longings and deferred dreams. Let them into the world of your story, and they just might surprise you with what they do.