Narrative Techniques Series: #13 Frame Story and Framing Device
In this new article dedicated to Narrative Techniques Series, we address Frame Story and Framing Device Narrative Techniques. They are different from each other and somehow intertwined.
It is not a simple link between the various events told in a story. A “frame” encloses the facts and stories of the narrative.
What are the Narrative Techniques of Frame Story and Framing Device?
Frame Story is a story that takes place in a novel, or in a movie. It is narrated by the main character, the writer itself as a narrating voice, or a support one. Usually, it starts with one character who tells a story to others. It can also start writing it down and then the narration begins.
We can also this Narrative Technique “frame narration”.
On the contrary, Framing Device includes a single action, scene, event, setting, or any element of significance at the beginning and end of a narration. The use of this technique allows frame stories to exist.
Sometimes, the Framing Device is not used for any particular purpose. It is useful to create a context and give more relevance to the frame around the narrative. This ensures that the reader appreciates the story more.
The difference between the Frame Story and the Framing Device
To better explain what the difference between the Frame Story and the Framing Device consists of, we take a famous example like the “Decameron” of Boccaccio.
This novel includes a hundred novellas inserted in the novel as a Frame Story. It is a sort of super-story that narrates the story of a “brigade” of ten young men who, having met in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence during the plague of 1348, decide to leave together for a villa in the nearby countryside.
Here they can recuperate for fifteen days from the mourning caused by the epidemic by leading a secluded life, dedicated to various occupations and amusements.
To pass the time during the day, they decided to take turns in telling each other those one hundred novellas. Later re-told in the book called Decameron.
This Frame Story is, however, then framed by a further space in which the author takes the floor directly to express his opinions about the work. This space is therefore not intended for narration, but rather for argumentation: this can be considered “outside the narration.”
“Since the beginning of the world men have been and will be, until the end thereof, bandied about by various shifts of fortune”
Giovanni Boccaccio
Examples of Frame Story and Framing Device in movies
In Christopher Nolan’s movie “Inception“, the main character Leonardo DiCaprio enters a dream of Mr. Murphy to add an idea to his subconscious. To achieve that, Cobb performed by DiCaprio, puts Mr. Murphy to sleep in his dream, creating a second layer of the dream.
These two Narrative Techniques allow creating different narrative levels.
The same thing happens in “Titanic“. Here, Rose, at her elderly age, starts to tell the story and the tragedy of the Titanic. The public finds themselves directly catapulted into the narrative that begins in 1912 and traces the days of Rose on the transatlantic. At the end of the narrative, the image returns to Rose, elderly, ending the story.
Write your story with bibisco’s novel planning software
Not even the most experienced writers find it easy while writing a novel. There are many aspects to pay attention to, and there are just as many techniques, as we’ve seen in this Narrative Techniques Series.
Thanks to bibisco and its innovative novel planning software you will be able to rearrange all the elements necessary to create the story you have in mind without neglecting the most important aspect: intriguing and attracting your reader.
Conclusions
In the landscape of narrative techniques, there are some that are better known and some that are less so. Some that you have even read or seen before but never paid attention to.
This could be the case with the Frame Story and Framing Device: we talked about it in this Narrative Techniques Series article. They are two expedients widely used but not so known on a technical level. However, they are very useful to use to make the narrative stand out from the others.
