Chapter 7 “From Story to Art” – Section 6 “Frame and Meta Narratives”
With Links to Supplementary Material
Meta... it seems like only yesterday that we were in the year 2010, with Meta being the newest and most pretentious of plot devices. However, it seems like enough time has passed that it has been revived with a greater amount of skill, so that we can begin to talk about how to use it effectively, including in the form of Meta Narratives. Meta Narratives are stories within a story—illustrated in its best form in movies such as Sucker Punch and Big Fish (though you could also succesfully argue that it is a Frame Narrative)—where short stories that take place outside the actual physical space and time of the main plot, are used to support the overarching plot. Similarly, Frame Narratives—used in such stories as The Princess Bride, How I Met Your Mother, and (somewhat) the NeverEnding Story—are prolonged Meta Narratives that become the main plot of a story, usually used when a character from the future is telling the story of something that happened in the past. Today, I'm going to talk about how to use both.
Tip 1: Use a Frame to hang the Narrative picture.
To understand how to correctly use a Frame Narrative, we must consider what a frame is. When choosing a frame for a piece of art or photograph, you don't look for a frame that will overshadow the piece, tell the viewer how they are supposed to see the piece, or make the piece seem more grandiose than what it is. You select a frame—Narrative or physical—based on what style and design will create the most appropriate and fitting boarders so that the viewer can best appreciate the art, even if that means going without a frame at all. In “The Princess Bride,” for example, the writers use the Frame of a grandfather reading the main story to his grandson in order to frame the movie as a storybook fantasy—complimenting and properly framing the type of story that the audience can expect to see, and putting them in the correct mindset to properly appreciate it.
Tip 2: Link your Meta Narratives into a structured topical or chronological plot.
The single most common mistake that I've seen in Meta Narratives is that the writer did not have a purpose for the miniature stories being where they were; the writer only knew that they wanted to add the little stories and so just threw them in to the story at random. Whether your plot is chronological or topical, the Meta Narratives should comprise the exact plot-points that are supposed to be in that part of the story. If your overarching plot—for example—has reached the Inciting Incident, then your short-story should emphasize a protagonist whose world is being shattered so that his story begins. “Big Fish” illustrates this with its own Inciting Incident, where the witch tells our young hero how he is going to die, instilling in him the bravery to face life with his head held high and the confidence that he will not die before his time.
Tip 3: Don't use Meta Narratives or Frames to make your story into something that it is not.
What has made Meta Narratives and Frames so pretentious and annoying in popular stories, is that they are often used to pass the story off as something that it is not. Authors will use a Frame, such as a Narrator introducing the story about some great hero of legend that “saved us all,” in order to make the story artificially grow to a greater scale. Similarly, Meta Narratives are often used for the purpose of making better commercials for the movie by making the audience think they are watching something that they are not. These tactics only result in audience annoyance and the feeling that they've been deceived. To avoid this, make the Frame and Meta Narratives appropriate to your story, and allow the overarching plot to speak its own scale.
Tip 4: Each Meta Narrative and both sides of the Frame Narrative must have a complete plot.
Obviously, there will be a particular overarching plot that will gain more attention, structure and detail than the Frame or the Meta Narratives themselves. However, these smaller stories within the overarching story must also have their own completed plots—a beginning, a middle, an end, a protagonist, a purpose, and an antagonistic force. In the Princess Bride, the more structured plot is clearly that of Buttercup and Wesley. However, the frame still illustrates the completed story about an old man trying to instill the virtues of love and goodness into his grandson through the power of story, and facing the antagonistic force of his grandson's somewhat pessimistic worldview—a complete story even apart from Wesley and Buttercup. Similarly, in the example of “Big Fish,” each tale about the protagonist's life features the hero stopping on his journey to encounter a challenge, figuring out a way to overcome it, and then ending the Meta Narrative with him returning to his journey through life. This is vital to making the Frame and Meta Narratives feel engaging to the audience, and not like a meaningless distraction from the overarching plot.
Tip 5: Meta Narratives should serve to show something that the overarching story could not.
In the movie, “Sucker Punch,” we encounter a brave young female protagonist who witnesses her father committing a horrible crime against her sister, being found out, and then being sold to an insane asylum that uses its patients as sex slaves. The movie then uses a mix of genres and miniature stories to stand in for the real events (rapes, abuse, and brutality) that the hero must endure so that she can make her escape from the asylum with her new friends—shown in the form of action sequences where she and her friends fight horrible monsters and villains. Now, had the rapes and brutalities merely been shown, we would have seen the hero as an unfortunate victim. However, the Meta Narratives show us something new by creating a context that allows us to see the incredible level of her heroism and strength—making us admire her instead of pitying her. Similarly, all Meta Narratives that stand in for just the bare-facts plot, should have a specific purpose and illustrate something that could not be shown otherwise, lest the audience simply become annoyed that you did not just show us the overarching plot without bothersome distractions.
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Meta... it seems like only yesterday that we were in the year 2010, with Meta being the newest and most pretentious of plot devices. However, it seems like enough time has passed that it has been revived with a greater amount of skill, so that we can begin to talk about how to use it effectively, including in the form of Meta Narratives. Meta Narratives are stories within a story—illustrated in its best form in movies such as Sucker Punch and Big Fish—where short stories that take place outside the actual physical space and time of the main plot, are used to support the overarching plot. Similarly, Frame Narratives—used in such stories as The Princess Bride, How I Met Your Mother, and (somewhat) the NeverEnding Story—are prolonged Meta Narratives that become the main plot of a story, usually used when a character from the future is telling the story of something that happened in the past. Today, I'm going to talk about how to use both.
