one thing i kinda love is all the elaborate framing devices of fiction from a couple centuries ago.
when published fiction was still a new enough thing that most authors felt like they still had to present it as if it was a true story, with context and citations and stuff
like they thought maybe the readers of the time wouldn’t be able to suspend disbelief, if the story just dropped them into the middle of claiming that a bunch of things happened, without the author explaining how they supposedly knew all that
so you’d get a whole introduction about how the author found this manuscript for sale as a handwritten journal from a mysterious book-vendor in a night market in some remote village… Or maybe it was a story recounted to them over several months of dinners with their friend B—-, to whom it really happened, but whose name is getting censored with a bunch of dashes for his privacy and also so you don’t get your suspension of disbelief broken by seeing a name that you could look up and find out if it’s actually a real person or not
the time when authors were still struggling to establish the ground rules of consensual lying. The time when novels were an actual novelty. What a concept.
Oh yeah, I love stuff like this. All the Sherlock Holmes stories were written by Dr. Watson. Dracula is a collection of letters, diary entries and newspaper articles. Frankenstein is a series of letters from a sailor stuck in the Arctic, who is told the story by Victor Frankenstein, who in turn also tells him the story that the Creature told Victor. Tarzan was told to the author by a mysterious drunkard, and Burroughs assures us that the name “Lord Greystoke” is fictitous, even writing:
“I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it may be true.”
And so many Lovecraft stories are written accounts by some terrified scientist trying to warn the world of his discoveries.
Oh, and one of my favorites is Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which ends abruptly with a note that says “The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press.” So Poe never actually writes how Pym died, or how the story ended, he just goes “Well, of course you’ve already read about that in the newspapers!”
I love the format. It’s so good. (I’m not saying you’re saying it’s not, I’m just here to say “ahhh it’s neat” but it’s neaaaaaaaaat :D
sure, currently we don’t feel a need to frame story that particular way to permit for fantastic elements– but look where we do! it’s so cool!
We use this for versimilitude. For “oh this was totally a true story, spoooooky” kayfabe. For analog horror. we call it found footage, epistolary format, that kinda thing. Or someone might use it for the structure advantages, so that we can follow one character (the teller/reporter/discoverer) with more plot after the person in the sub-story’s story is done, maybe they died, maybe they had a bad end, whichever. Maybe we use it for more than one narrative line so that we can cover multiple people/places/times.
aaaa :D