In a post on Writer Unboxed, Donald Maass examines novels that shouldn’t work, but do. “Some novelists break rules,” he says. “They go ahead and write exactly what they want, offend without concern, ignore the rules, throw away the craft books and indulge in freeform story structure.”
However, these stories often aren’t as rebellious as they seem. Underneath the risk-taking, they generally adhere to classic story principles, Maass says. To illustrate his point, Maass examines a few episodic novels. “These are stories that do not pose an obvious and immediate plot problem,” he says. “They do not proceed in tidy chronological fashion, one plot development leading directly to the next. They are an assembly of clumps; a jumble of episodes that somehow sum up to something greater than their parts.”
But what ties them together? Despite the episodic nature of the storytelling, the novels have a unifying purpose.
- Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table is about a child named Michael traveling unaccompanied aboard an ocean liner. In his opening, Ondaatje uses words like horizon, adventure, and castle to prepare the reader for an interesting journey. He implicitly promises wonders and amazement.
- In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut sets a very different scene using similar tools, with words like war, killed, prisoners, peace, and freedom. Vonnegut also promises adventure, though perhaps a more harrowing kind than Ondaatje.
While both novels use discrete episodes to tell their full story, each part is connected. “They are connected not by plot but by a larger intent: to take us readers on an adventure; to show us readers that the isolated episodes of a life add up to something; to assure us that we are in safe hands even if a story pattern isn’t predictable,” Maass explains. Ondaatje and Vonnegut signal that adventure in their openings.
What does that mean for you? “It matters because timeless novels have a purpose that is larger than their plots, per se,” Maass writes. “Their purpose is to show us more than the thin surface of a story. It is to show us ourselves, the uneven patterns of our lives, the meaning that eludes us in the moment but that can become apparent over time, when we achieve a mature perspective.”
What does the opening of your novel signal to the reader? Consider how you can apply the lessons of these unconventional novels to your work.
