Frame story

In practice

A frame story is a story that contains another story. An outer narrative, the frame, sets up a situation in which a character tells, reads or remembers an inner narrative, which is usually the main tale. In The Princess Bride, a grandfather reads a book to his sick grandson; the adventure of Westley and Buttercup is the inner story, and the bedroom scenes are the frame.

Frame stories are among the oldest structures in literature. In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade tells the king a new story each night to postpone her execution. In Boccaccio's Decameron, ten young people fleeing the plague in Florence tell a hundred tales, and in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, pilgrims compete in a storytelling contest on the road. The frame gives a collection of tales a reason to exist and a voice to tell them.

The common mistake is treating the frame as packaging. A frame that only introduces the story and then disappears adds pages without meaning. A strong frame changes how the inner story is read: who is telling it, to whom, and why now? In Titanic, old Rose's telling of the voyage to treasure hunters turns a disaster film into a story about memory and what a person keeps to herself.

The listener and the tale

The frame is not a neutral setup. Grace is dying, June is recording, and the first thing Grace says is a secret, so the audience watches the 1962 story knowing it will rewrite the family's history. June's hesitation over the stop button makes the frame a story too: will she keep this recording, and what will she do with it? The cut into the past is earned by a question in the present.

What a frame story means

A frame story, also called a frame narrative, framing device or story within a story, is a narrative structure in which a main story is presented inside a secondary one. The outer story establishes a narrator and an occasion for telling; the inner story is what they tell. The word comes from the picture frame, which sets a painting apart from the wall around it.

Frames come in several shapes. A single frame holds one inner story, as in Frankenstein, where the explorer Robert Walton's letters to his sister contain Victor Frankenstein's account. A cyclical or collection frame holds many tales, as in the Decameron. A nested frame puts stories inside stories inside stories, so that Frankenstein's account contains the creature's own story, told to Victor.

The frame can open and close the work, or return between sections. Some frames are left open at the end, so the reader never comes back to the outer narrator, which can be unsettling. Others close with a twist that changes the meaning of everything inside.

What a frame does

A frame creates a narrator with a point of view. When a story is told by a character, the reader can ask whether that character is reliable, what they are leaving out, and how their memory has changed things. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is told by the housekeeper Nelly Dean to a tenant named Lockwood, and both of them have limits that shape what the reader learns.

A frame also creates stakes for telling. Scheherazade will die if her stories stop pleasing the king, so every tale has a second suspense. In Amadeus, the aging Salieri confesses to a priest, and the confession itself, not just the rivalry with Mozart, is the drama.

Finally, a frame can comment on storytelling itself. The Princess Bride's grandson interrupts to complain about the kissing parts, which lets the film tease its own romance and then win him over. Frames remind the audience that every story has a teller and a listener, and that both are changed by the telling.

Examples of frame stories

In literature: One Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which Marlow tells his Congo story to friends on a boat on the Thames as night falls.

In film: The Princess Bride (a grandfather reading to his grandson), Titanic (old Rose telling the treasure hunters), Forrest Gump (Forrest telling strangers at a bus stop), Amadeus (Salieri's confession), Big Fish (a son sorting truth from his dying father's tall tales) and The Grand Budapest Hotel, which nests its story inside four frames from different decades.

Is The Great Gatsby a frame story? Not in the strict sense. Nick Carraway narrates events he took part in, looking back, but there is no outer scene of telling. Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film adds one, with Nick writing the story in a sanatorium, which shows how adaptations often turn retrospective narration into a frame.

Frame story, flashback and nonlinear structure

A flashback is a scene from the past inserted into a story told in the present. A frame story is a whole structure in which the present scenes exist to tell the past. The difference is proportion and purpose: a flashback serves the main story, while in a frame story the main story serves, and is shaped by, the act of telling.

Many films combine the two. The frame appears at the start and end, and the inner story is presented as a long flashback, sometimes returning to the frame at turning points. Citizen Kane builds its frame from a reporter interviewing people who knew Kane, so each section is a flashback from a different witness.

Nonlinear stories rearrange time without any teller, as in Pulp Fiction. A frame story keeps a clear present and a clear past, and the line between them matters. If your structure has no character doing the telling, it is probably nonlinear storytelling, not a frame.

How to write a frame story

Give the frame its own story. The teller and the listener should want something from the telling: forgiveness, a confession, a delay, a lesson, a record. If nothing would change in the frame without the inner story, the frame is decoration and can probably be cut.

Connect the two levels. Let the inner story answer a question the frame raises, and let the frame react when the inner story reaches its turning points. The strongest frame stories end with a change in the outer narrative that the inner one caused, as when the grandson in The Princess Bride asks to hear the story again tomorrow.

Keep the frame lean on the page. In a screenplay, a frame scene has to earn its place like any other scene. Return to it sparingly and with purpose, at the start, at a midpoint or crisis, and at the end. Each return should tell the audience something new about the teller, not only remind them that someone is telling.