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276 Part IV: Developing Your Plot and Structure
You can connect different stories or threads of stories to one another in loads
of ways:
✓ Characters living in the same place: Sherwood Anderson’s 1919
Winesburg, Ohio and Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987)
are linked by the characters living in the same town or apartment block.
✓ Characters thrown together by circumstance: If Nobody Speaks of
Remarkable Things (2002) by Jon McGregor portrays a day in the life of a
suburban British street, following the lives of the street’s various inhabitants.
Readers gradually realise that something terrible happened that
day that links the various stories.
✓ Characters linked by an object handed from one to another: Annie
Proulx’s Accordion Crimes (1996) tells the stories of immigrants to America
through the eyes of the descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Africans, Irish-
Scots, Franco-Canadians and many others, all linked by their successive
ownership of a green accordion.
✓ Stories within stories, which characters narrate, write down or read:
Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) contains several
incomplete narratives. The frame story is about someone trying to read
a book called If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Alternating between
chapters of this story are the first chapters from ten different novels, of
widely varying style, genre and subject matter; all are interrupted for
reasons that are explained in the frame story.
✓ Stories from different stages of a character’s life: The Girls’ Guide to
Hunting and Fishing (1988) by Melissa Bank contains short stories linked
through being different episodes from the protagonist’s life.
✓ Stories linked by a theme such as love, death or money: David
Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (2004) has an ingenious structure in which
six stories from different eras, written in different styles, are nested
inside one another. Each story has a connection to the previous one,
and part of the fun of reading each new story is to discover the link.
The novel also seems to show that many of the characters may be one
soul reincarnated in different bodies, pointing to the theme that we
are all interconnected.
Try this exercise to find ways of connecting separate stories. If the first version
doesn’t work, then keep trying the various options until you find one that does:
1. Pick one of the six structures in the preceding list and plan a novel.
2. Invent an additional, unusual way to combine different characters
and their stories.