Taking Risks With Structure

When I wrote the most recent draft of my book Killing Hamlet, I used a traditional narrative structure where the story is presented in chronological order, in past tense, with only a few brief passages of explanatory backstory here and there. It seemed like the best way to tell the story and I was content with a straightforward narrative until I got to the very last chapter. At that point, something in my brain zigged when normally it would have zagged, and I decided to do something different.

There were a couple of reasons I wanted to do something radical in the final chapter:

First, the chapter had to contain the book's last scene of dramatic action and then relate what happens after the story proper ends. I really don’t like the “story/epilogue” structure, and I wanted to avoid it. But I still wanted all that epilogue material in the chapter.

Second, I have taken a lot of chances with this book already. I’ve pulled the characters out of Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” and told a different tale with them, one that sort of mirrors the historical accounts of Hamlet that Shakespeare based his play on, but also plays fast-and-loose with the source materials and with “Hamlet” and is entirely new at the same time. That’s a risk in itself. So I figured that if the reader was willing to come along up to this point, I could try to pull one last rabbit out of the hat and give a shot at a really virtuoso performance in the final chapter. So, yeah, I just want to show off a bit at the very end.

Third, and this properly goes with the first point, I wanted the drama to keep rising until the very last word on the very last page of the book, and using the “story/epilogue” structure won’t allow that; the epilogue is always a slackening of drama and I want to go out on a high note, to keep pushing the reader into new territory with each sentence. Again, it’s showing off.

So I came up with a structure that’s more or less as follows:

Last scene of story (interrupted)
10 years previous
Last scene of story (continued)
A few hours later
Last scene of story (continued)
Three years later
Last scene of story (continued)
Three years later
Last scene of story (finishes)
Three years later and into the future

The language becomes increasingly high-flown and poetic as the chapter progresses, and I am inordinately pleased with the last sentence of the book. I’ve never attempted anything quite like this before, with a narrative sort of coiling around itself while moving forward. I bail out of the 'last scene of story' in the middle of the action without truly finishing the scene; it’s clear what’s going to happen so there’s no point in spelling it out. I’m proud of that bit. Anyway, this is the chapter that establishes my “literary fiction” street cred. I have no idea where the impulse to tell the last scene and the epilogue in overlapping segments came from, but I’m glad it came to me.

My next big book project will present the story out-of-order, for the length of the narrative. We'll see how that works out. Some day I'll try A.S. Byatt's idea of "laminating" stories on top of each other, or working the way Salman Rushdie has done, telling at once several stories that are linked just barely by theme/location. Or maybe I'll borrow the idea from Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight where the book takes on the structures of the books the narrator is discussing, but this isn't pointed out to the reader. Who can say? Possibilities abound.

So, you: are you doing/have you done anything interesting/different with the structure/chronology of your narrative(s)? If so, what? How successful do you think you were? How have readers responded to it?