Lit Theory 101 | Narrative Structure & Time

Free, accessible, practical guide to help make you a better writer and reader | PART 1

Literary theory has a reputation problem. Most of us might have encountered it in some airless seminar where a professor droned on about the death of the author while we wondered if we were dead too. Or it was rammed down our throats as the jargon that gets between us and the actual pleasure of reading—like someone explaining a joke until it stops being funny.

Fuck that version of theory.

Theory done right is electric. It’s the moment you realize why a story you love works. We’ve created this crash course for folks who devour literature and want to write better. We’ll cover concepts that have beguiled us in our own quest to be better readers and writers and editors. And because lit theory is the behemoth you didn’t know you needed to experience, we’ll divide this up into (hopefully!!) manageable parts consisting of six different units:

1. Narrative Structure & Time

2. Voice, Consciousness & Distance

3. Language & Perception

4. Reader, Text & Interpretation

5. Affect, Atmosphere, & the Ineffable

6. Character & Characterization

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All six of these units will be completely free to read. We believe learning ought to be accessible and practical insofar as it can be. This is our little effort in trying to do so. We do have something special planned, however, for our paid subscribers, because y’all make this possible:

Each unit will come with a couple writing exercises we’ve designed to get you working with the techniques and concepts learned in the lessons. Our intention for these additional materials is to help you make tangible something that is innately intellectual. There will also be an opportunity to share your own writing in the comments and receive feedback from peers.

Today, we’lI focus on Narrative Structure & Time: how stories arrange events, break chronology, refuse linearity, and let structure emerge from content instead of imposing it from outside.

Here are the writing exercises that pair with the lessons below:

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Writing Exercises & Feedback Thread #1

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⟡ Fabula vs. Syuzhet ⟡

The Russian Formalists (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky) distinguished between fabula, the chronological sequence of events as they “actually happened” in the storyworld — and syuzhet, the order in which those events are arranged and presented in the narrative discourse.

Seymour Chatman later translated these terms as “story” and “discourse.” The gap between fabula and syuzhet is where narrative art happens.

The fabula of Beloved is Morrison’s chronicle of slavery, escape, infanticide, and haunting in chronological sequence. The syuzhet circles and fragments that chronology, forcing readers to reconstruct trauma through non-linear revelation—the very structure enacts the psychic disruption.

Let’s take a movie example too. The fabula of Arrival (the film) is: Louise learns the alien language, which allows her to see time non-linearly, she uses this ability to convince the Chinese general to stand down, preventing war. Alongside this, she knows her daughter will die but chooses to have her anyway. The syuzhet is: We see Louise’s memories of her daughter interwoven with the present-day alien encounter, and only realize later in the film that these aren’t memories but visions of the future.

Such distinctions matter because they reveal that storytelling is never neutral. Every narrative makes choices about what to reveal, when to reveal it, what to withhold, and so on. In short, the fabula is what happened and the syuzhet is how you tell it—and that how shapes the reader’s experience.

⟡ Analepsis & Prolepsis ⟡

These are Gérard Genette’s terms for narrative’s temporal dislocations, what we casually call “flashback” and “flash-forward”. As with a lot of literary theory, it’s worth remembering that these are ultimately representations of consciousness.

Humans think this way (psychological term: “mental time travel”). The same neural networks that let us remember yesterday also let us imagine tomorrow. A fragrance or taste (think Proust’s famous madeleines) drags you back ten years. Anxiety hurls you into next week. Good narrative, then, reproduces how a mind moves through time…in loops, leaps, and intrusions.

Analepsis (flashback) retrieves the past. In Cortázar’s Hopscotch, the narrator circles back obsessively to Paris, to La Maga, to moments already lost. Each return peels back another layer. The structure mirrors obsession: you can’t move forward because the past won’t release you.

Analepsis can be:

• Internal: within the main story span (e.g., recalling something from the protagonist’s childhood which is part of the main story world)

• External: before the main story’s temporal frame (e.g., mythic, family history, etc.)

Prolepsis (flash-forward) anticipates the future. García Márquez opens One Hundred Years of Solitude with a man facing a firing squad, remembering ice. The entire novel unfolds in the shadow of that flash-forward. We read his childhood knowing how it ends.

Prolepsis is often used for:

• Foreshadowing

• Creating irony (reader knows more than characters)

• Framing an entire story as something already completed

Monika Fludernik’s work on experientiality grounds all of this. For her, narrative is rooted in how we actually live—embodied, temporal, always in the middle of things.

Prolepsis and analepsis work best when they honor that: when the temporal break reveals something the chronological order couldn’t, when the structure itself carries meaning. They fail when they’re merely decorative—when a writer jumps around in time just to seem interesting, or buries a revelation in a flashback because they couldn’t figure out how else to deliver it.

⟡ Mise En Abyme ⟡

French term from heraldry (a shield containing a miniature of itself). In literature, it’s when a text contains a smaller version of itself—a story within a story that mirrors the larger structure. While we could conceive of it as a nested tale, more accurate would be a narrative that reflects or comments on the work containing it.

Think of the play within the world of Hamlet. Borges, too, does this constantly—stories that contain versions of themselves, libraries containing all possible books including books about those libraries. The effect: you realize the text is aware of itself as a text, and that recursive loop pulls you into infinite regress. It’s dizzying, vertiginous. A mirror facing a mirror.

This is the beginning of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler:

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice -- they won’t hear you otherwise -- “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything: just hope they’ll leave you alone.”

Form grows from content, emerging from within rather than imposed externally. You might think of “form follows function”, but this isn’t exactly what this concept means. Rather, think of it as “form/function/content are one and the same.” Coleridge writes:

The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material—as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form on the other hand is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward Form. Such is the Life, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms.

Let’s look at one of Karan’s most favorite movies: The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011). Malick’s original concept was called “Q,” a history of the cosmos. Over 5+ years in production, the film evolved into something that moves between cosmic origins, 1950s Texas childhood, and present-day grief without conventional narrative logic. The form emerged from the questions the film was asking: how does one life fit into all of existence? The answer couldn’t be linear. Even the visual effects came from organic processes—Trumbull photographed dyes, milk, and liquids in water tanks rather than using CGI.

Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights abandons conventional plot for what she calls “constellation form”—fragments that accrue meaning through proximity rather than causation. Each piece complete in itself, but the whole only visible when you step back.

Organic form, then, emerges from within. The creative work generates its own shape as it develops, the way a plant grows into the form it needs to be. You can’t separate what something is from how it’s shaped—they’re the same thing. A sunflower doesn’t choose to be a sunflower; its form is inseparable from its life. Trust that the right structure will reveal itself through the act of writing. The form you need is already latent in your material.

We hope you found this first part of our Lit Theory 101 crash course interesting or enthralling or any valence in between. Once again, paid subscribers can access the additional materials paired with these units here:

Writing Exercises & Feedback Thread #1

Other than that, we’ve been busy reading and wrapping up a bunch of other projects before the holidays begin. Wishing you a most wonderful weekend.

With gratitude,

Shannan & Karan