Writing Great Fiction

Lecture 12: Structuring a Narrative without a Plot

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Except for the death of Septimus, it’s a fairly unremarkable day.

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the end, what gives the book its structure? Instead of using a plot to

structure the novel, Woolf uses two techniques, one of which governs

the overall shape of the novel, and the other, its movement within and

between scenes.

o The overall shape comes from the fact that the novel is set over

the course of one day, which allows Woolf to limit the number

of incidents in the book and the scope of the characters.

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to moment is stream of consciousness. As you recall, when we

read the passage in which Clarissa looks in a shop window, her

thoughts shifted quickly and subtly from the world around her

to her memories of girlhood, the last days of her uncle, and

her relationship with her daughter. Each brief moment in that

passage tells us something about Clarissa that we didn’t know

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Wo o l f e ff o r t l e s s l y, o f t e n s u d d e n l y, s h i f t s t h e n a r r a t i v e ’s p o i n t o f v i e w

among a number of characters. These shifts also provide the sort of

narrative momentum that other, more conventional books rely on

plot to provide. They enable Woolf to evoke a particular moment

in time and in the lives of her characters far more vividly than in a

conventionally plotted narrative.

Postmodernist Techniques

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techniques we’ve explored are not for everyone; most writers fall back

on plot because it’s easy and it’s what most readers expect and enjoy. But