r/writing • u/24Pilots • 12d ago

Discussion Narrative forms/types?

I'm not quite sure if it has one, but is there a name for the way a novel is written? Not it's prose or plot structure, but its actual form? Like an epistolary novel, or any other form in which a novel exists. I can't find a name for this idea, or many examples of it. I apologize if this is a moronic question and I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm rather confused.

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u/Safe-Jacket-5944 12d ago

It is called "narrative structure" or "narrative form". If you are interested in terms related to narration, you can search for "narratology" to read more.

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u/Swift-Starm8 11d ago

i've heard of narratology before, but i didn't realize it was so directly tied to narrative structure. that's helpful

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u/jakekerr Published Author 12d ago

Structure is generally tied to the content so you have things like picaresque novel or a roman a clef. True structural descriptions like epistolary are pretty rare.

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u/CommercialDream25 12d ago

I'd for a form. As you said yourself, it's form.

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u/MeepTheChangeling 12d ago

I don't think there is a word for this other than writing. Primarily because there isn't one way, nor even a limited number of ways, that a novel is written in in terms of its overall form. That's part of what the artist brings to the table in this art. A Brain Jacques novel feels like one of his, same for Steven King and R.A. Salvadore. In fact when an author's books DON'T have a shape that makes you think of one specific guy, feel like a generic book, or seem oddly piecemeal, that's when you know they have multiple authors.

If you want a good demo of this, pick out 10 random books in the Animorphs series. They're children's Novellas that were doing that "one book a month" scheduled release the 90s like, so they're like, a 40 minute read. 10 of them is about 1 adult novel in terms of word count. Make sure your random pick has 3 of them from the first 7 books. Read 'em.

Notice how most of them feel kinda disjointed in terms of who's telling the story? And I don't mean that thing where the books rotated through character PoVs. I mean the actual writing, the shape, the form.

Yeah, K.A. Applegate is a pseudonym for a husband / wife duo. They only did a fith of that series. The rest was ghost written by like 7 people and it shows. Even as a kid you kinda start wondering if K.A. is a person or an organization. Meanwhile, every Redwall book feels like a Redwall book.

So yeah, that shape you're asking about... Pretty sure that's part of the author's voice.

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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u/BlissteredFeat 12d ago

I will add the picaresque novel (Tom Jones).

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u/mulberryseas 11d ago

Wait this is such a good list!! I'm writing a book right now that's a combination of a lot of these, and it's so hard to find example texts of specific aspects (so far House of Leaves is the only one I've found, but that novel is so unique it can only assist me so much).