Framing: Two Murders, an Economist, and a Novelist
How worldviews shape story and structure keeps you reading
Framing My Neighbor
This summer, the security camera on my house recorded my neighbor mowing my lawn. In response, I wrote a piece for our neighborhood newsletter called, “You can’t pick your neighbors.” It complains about the way he’s shoveled my sidewalk, scraped my windshield, and even fixed my break lights. There’s a turn then to worrying about my children, who are failing to learn survival skills like selfishness as a result of his influence.
It’s an ironic piece. My neighbor and I get along well. I appreciate his help and tell him often. He appreciates that every member of our family always stops to chat with him. Framing his generosity as a problem makes the piece funny.
In story, a frame is the worldview through which the storyteller describes events. All stories are framed, whether intentionally or not. In the short story “The Werewolf,” Angela Carter reframes the Little Red Riding Hood story by setting it in “a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.” When the mother sends this Little Red through the forest to grandmother’s house, she adds, “here, take your father’s hunting knife; you know how to use it.” Listen to the story here or read it in her collection, The Bloody Chamber.
On Location: Edinburgh 1828
In 1828 Edmund Burke and William Hare learned supplying cadavers to doctors in Edinburgh’s Surgeons’ Square for dissection was a lucrative legal gray area. They murdered 16 people. Recently, I heard two takes on those events. One was by undercover economist Tim Harford, a journalist and podcaster from England. The Cautionary Tales Halloween special was “The Edinburgh Body Snatchers: Murder at Halloween.” The other was by Jaima Fixsen an author and occupational therapist from Alberta, Canada. She’s also my writing buddy. Her new novel is The Specimen, is a gothic murder mystery inspired by Burke and Hare.
The Specimen is the story of Isobel, whose son goes missing. He has a mitral valve heart defect. Long after the police have given up hope of finding him, she sees a child’s heart with the same defect in an anatomist’s collection. Harford’s podcast is about repugnant markets, where the goods are taboo, like human organs or sex, held together by a dramatization of Burke and Hare’s participation in the repugnant market for cadavers.
What we get is a set of historical events filtered through two worldviews or frames yielding two captivating, capable stories. By setting the stories next to each other, we see how framing impacts the story that emerges from a series of events. There are other frames that would make for great stories here. The medical education frame. The religious frame. Burke and Hare were Irish, so there are immigrant and class frames as well. The frame shapes the story.
And yet - we have two stories that work. By work, I mean the hold the audience enthralled from beginning to end. That’s easier to imagine with a 41 minute multi-voice podcast than for a 416 page novel, but at least one Instagrammer posted a story about staging up past midnight to finish The Specimen, so something works there.
Making Stories Work
Stories don’t “just work” after a certain amount of tinkering. Storytellers use all the tools at their disposal to capture and hold audience attention. A little reverse engineering will reveal a few.
Whether you’re using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey (I compared them here), Freytag’s pyramid, Dan Harmon’s circle theory or any other story structure, the first part of a story introduces the audience to characters and scene.
The first chapter of The Specimen introduces Isobel, single mother and piano teacher who learns that her son Thomas has a fatal heart condition. The opening moments of “The Edinburgh Body Snatchers” does similar work, describing Burke entrapping Marggie Docherty by claiming to be related.
Great storytellers use “show” techniques instead of telling (check out these examples and guidelines). When Isobel’s son’s giggles turned into breathless wheezing, “he leaned forward struggling to draw in more air while I reached for a camphor scented handkerchief and rubbed circles on his back.” We see that Thomas’s body cannot draw breath fast enough and his mother’s act of caring concern. In Cautionary Tales, Maggie Docherty goes to a room that’s “sixteen feet by seven, with a wooden bed with straw for a mattress and a pile of straw next to the bed.” It’s an image of stark poverty. These methods succeed by being concrete. Whereas “poor” and “sick” are subjective, a straw bed is a fact.
After drawing you into the story, the storyteller has to keep you there. Both opening sections use similar techniques, hinting at something as yet unknown. The final sentences of The Specimen’s first chapter read, “Later I learned that was true. Too late for me, though.” The opening sentence of Harfield’s podcasts is, “So, we’ll be glad to see you again when you have another body to dispose of.”
Screenwriter and author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee calls this creating a gap. It’s creating an expectation in the reader and then not fulfilling it. I think of it as the feeling of going over a tickle bump in your car, when your stomach is in the air for just a moment longer than your car. Jaima uses the scene and sequel method described by Dwight V. Swain. The scene has a goal, conflict, and disaster. It’s closely followed by a short sequel which has a reaction, dilemma, and decision. When the audience understands what’s at stake (the dilemma) and the character’s intentions (decision), they are set up to wonder what happens next. They turn the page.
Economist vs Novelist
I love that two people on two different continents learned about Burke and Hare and that different stories emerged. Tim Harford thought about them as an economist asked, “what’s gone wrong with the market when bodies become commodities?” Jaima wondered, “what would a mother do if she lost her child to these killers?” I like to imagine both of them visiting the National Museum of Scotland to see the Anatomy: A Matter of Life and Death exhibit in 2022, maybe at the same time. Both of them looking at Burke and Hare’s life masks, their minds at work in different directions.
Frames change the stories we tell and how we understand other peoples’ stories. As students of story - and we are all students of story whether it’s watching the new Moana movie or scrolling news websites, it’s important to consider frames - yours and the storytellers.
My dream is a conversation between Jaima and Tim where they talk about their work, the choices they made about what aspects of the Burke and Hare stories to include and which they discarded (because all storytelling is making choices) and what they hear in each other's work. In other words, to hear two skilled storytellers talk craft.
What question would you want to ask them?
Do you know Tim Harford? Do you know someone who knows Tim Harford? I’m on a mission to connect him and Jaima, so
P.S. If reading about what happens to cadavers today is your jam, please read Stiff by Marion Roach. It has one of the most memorable opening lines I have ever encountered.