What makes a novel a novel? 

Is it any kind of longish story printed on paper? Do the words have to be placed on the paper in a traditional sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph format? And what constitutes a “story” anyway? What’s a plot? How much can you change before a novel isn’t a novel and a story isn’t a story anymore?

Depending on your personality, these kinds of questions might make you roll your eyes, or they might ignite some inspiration. Writers have been experimenting with form for millennia—that’s how what we think of today as the “traditional” novel came to be! 

Whether or not you think you’d be interested in writing experimental fiction, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with classic works that play with form. Thinking about elements of your craft you might take for granted will not only make you a better writer, it’ll make you a more inventive thinker. 

The First Novel

It’s hard to be sure, but most historians theorize that Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji is the first novel. 

Murasaki was a woman who lived in Japan over a thousand years ago. Her truly epic story follows Hikaru Genji, the son of an emperor, who loses his status as royalty and becomes an imperial officer instead. The story is so long that modern translations clock in at over a thousand pages. 

The Tale of Genji is considered a foundational classic of Japanese literature. Because language in Japan’s Heian era is different from modern Japanese, and because it was typical in the Heian era for aristocrats to casually reference poems in regular conversation, reading the text in its original form takes specialized study. However, there have been several notable full English translations, particularly in the twentieth century, with Dennis Washburn publishing the most recent in 2015. 

Given its length—and depending on your reading habits and experience with epic poetry—you could approach The Tale of Genji by learning more about its history. How was it printed at the time? What kinds of things were people reading in the recent past leading up to Murasaki’s time? What do different historians think marks The Tale of Genji as the first novel as opposed to something else? 

What’s a Story?

James Joyce’s masterpiece of modernism, Ulysses, is the story of what happens on single day, June 16, 1904, to three people: Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus. Joyce experiments with many different forms, but most notable to a reader picking it up for the first time would be stream of consciousness. Additionally, Joyce played around with puns, parodies, allusions, and sometimes just plain puzzles. The novel is so intricate and layered, it’s hard to find a university English department that doesn’t have at least one class dedicated to it. 

Ulysses is structured into eighteen episodes grouped into three parts, so it’s pretty simple to tackle one piece at a time and get used to reading it. It’ll also help to refamiliarize yourself with The Odyssey, which is the broader inspiration. 

Stream of consciousness is chaotic, but does it add a deeper intimacy to the characters, or do you feel more alienated as a reader? Why couldn’t this story be told in a more straightforward way? Who were Joyce’s contemporaries, and how was their work different? 

The Printed Page

Is it horror? Is it poetry? Does every page even have words on it? Do you need to hold it upside down to read it?

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is difficult to describe. Very (very) broadly speaking, it’s an epistolary metafiction centered on a fictional documentary called The Navidson Record, which supposedly depicts a family finding an inexplicable labyrinth hidden in their house. 

So it’s a haunted house book. At least, kind of. It’s also chock-full of footnotes, some of which don’t seem relevant. It has the formatting of an academic work but also seems to defy formatting, with the text often warping to suit the story. 

House of Leaves is worth at least flipping through to see Danielewski’s experiments with ergodicity, making the reader figure out how to even read the book. But it also demonstrates how you, as the author, have the power to use the physical object of a book to immerse readers even further into the story. Even without the experimental format, House of Leaves’ extensive use of footnotes and end matter demonstrate conflicting narrators of the same story. 

Know Your Tools

If you’re an athlete, you don’t just consider your workouts and your shoes; you think about the rules of the game! And you know how those rules might have changed over time. As a writer, never stopping to examine the format of long-form fiction, grammatical structure, and the book itself as a physical object will limit your imagination, even if you don’t want to write experimentally. And unlike an athlete, you’re allowed to break the rules of fiction. In fact, you’re encouraged! 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.