Frame

Just today I decided to write my May 1968 novel around a frame. It wasn't something I'd thought about doing before, but it just came to me today and I think it makes sense. Frames work well when what you're writing about is sweeping, large, when it covers vast amounts of time and I think that would benifit this novel. I have stopped, for the time being, wanting to write about the everyday. That's what novels are now. It started with Joyce and Woolf and has moved from modernism to post modernism and while I never minded the every day, in fact I have written about the every day, I'm a little sick of it. I want to write about something bigger, grander, more sweeping. History. I want to explore the price of and the effects of history without venturing into historical fiction per say. Having said that I think the frame works well for this story which will center around a couple, a young American girl come to Paris to study and an older Romanian gentleman who works as a waiter at a popular cafe. I want to start the novel a couple of years ago, at the thirtieth anniversary of the May 1968 riots in Paris where both characters meet again after many years. He'll be old, in his seventies and she'll be around fifty-something, much younger even now. I'll weave what's going on now in history with what went on them as the story goes back and forth. Perhaps there will be larger bits of one story and then another, but then again, maybe it would be nice to keep it all even.