By Jack Kaulfus
We all know that books are more than just words: they’re little worlds between covers. As writers, we’re often mostly concerned with getting our stories to reflect the visions we’ve been working out for months on end. We’re hoping to keep our reader so engaged on the page that by the end of the book, they’ve had a highly curated experience with our specific little world. We want our characters to be perfectly rendered through dialogue and action, our settings to be expansive and meaningful, our themes to emerge with beauty and grace.
However, if you’re only thinking about words, you might miss opportunities to create a more fully realized experience of story for your reader. Readers have been trained, over the course of their reading lives, to expect certain aspects of books to reveal information about the story inside. This means you have a unique storytelling opportunity to meet, enhance, or completely subvert their expectations.
Enter The Paratext
According to Allison Parrish, French literary theorist Gérard Genette introduced the term "paratext" to describe elements like prefaces, introductions, dedications, and epigraphs. These can also take hypertextual forms, such as footnotes, tables of contents, indices, and bibliographies.
Think about your own habits when choosing a new book to read. Where do you look first? Despite the adage, a lot of us do judge books by their covers. We’re all aware that cover trends exist, and that the artwork often relays both genre and tone. Where do you look next? I’m in the habit of reading the summary on the back (or inside flap), glancing over the names of writers who have offered blurbs, finding the picture of the author (or noticing when there is none), and taking note of the publisher. All this before I even open it to see what the writing is like.
Once I open the book, I flip through the pages to see if there’s anything interesting happening formally. I love to see footnotes in a fictional work, or what looks like a random illustration in what otherwise seems like a traditional narrative. These little details build readerly anticipation in me, and pique my curiosity about what the writer has in store.
Table of Contents + Chapter Titles
Your reader may not be consciously aware of it, but the table of contents plays a big part in setting expectations around narrative structure, tone, and pacing. Many novels don’t include a table of contents and don’t necessarily need one, but because the table of contents are at the beginning of the book, and are likely one of the first pages your reader will see. You can use those first couple of pages to your creative advantage if you like.
Consider The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Her table of contents provides insight into genre-defying, generational themes in the book. Each section is an unnamed song, and each chapter title reveals information about the family structure at the heart of the narrative.
You can also make decisions about pacing by separating your book into parts. Most readers have been primed for traditional narratives with three acts: the setup, the confrontation (challenges, etc), and the resolution. Your book does not need to follow the traditional narrative structure – plenty of fantastic books don’t – but you have an opportunity to either effectively telegraph Checkov’s gun, or pleasantly surprise your readers by upending their expectations about what comes when.
Prologues, Epilogues, and Epigraphs
Framing devices fall in and out of favor, and they fit some narratives better than others. They tend to show up in sprawling novels with a lot of world-building, and provide a formal sense of structure. Prologues are not useful when they’re used as an expositional catch-all or a gimmicky hook. Most readers want to get started right away, and may skip the prologue altogether if it is overly long or seems to have nothing to do with the story. However, if your book has some experimental elements in it – if it slides into meta-territory or follows a nonlinear timeline – the prologue is a good place to creatively introduce some of those elements.
Epigraphs are those quotes that show up at the beginning of the book (or sometimes at the beginning of chapters). They’re usually from familiar or historical works, and the aim is to provide allusive weight to whatever’s coming next in the book. Epigraphs can provide context, frame your book as part of an ongoing literary conversation, or prepare the reader to look out for upcoming themes. If you’re thinking about including epigraphs in your book, consider what you’re imparting the reader. Are you communicating something personal you want your reader to know about you as an author? Are you aligning your work with the one in the quote? Are you adding depth to character? Courtney Maum has some interesting viewpoints on why and how some epigraphs work better than others on her substack.
Footnotes and In-Story Artifacts
The first time I came into contact with footnotes in a semi-fictional work, I was enthralled. I found an airport read in the early 90s, and as my plane took off, I dove head-first into David Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Since then, I’ve been partial to works that use this conceit. Fictional indexes provide a similar thrill for me. The reason is simple: though obviously a work of popular literature, I begin to employ some of the same critical reading practices that I use with scholarly works. I’m no longer a passive reader – I’m entering into a kind of collaboration with the writer, and it feels like we have a tacit agreement that I’m going to find more inside this book than I expected. Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House brought footnotes to a whole new level – one that rewards readers who revisit the book.
I feel similarly about other artifacts that pop up in unexpected places: random-seeming illustrations, a harried-looking grocery list, or text thread between side characters. Though N.K. Jemisin doesn’t love maps in fantasy novels (they’re basically spoilers), she did end up posting one for The Fifth Season series online, and now the maps are included in all her books.
Doug Dorst’s and JJ Abrams’s novel “S” uses paratextual elements to create a story within a story – an alternative narrative between characters who are only communicating through margin notes. As their relationship deepens, so does the reader’s understanding of both stories. And because we’re living in a time when our access to media allows for stories to develop both in-universe and on virtual platforms, paratexts may now easily jump from page to screen to headphones. Plenty of books, especially in the romance genre, now include song playlists so readers can create story-specific ambience each time they crack open the book.
So it's not just about what's on the page, it's about everything around it too. As writers, embracing the power of paratext offers a fantastic opportunity to deepen our connection with our audience and craft an immersive literary experience. While our primary focus will always be on crafting compelling narratives with well-wrought prose, paratextual elements offer us subtle and meaningful ways to actively shape the reader’s journey through each little world.
