Today, I want to talk about the fabula and syuzhet, two relatively obscure but useful terms in stories.

What is the Syuzhet?

The syuzhet is the story we encounter on the screen or page—the story as published or the film as released. It is the blow-by-blow account of the narrative events that comprise our tale, in the order set out by our book or film. These events may or may not make immediate sense to the audience or readers, and therein lies the fun and intrigue.

This is very much the case in Memento, for example, where the protagonist’s retrograde amnesia is mimicked by the syuzhet’s presentation of a narrative that is given in reverse order in the black and white sequences, and in normal order in the colour sequences. The effect of this on the audience is one of confusion and obfuscation, much like the confusion and obfuscation experienced by the protagonist.

What is the Fabula?

The fabula, by contrast, is the product of an ongoing process of deconstruction and reassembly of the syuzhet during the act of viewing/reading, using accepted norms of coherence and inference so that the reordered story has a clear beginning, middle, and end—in short, a story, reordered in our minds so that it makes sense.

Without this reordering, films like Memento, Pulp Fiction, Donny Darko and Jacob’s Ladder remain confusing. Indeed, many of the films we see in the art-cinema circuit, demand such an active process of fabula construction if they are to make any sense at all.

The point, in relation to writers, however, is that we need to have a thorough grasp of a coherent fabula, in the sense of knowing its beginning, middle, and end, before we can begin thinking about styling it into an effective syuzhet that can manipulate, misdirect, and surprise its readers and audiences. It is here that thinking about our story in terms of a fabula and syuzhet proves useful.

“Why should writers not simply stick to writing a fabula and dispense with rewriting it into a syuzhet, and be done with it? Because presenting events in their naturally occurring order (fabula) without hiding, withholding, or misdirecting the audience (syuzhet), robs us of the element of surprise and results in predictable and boring stories.”

Summary

The fabula and syuzhet allows you to construct complex but coherent narratives that intrigue and challenge your readers and audiences.

CATCH MY LATEST YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE.