One early reader has said that The Elephant of Surprise progresses like a chronological series of short stories brought to you in straightforward fashion, each with a thread into a later chapter.  As each next story unfolds you may wonder at first how it relates to what came before, but when you see the connection you will be keen to discover what comes next.  In Chapter Three, though, you meet the one character who unites all the others and ties together all the events.

A novel can be organized (if organized at all) in many ways, different story structures appealing to different audiences.  Here are some examples, but many more are possible.  What’s more, an author may combine these in artful ways (or in ways that fail miserably).

• A story can be presented in continually-building suspense.
• An author can jerk you back and forth between disjointed scenarios that may or may not be resolved in the end, a sort of stream-of-consciousness approach.
• A novel can be merely the telling of nothing at all, really, relying on the reader’s interest in a continuum of trivial events with neither suspense, mystery, purpose, or resolution.  This could be intensely boring, but if the author has a gift for language it can be a joy to read.
• Some stories bounce you between present – past – future – past – future – present – past until you can no longer make sense of the sequence.  A retrospective in a novel is helpful, though, such as a character’s reflection on a person or event in the past that affected one’s character thereafter.
• You may be drawn in by mysteries giving clues intermingled with misleads and dead-ends.  An author may give too many clues, spoiling the mystery element or too few clues, making for an unsatisfactory, confusing ending.
• Some stories are effectively told by two or more narrators with different viewpoints on the subject at hand.  One narrator (character) may know what another does not, and you, as the reader, are given all the information that one or another character in the story does not know until, perhaps, the end.  This can be suspenseful when it makes you want to tell the oblivious characters something that they should know.
• Some short stories and some novels are told entirely in the present tense.  This should not be done.
• Some stories are written without punctuation or without quotation marks.  This should not be done.  It is not the reader’s responsibility to supply what the author was too lazy (or “artistic”) to provide.
• Some stories are told in sentence fragments.  This should not be done.
• A story can effectively be told in the first or third person.  A first-person perspective can be intimate but is not always so.  A first-person novel must rely chiefly on the narrator’s observations and omit the perspectives of other characters.  A third-person presentation, on the other hand, lets the author give you all the information you need as the story goes on.
• A novel may be structured as a straightforward documentary, such as the saga of generations in a family or a fictional parallel to a historical event or period.
• A lexicon is an unusual format for a novel but it has been done.
• A novel can be a series of shorter stories presented without apparent connection one to another, or as a series of stories such that the second may just about stand on its own or may have a connection to the one before it, and so on.  In a way, most straightforward novels use a variation on this approach, chapter by chapter.

In The Elephant of Surprise, a principle character may be introduced in what amounts to his or her own short story (chapter) or may be brought on stage, as it were, without any introduction but with the background story provided later or woven all through the other, related stories.  Some lesser characters, who are necessary to the novel overall but may not deserve a chapter apiece, are given longer treatment because their stories are compelling and diverting too.

=DAVID A. WOODBURY=