Good morning!
Quick question before anything else: did you know that "Frankenstein" isn't the name of the monster?
It's actually the name of the young scientist who built the monster.
This novel was written about 200 years ago by a woman who was around eighteen. And here's the thing — the way the story is built is almost unfairly good.
Today I'll break down that "cleverness" into three parts.
If you write stories yourself, you can probably steal every single one.
Trick 1: Turn your story into an onion
"An onion? What are you even talking about?"
Yeah, I know. Stay with me.
The most impressive thing about Frankenstein is that there isn't just one narrator.
The story unfolds like this.
First, an explorer named Walton, heading for the North Pole, writes letters to his sister Margaret back in England.
Inside those letters, a young man Walton meets — Victor Frankenstein — starts telling the story of his own past.
And then inside that story, the monster himself confesses: "This is how I learned to speak, and this is how I was wounded."
A confession, inside a memory, inside a letter.
A triple onion.
And the order is beautifully symmetrical.
Walton → Victor → the monster → Victor → Walton.
You go in, and you come back out.
So why does this structure work so well?
In most novels, a god-like narrator who knows everything tells you, "He thought this."
But this novel has no god. All it has is the biased, personal view of each character.
So the reader has no choice but to think for themselves. Is the real monster the terrifying-looking creature? Or is it the young man who built him and threw him away?
Because you're never handed the answer, you keep chewing on it.
And by placing Walton — the outermost narrator — as a "listener from the real world," the monster's story on the inside starts to feel like, "Wait, maybe this actually happened."
Seriously well made.
Here's how to steal it for your own work. Don't tell your story in a straight line.
Put a listener from the everyday world on the outermost layer.
Put the person who crossed a forbidden line one layer in.
Put a monstrous accuser deeper still.
Stack three viewpoints, staggering them along the timeline.
That alone changes the depth of your story a whole level.
Trick 2: Show fate through facing mirrors
"Mirrors? Why are we suddenly talking about mirrors?"
Relax. This one's brutal too.
Walton, pushing toward the North Pole in search of glory.
Victor, crossing nature's limits in search of the secret of life.
These two are actually the same person.
Both defy their families, both are isolated, both ignore other people for the sake of knowledge and glory.
In his opening letters, Walton basically says that a single human life is a small price to pay next to the knowledge he's after. That's already forecasting the ruin Victor is about to describe.
Walton is Victor's double — and at the same time, his other possible future.
Victor's story is handed to Walton, who is chasing that exact same ambition right now, as a living warning.
So the reader listens to Victor's past while worrying about Walton's future. It hits twice.
And the facing mirrors aren't only between characters. Scenes mirror each other too.
Creation, which gives life.
And its opposite: destruction, which takes it away.
When Victor destroys the monster's bride, the monster destroys Victor's bride, Elizabeth.
The pursuer becomes the pursued.
Do it to me, I do it back to you.
Because each scene is placed as the "pair" of an earlier one, a sense of inevitability soaks into the whole story.
Creepy, right.
Here's how to bring it into your story.
Set up someone who closely resembles your protagonist.
Let that person foreshadow the protagonist's future.
And always place your key scenes in pairs.
What is given gets taken.
The one who chased gets chased.
That alone gives your story a sense of no escape.
Trick 3: Let the weather do the talking
"Who cares about the weather?"
Come on — this is the third weapon.
In this novel, the weather turns violent at every crucial moment.
Life is born on a bleak, rainy night in November.
Victor becomes certain of his brother William's death on a night of fierce lightning over Lake Geneva.
At the decisive moments, harsh nature always tags along.
It's not just scenery.
It's the storm inside Victor's heart.
And you can read it as nature's own silent judgment on a man who violated its order.
The weather speaks for him.
On top of that, ominous foreshadowing is tucked in everywhere.
Victor calls his mother's death an "omen of future misery."
A tree split by lightning quietly foreshadows the later idea of electricity as the power of creation.
Right after his success, Victor dreams of embracing Elizabeth.
And then she turns into the rotting corpse of his dead mother.
Spine-chilling.
And in Chapter 8, Victor calls his brother William and Justine — the servant executed for a crime she didn't commit — the "first" victims of his unholy craft.
The first.
Which is a promise that there will be more.
Here's how to steal it for your work.
Sync the weather to the single most important decision in your story.
A storm at the moment of creation.
Barren silence at the moment a promise is broken.
Extreme ice and snow at the moment revenge is set in motion.
And set the stage on a lonely island, a mountaintop, or the polar wastes.
Let the nature outside your characters speak for the hearts inside them. That alone removes the need for cheap dialogue.
Wrap-up
Let's recap the three.
One, turn your story into an onion.
Two, show fate through facing mirrors.
Three, let the weather do the talking.
The reason a 200-year-old novel is still read today lives right here.
It's not the content of the story that's amazing. It's the way the story is built.
And here's the part that matters.
If you read this and it ends at "huh, interesting," nothing changes.
But the next time you write something —
"Oh, I could make this part an onion."
"I could build a pair for this scene."
The moment you think that, you're already a craftsman of technique.
Masterpieces aren't things to admire from a distance.
I think they're things to quietly steal and make your own.
So — let's go steal.