Reincorporation: Surreal suppers and a lesson in storytelling--a guest post on 'Scrivengale'

Author and secretly bestselling ghostwriter Roz Morris

Today, I'm pleased to welcome a guest post from author, editor, and blogger Roz Morris. Roz wrote an ingenious craft book called Nail Your Novel and is the host of a blog of the same name. It was through reading her blog (which I'm highlighting this month on "Scrivengale") that I was introduced to the concept of reincorporation. With Roz's permission, I am republishing her post on this technique, which has the potential to enrich your storytelling and keep your reader engaged.


Readers love it when you use reincorporation. Here’s what it’s all about.

The 15 guests had to be at a secret location in east London at 8.13. No earlier, no later. They entered through a doorway fringed with yellow flippers and feathers so they had to, er, duck. Fizz was served in teacups with sugar cubes, by a lady who would later dress up as a cat. There was no alcohol licence, so guests were given crayons and told to draw artworks, which they sold to each other, each ‘sale’ earning a free glass of wine.

Food was similarly witty. An amuse bouche of praline served in a paper cake case tethered to a helium balloon. Eat the praline and the case floated up to the ceiling, to gasps of delight. Japanese fish was served in tin cans. Between courses, the guests split into teams to play a consequences storytelling game. After pudding (a suitably surrealist baked Alaska) they took turns to read out the resulting literary lunacy – while breathing in the helium from the starters.

Isn’t there something amazingly right about this reuse of the balloons? We’d forgotten about them in all the other charming strangenesses, but they were up there on the ceiling all the time, bobbing there, on the periphery of the story.

In storytelling this ‘bringing back’ is called reincorporation. It seems to hit the audience’s satisfaction centres to a primeval degree.

When you’re tempted to invent more stuff to put in a story, it’s always worth seeing what you can bring back in. It could be a throwaway remark like a random thing you decided the character was doing the other night. Or it could be an anecdote you used early on for character building. Push something to the audience’s peripheral vision – or make it look as though you have finished with it. Then bring it back in and audiences will love it, as if you just performed a conjuring trick.

So, you introduce the helium balloons in the first course, have a little episode with them that is fun and charming, and let them drift away. It looks like they’ve played their role and the audience doesn’t give them another thought. And just when the story has got a lot further, and people have forgotten about them, you blend them back into the main story to do something even funnier.

I didn’t make this up, by the way. This delightful evening was the brainchild of ‘Sue Dinner-party’, a supper club in east London. My thanks to them not only for surrealist inspiration but for a nugget of storyteller’s gold.

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You can read a fifteen-page sample of  Roz's craft book Nail Your Novel here.