A story inside a story inside a story, where each layer of narrative contains and comments on the ones around it.
A nested narrative is a structural technique where stories are layered inside one another, like Russian nesting dolls. The outermost story contains a character who tells or encounters a second story, which may itself contain a third, and so on. Each layer adds perspective, theme, or mystery to the layers around it. Unlike a simple frame narrative, which has one outer story wrapping one inner story, nested narratives go deeper, creating recursive structures that can explore how storytelling itself shapes reality and memory.
Nested narratives let you do things that linear storytelling cannot. You can explore the same theme from radically different angles, show how stories change as they pass from person to person, or create a puzzle-box structure that rewards attentive readers. They are also a powerful tool for writing about memory, truth, and subjectivity, because each layer of narration introduces a new filter between the reader and the 'real' events.
Six nested narratives span centuries. Each story is interrupted at its midpoint, and the second half of the book completes them in reverse order, creating a symmetrical structure that mirrors the novel's themes of connection and recurrence.
Scheherazade tells stories to survive, and characters within her stories tell their own stories, creating layers of narrative that sometimes go four or five levels deep.
The novel contains the beginnings of ten different novels, nested within a frame story about the reader trying to read them. The structure itself becomes the story.
Dreams within dreams within dreams, each with its own timeline and rules. The nested structure is both the plot mechanic and the thematic core.
Give each narrative layer a distinct voice, setting, or time period so the reader always knows which level they are on. Visual cues in formatting can help too.
Every layer needs to earn its place. If removing an inner story would not change the reader's understanding of the outer story, it is decorative, not structural. Cut it or make it essential.
If you open three narrative levels, the reader expects all three to resolve. Track your layers carefully and return to each one, even briefly.
Write a 600-word piece with at least two layers of nesting. Start with a character finding a journal. Inside the journal, the writer describes overhearing a stranger tell a story. Make each layer shorter than the one before it, and make the innermost story reveal something that changes the meaning of the outermost one.