| Summary: | This paper investigates narrative macrostructure in the novel with an emphasis on the practice of novel writing. Drawing on narratology (Genette and Chapman), formalism (Propp), and their historical antecedents (Aristotle, Freytag), as well as more recent studies in narrative theory, this paper reframes narrative theory in practice-led terms and builds bridges between the scholarship and practice of narrative. To this end, the reflections on novelistic practice by Henry James and John Gardner are used as departure points to discuss the act of novel writing. There is also a comparative analysis that takes into account the macrostructural implications for realist and modernist discourses. The main discovery of this inquiry centres on the identification and articulation of five local narrative schemas that serve the act of novel writing: time, point of view, events, character, and setting. Each schema, it will be argued, has its own structure, and it is the interaction of these schemas that forms the novel as a whole and where the work of narrative macrostructure takes place.
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