station eleven creative writing ideas

Essay Prompts

Station eleven.

The most wonderful, the strangest thing anyone had ever given her. It was a lump of glass with a storm cloud trapped inside. In what way does the paperweight reflect the elements of society?

‘To Arthur’, they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm. How is Arthur’s death central to the novel?

The prophet discusses death: ‘I’m not speaking of the tedious variations on physical death. There’s the death of the body, and there’s the death of the soul’. ‘Survival is Insufficient’ is the Travelling Symphony’s motto. Discuss with reference to these quotes how Station Eleven views life, death and survival.

Arthur wishes to be remembered. What is his legacy?

The state of a society cannot be measured by its technology but through its art. Discuss.

What is the role of technology in Station Eleven ?

Examine the ways in which the graphic novel series, Dr Eleven, mirrors the post-Georgia Flu world.

Miranda declares, ‘I regret nothing.’ Who does harbour regret in Station Eleven ?

Where does hope lie in Station Eleven ?

What does Mandel achieve through her use of foreshadowing and various time periods?

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Keep Writing Inspired by Station Eleven

In which i realise i've been masking my adhd in my creative writing.

Now and again, I read something that makes my heart ache for how wonderful literature can be. This feeds my creativity and reinvigorates me as a writer and as a writing coach. One of my all-time favourite quotes about writing, which I’ve shared before, but I’ll share again, is this one, by Henry Miller:

“Everyday we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognise them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.”

I’d love to hear what pieces of writing have done this for you?

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These texts often seem mysteriously compelling as I read them for the first time. As I become immersed, I’m unaware of how it’s being done; I’m just marvelling at how it’s gripped me, taken me out of my everyday life and forced me to find time to read, even at the expense of sleep.

When I resurface, I enjoy analysing how it was done. I get to enjoy the book a second time, in a different way. The insights I gain from this kind of attention demystify art without degrading it. It’s a form of appreciation. My ambitions to write (and write well) feel less impossible and help me guide the authors I work with as a coach.

I also enjoy paying my due to literature. I pay my due by paying deep attention. So I’m indulging that here, by writing about writing.

In appreciating the engineering behind this wonderful novel, I hope it might inspire you to steer your craft with a spacious sense of the possibilities of the novel form and ideas for how you keep readers reading. That’s what it’s done for me.

As someone whose inner critic often disapproves of my inability to stick to one point of view, or first person, or to one timeline, as a writer often frustrated with my apparent inability to do things the easy or straightforward way, Station Eleven was evidence that struck that inner critic dumb. ‘See, it can be done!’ I said to myself. I’m always urging authors to lean into what they do naturally and best, to turn what they see as a weakness into a strength, by exaggerating it, go big or go home. Station Eleven gave me permission to do that for myself. So, my intuition wants to see a story from several points of view and different timelines? Station Eleven showed me that that doesn’t have to be a problem. It can be glorious!

By luck, in the middle of this reading experience, I did a workshop in Calliope’s Writers , with Lucy Beckley . Lucy asked us to bring along a short section of a work in progress that we felt stuck with. When Lucy asked us to find another way into this section by choosing a different character through whose eyes we could tell it, I’ll be honest, I was pissed off. My inner teenager said, ‘you’re not the boss of me!’ But I’ve been coaching writers long enough to recognise this as a sign that I might really need to be open to this idea that has touched some kind of nerve. And, after all, I had just been reading Station Eleven, a novel that unapologetically moves between the points of view of a wide cast of characters. So I put myself in Lucy’s hands and trusted the exercise. Now the wheels of this novel have been rusted over and stuck since late 2022, at least, and even before that they were never running smoothly. But, as I recast this scene through the eyes of a new point of view character who had always wanted to be heard, but who I had always thought could not be made room for, I heard the wheels creak, like they wanted to move. And, with just a little encouragement, they began to spin. We were free! We are up and running once again.

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I spoke about this with Susan Earlam who was amongst the many people who had recommended Station Eleven . It turns out, her dystopian ecohorror novel, Earthly Bodies , was partly inspired by the same multifocal, nonlinear quality of Station Eleven that I was finding so inspiring. And Susan pointed out that we are both neurodiverse (we have ADHD). We can’t stay in one character’s head for long, and a simple one-track structure is alien to our experience of the world. When your mind almost always has several tracks running simultaneously, why would you expect your writing to have a simple, linear, univocal form?

Could it be that I’d been masking in my creative writing? Is this why I so often find my stories seizing up like rusty old daimlers, forgotten in a scrapyard of abandoned ideas?

Yes, George, I think that’s very possible.

So, back to Station Eleven and what makes it so wonderful.

This post CONTAINS SPOILERS for Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel.

Please read it if you haven’t already, then come back..

I repeat, SPOILERS.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (2014)

Wordcount: 98,000 words

Genre: Science Fiction, Dystopia, Literary Fiction

Chronoception 1 : The narrative moves between two primary timelines split on the fulcrum of a pandemic called the Georgia flu:

Pre ‘collapse’, circling, around the life of Arthur Leander, a movie star. A timeline set in a world we recognise, a world before a civilisation-ending pandemic.

Twenty years post-collapse, following a travelling theatre group determined to bring Shakespeare to a post-civilisation world, despite danger and hostility, because “survival is insufficient”.

Point of view: Station Eleven has an agile narrative voice, ranging between perspectives. It’s a masterclass in free-indirect style. The third-person voice has passages of profound and wistful omniscient narration at the scale of the fall of civilisation. It also has swathes of close, deep third-person narration where we encounter events focalized through a particular set of characters we come to know and love.

In the pre-collapse timeline, the free indirect style ranges between omniscient foreshadowing of the pandemic, and the perspectives of Arthur Leander, a movie star, and people who crossed his path; from his lovers, to his best friend, to a paparazzi and more.

In the post-collapse timeline, Kristen Raymonde, an actress who was a child when the pandemic began (and who knew Arthur Leander), is the primary perspective through which we experience events, along with the omniscient voice. The uncontainable free indirect style uses other characters’ perspectives as and when needed.

Using free indirect style with intention means handling the movement of the narrative. I think of it as a spirit, which can move between objective and subjective viewpoints. Beginner novelists are often warned not to ‘head hop.’ The hopping is a problem, not the movement between heads in itself. A spirit floats and transitions between these viewpoints not in a hopping movement, but in a smooth, unbroken chain, where transitions are signalled and handled carefully so that a reader doesn’t get confused or whiplashed by the journey.

The novel also tells the story through artefacts, for example, the transcript of an interview. The use of artefacts contributes to a sense of an after time when all that will remain is the detritus of a life, the traces we leave behind in artefacts like interviews and photographs whose context will likely be lost, making them curious yet illegible to the future. They are not just a convenient exposition device but have thematic significance, and they also end up playing a role in stitching together the subjective viewpoints, like a physical baton that can be passed between the characters, connecting them across time and space. They even end up playing a role in the denouement of the novel. I think this is one thing that makes them feel good. If they were just there for exposition, they might seem a little like cheating, a little clumsy. But they are integral to the texture of the novel on so many levels, not just as an exposition device.

Structure: There are nine ‘parts’, comprising sixish chapters each (although some have as few as three or four). The part breaks help demarcate the two timelines, with transitional closing chapters which propel us forward or backwards into the timeline of the next part, often through mention of an artefact which also exists in the other timeline. The frequent chapter breaks signal the fluid movements of the free indirect style between different points of view and narrative techniques.

This is where the spoilers really do begin; stop reading now if you haven’t read Station Eleven .

How station eleven keeps us reading.

Part one is the hook; a pre-collapse timeline set on the day that Arthur Leander dies and news of the Georgia flu breaks out. Tension is created with an omniscient voice that foreshadows the terrible, world-changing events to come with dark certainty.

“Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

Inciting Incident, Goal, and Conflict

Part two is exclusively a post-collapse timeline and contains an inciting incident. The travelling theatre troupe arrives at an agreed rendezvous with two of their number to find that they are not there, and the town where they’ve been living has become a sinister doomsday cult. A goal is established; to look for the two missing members of the troupe at a place called ‘The Museum of Civilisation’. The obstacles to getting there make up the conflict that runs through the novel and keeps us turning pages. This conflict is the bait, but as we are pulled through the pages we experience profound and poignant reflections on humanity and trauma and change and legacy. These reflections enrich the gripping ‘action’ story of survival with deeper meaning. The sense of peril and threat keeps our monkey brains turning pages so that our better selves are present to reflect on the human condition at the scale of civilisation collapse and regeneration. And it’s that stuff that stays with us, beyond the thrilling climax of the plot resolution.

The last chapter of part two transitions to part three using a photograph of Arthur Leander’s first wife, Miranda, which Kirsten cherishes in her timeline.

Part three expands out from telling the story of that photograph of Miranda. It is mainly pre-collapse, the tale of how Arthur and Miranda met and broke up, and how Arthur and Clark, his best friend, grew apart, also, of how Miranda’s one constant is her creative relationship with her graphic novel, Station Eleven .

Part three also contains a transcript of an interview with Kirsten, post-collapse. Including these post-collapse artefacts knits the two timelines together more clearly, underlining the link between Kirsten and Arthur and Miranda; Kirsten cherishes her copies of Station Eleven and her clippings of Arthur Leander’s life.

The last chapter of part three transitions to part four, as the interview speaks about the dangers of extremism in the towns overtaken by doomsday cults.

“RAYMONDE: Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous. DIALLO: In what sense? RAYMONDE: In the sense that they’re unpredictable. You can’t argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic.”

The interview underlines the Travelling Symphony's peril, which creates narrative drive, for the sake of that hungry monkey brain, who doesn’t read just for beauty and profundity, sadly.

Escalating Conflict

In part four, conflict complicates and escalates for the Travelling Symphony and Kirsten. The theatre troupe begin to vanish one by one, and they ask “Are we being hunted?”

This is the structural midpoint of the novel.

Again, the escalating thriller/horror elements create a compelling plot, while subjective reflections on survival and humanity give us poignant and beautiful resting places.

The tension is magnetic but not unbearable, which is a relief. I am reading Station Eleven only now, nearly 10 years after its publication, because I didn’t think I could face a dystopia before this moment. I’m glad I got here eventually.

The promise of resolution

In part five, we glimpse the beginning of the end, even if we don’t realise it at the time. We loop back to join Jeevan, who appeared in the opening chapter and had small bit parts dotted through the first half of the novel. Structurally, there’s a sense of beginning to open out the story in surprising yet inevitable ways, bringing in the ingredients that will come together in the climax and resolution, now that the conflict has escalated to the midpoint. The reintroduction of Jeevan’s point of view feels like a promise to the reader that everyone and everything in this book will be significantly connected and, if only we stay with the story, we’ll come to understand those connections. There will be a payoff.

We join him first when he is interviewing Arthur about leaving his wife and baby for another woman, then follow him post-pandemic as he comes to the point of leaving his apartment and Toronto and starting to walk to survive. Jeevan’s point of view is intercut with the artefact of the interview with Kirsten, as she recounts her parallel experience in the first days of the pandemic.

In part six, the weave of the different storylines we’ve followed tightens again. We briefly touch base with Kirsten and Auguste, alone on the road, separated from their troupe, and reflecting on parallel universes. They find a clipping about Miranda in an old celebrity gossip magazine, and Kirsten realises she was there the night it refers to. This transitions us to Miranda, receiving the call about Arthur’s death in the pre-collapse timeline, and reflecting on previous versions of herself. There’s a thematic resonance there, a ‘sliding doors’ feeling, and the connective artefact of the paperweight and how it connects Miranda, Arthur, Clark and Kristen, is revealed. We move to Clark, who discusses the funeral in Toronto with Arthur’s lawyer, and gets on the same flight to Toronto as Arthur’s ex-wife and young son, to go to the funeral. Miranda dies.

In part seven there’s a very concrete sense that all the timelines are converging, as we join Clark twenty years post-pandemic, at an airport which we suspect is the very same one to which the troupe are all headed.

I think it’s unnecessary to summarize the rest of the story. The craft lessons are there, and in parts eight and nine the resolution brings everything together, concentrating all these threads in a climactic moment which is intensely satisfying.

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Final thoughts

One of the effects of this virtuoso weaving of characters and events coming to a surprising yet inevitable conclusion is the impression that ‘everything happens for a reason’. It’s the ‘Chekhov’s gun’ principle in action across the novel. And yet that need to believe that everything happens for a reason is interrogated by the novel, shown to be dangerous. What if the world is meaningless? What if we are alone out here? What if there is no God? There’s a sense of irony in the novel, which leaves us still worrying away at the story's themes long after we are no longer on the hook for the escalating conflict and all that stuff that kept us reading. That enduring reflection is what makes this one of my favourite novels.

What I’ve taken from this is that it’s ok, more than ok, to be complex. To not take the straightforward route through a narrative. And since I’ve become aware of that, now my inner critic isn’t blocking my view, I see that most of the writing I wish I’d written seems to be powered by a similar way of thinking, making divergent, creative connections with freedom and boldness. The magic trick is to make them come together in surprising yet inevitable ways, making the writing compelling.

I’m always going to admire the art of the simple. I know it can be harder to say something simply than to say something complicated. But, maybe that’s something I can admire in others without aspiring to it myself. Maybe I can be more who I am in my creative writing. And maybe, it might be easier to keep writing now that I’m going to let myself do that.

Thank you, Emily!

I love this word, ‘chronoception’, which means the perception of time, a field of study associated with psychology and neuroscience, and now (here), the handling of time perception in literature.

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Home / Essay Samples / Literature / Books / Station Eleven

Station Eleven Essay Examples

Survival in the new in "station eleven" by emily st. john mandel.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel highlights the situation in the world years after the world’s population has been swept away by a dangerous virus known as the Georgian Flu. The flu leads to the desertion of numerous major cities. All sources of “gasoline...

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: Importance of Art and Memory is the New World

Thousands of decades ago, civilization created a language, symbols and cultures all over the world and the moment this all appeared researches have called it “the cultural big bang”. The reason the world is what it is today, is because humanity has brought the art...

Themes of Death and Survival in Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was published in September 2014. The novel was a National Book Award Finalist and a Pen/Faulkner Award. The novel starts and ends with Arthur Leander’s death on the stage from a heart attack. Arthur got married three times and...

The Analysis of Post-apocalyptic Novel "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel

The novel, “Station Eleven”, by Emily St. John Mandel, begins surprisingly with the end of the world as people know it. While performing onstage, Arthur Leander, playing the role of King Arthur, falls dead to a heart attack. Shortly after this tragedy, a highly contagious...

Technology and Isolation in Emily St. Mandel’s Station Eleven and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”, said by Albert Einstein when asked about the future relationship between humanity and our technology. In the current fast pace society, we demand speed and convivence with every aspect of our lives; whether...

Comparative Analysis of Oedipus Rex and Station Eleven It Terms of the Idea of a Hero

The idea of what makes an acceptable hero in literature today is vastly different to what it was in ancient times. Analyzing Oedipus Rex and Station Eleven displays an excellent example of how the idea of a hero has changed in writings over time. Sophocles...

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About Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

Post-apocalyptic fiction

Kirsten Raymonde, Arthur Leander, Miranda Carroll, Tyler Leander/The Prophet, Jeevan Chaudhary, Clark Thompson, Elizabeth Colton, August, Charlie, Sayid, Dieter, Frank Chaudhary, The Conductor, V (Victoria), Francois Diallo, Tanya, Dr. Eleven, Luli

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