I don't think there's an easy way to write about anything. Everything is complex. To explain a situation, I have to explain what led up to it, but then that raises other issues which need to be explained and I have to explain what led up to that, and then what led up to that, and I go further and further back, building up this burden of stuff that needs to be expressed. But that's not a writing problem, it's a thinking problem. It's a problem before I write, and an obstacle to beginning to write.
Life doesn't happen in story form. In other words, what novelists portray in the form of a story (the novel) is not itself a story (the lives and action portrayed). Take Wuthering Heights for instance....we're introduced to Lockwood, the outermost narrator (because Wuthering Heights, like Frankenstein, is structured in the form of 'nested narratives')....so we start with Lockwood and then, when he visits Wuthering Heights and ends up having to stay overnight because of the snow storm - in that whole scene: the day and the night that follows, we are introduced, and Lockwood is introduced, to both the adult (or present) and the child (or past) version of both Catherine and Heathcliff. That's a stunning literary feat, when you think about it....the perfect introduction to the fullness of the two main characters. And then the life stories of Heathcliff and Catherine and their relationship and interactions with others, are delineated by Lockwood's housekeeper, when he returns home, sick with a cold and therefore needs to spend time in bed and has time to listen to Nelly's narrative.
and something else is happening. During Nelly's long narration, we forget that she is narrating....we hear Catherine and Heathcliff and Edgar and all the other characters speaking. So, the narration, like the story itself, is a construction and isn't realistic. Nelly's narrative contains long sections of dialogue, and besides the fact that, when you're telling a story, you generally don't recite complete dialogues because you wouldn't remember them and they would just get in the way of the story you are telling....besides that, the statements made are so powerful that it's the voice of the character we are hearing. Arguably, Nelly doesn't really have a voice in Wuthering Heights. She's meant to be a conduit for the story. It's not that she doesn't play a role /// but her involvement doesn't influence the course of the story. Her role is to tell the story.
So, there's a lot of construction and artistic creation and manipulation that goes into the writing of a novel.
Frankenstein is similar in terms of narrative structure. The story unfolds through nested narratives - the monster's story (which the monster narrates, by the way), inside Frankenstein's narrative, inside Walton's narrative, and Walton, even more so than Nelly, plays a minimal role in the story. He's supposedly the narrator of the whole thing, but it's Frankenstein's and other voices we hear and whose lives and adventures we learn about, while Walton is invisible the whole time. But the pretext is that everything written - the whole novel - is related in Walton's letters to his sister.
It's interesting how, in both the world of the novel and the real world - the real narrator or story teller, has to stay out of the story. You can read and appreciate Wuthering Heights and have no interest in Emily Brontё. I became interested in Emily Brontё though, and went on to read and research a lot about her and read her poetry. The more I learnt, the more interested I became because it all fits together. Emily's literary work (the novel and her poems) and her life, reflect on each other in fascinating ways. Same with all the Brontёs - they're all fascinating. The Brontёs by Juliet Barker is a really good combined biography of all the Brontёs, and my favourite biography of Emily is the one by Winifred Gérin. I also liked Emily Brontё: Heretic by Stevie Davies, but that's more of a literary biography centered around Wuthering Heights.
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