My natural storytelling instinct for my books leans exclusively to third person, shifting points of view. I’ll write an occasional short story in first person, but those are rare, as well. I don’t know why that is, and as with so much else as a self-taught writer, I try not to dwell too much on the whys of my process for fear that if I think too hard I screw something up–much as my one and only golf lesson did to my golf game. Once you start thinking about every movement, no movement feels natural anymore.
Over the course of writing the past few books, I’ve run into an interesting challenge, where the timeline of one groups of characters, and the events of their lives is unfolding weeks earlier than those of my primary characters. Ultimately, the two groups will come together in a tumultuous manner in the same time and place, but the journey to get them there bears a high risk of confusing the reader.
The problem is even more challenging because the separation consists only of weeks, not years. It would be easy to drop in slug lines like 1847 versus 2026, because readers can keep track of those. I don’t think you can say the same about May 14 versus May 5. Readers would be compelled to flip back and forth just to keep up.
My upcoming thriller, Burned Bridges (May 27), begins:
Chapter One
Thirty-Five years ago
Then chapter one shows two teenagers disposing of the body of a third teenager in the opening of a limestone cave. Truth be told, I could legitimately have written that chapter as a prologue, but I have a visceral dislike of prologues. Then, the second chapter begins:
Chapter Two
Present day
In this chapter, we meet my protagonist, Irene Rivers, and her family, and discover that her nephew has discovered a body that had been stuffed in a cave on their property. And then the story remains exclusively in the present day, so I don’t use any more time stamps.
In my Victoria Emerson trilogy, I figured that after a nuclear holocaust, all time would be tracked relative to Hell Day–the date of the attack, so as I moved from one timeline to another, I used Hell Day as the anchor at the top of each chapter:
Hell Day Plus 22
Where events spanned consecutive chapters, or where I was shifting the point of view on a single event, I’d make sure not to lose to the reader by putting a slug like this at the top of the chapter:
Hell Day Plus 22 (Same Day)
I’m currently putting the finishing touches on Scorched Earth, #18 in the Jonathan Grave thriller series, and I’m wrestling with a new twist on the timeline problem. In this case, the other timeline is presenting essential backstory, lived out in real time for the reader, but I’m finding it hard not to squander the big “organ chord” reveal sooner than I want the reader to know it.
I know that in a conference setting or in an academic setting, many of us like to express this thing we do in term of art. But sometimes, it feel more like carpentry–making those pieces you cut wrong somehow join together anyway.
Y’all got any tricks for writing conflicting or parallel timelines? Anybody else had an instructor ruin your ugly yet perfectly passable golf game and turn you into a worm burner?
This technique is what made the movie “Dunkirk” confusing as, well, war at first… but when it dawned on me (spoiler alert if you’ve not seen this), it was three intertwined stories beginning at different times on the same day, intersecting at times out of sequence one from the other, and all coming together on the rescue at the beach. This made – at least for me – an awesome “Ah-ha! Cool!” moment that has this flick among my favorites – not something many current releases can claim (not that I’m Gene Shalit or Michael Medved… 😋).
I’m not sure how this would read in book form – as you said, flipping between May 14 and May 5 would be confusing enough out of sequence, I can only imagine it being worse with three threads jumping between 9:30 a.m., 6:45 a.m., noon, etc.
As to golf? Well, let’s just say I don’t play unless my hunting and fishing licenses are current…
Interesting you bring up Dunkirk. I found the structure of the filmmaking to be so distracting that I never got into the story. By the time I understood what was going on, I was pissed that the director was being do self-indulgent. Maybe I need to watch it a second time now that I understand what is happening.
“I don’t think you can say the same about May 14 versus May 5. Readers would be compelled to flip back and forth just to keep up.”
Possibly with some readers, but if someone is truly engaged with your story, they’ll take the time to keep up. One of those “trust the readers to get it” moments in writing.
But then historical is my favorite thing to write so maybe it’s not as bothersome to me as to others. I’ve heard people complain about date headers at the beginning of chapters, but I prefer it when writers are crystal clear about timeframes. I don’t want to be left guessing and sometimes authors aren’t anywhere as clear in their prose as they think they are about establishing time-frame in the reader’s mind.
John, I dunno if this helps but I used a calendar for a complex timeline in my book Dead Man’s Bluff.
The story unfolded during an actual event, Hurricane Irma. I wanted to be factually accurate about which days flooding occurred, which roads were closed when, and the herky-jerky sporadic way the power came back on in different areas b/c all those elements factored into the plot.
On a calendar, I divided each day in two columns. In the left column, I recorded the times of actual events. In the right column, I wrote down what various characters were doing in several different locations at that time. Visualizing the timeline helped me create transitions between scenes that (hopefully) led the reader along w/o too much confusion.
Rather than use time stamps, each scene was introduced with a short phrase like “Four hours earlier…” Those intro words were omniscient POV before the story went back into deep third POV. I figured clarity was more important than strictly sticking to arbitrary POV “rules.”
For years, I was told you *have* to outline. Whenever I tried, the story flopped.
Ya gotta go with whatever works for you, not the rulebook.
I did something similar in a three character, first-person-for-each POV, set during the end of the War Between the States (or as Hoosiers refer to it, the War for the Union)… paralleling timelines in each of the three major settings I had (the Army of Northern Virginia – in the east, The Army of Tennesse, in the west, and the effects on civilians at home)… fortunately, there wasn’t a lot of overlapping action, and many scenes seemed dovetailed neatly… but it was a kind of hairy Gant Chart looking thing when I got done “outlining” it…
Growing up in Virginia, it was the War of Northern Aggression.
There’s an accident investigation methodology invented by Ludwig Benner called Multilinear Event Sequencing Analysis, in which every possible contributing factor to an incident is given its own timeline, and then you study the points of intersection. I found it to be more of an intellectual exercise than a practical one, but it can be helpful in storytelling.
John, I’ve never been confused by your writing/timelines…let’s get that out of the way! And I’m too much of a newbie to comment on any tricks or tips (since I don’t have any).
🙂 That’s why I tune in here every morning.
This stood out to me, John: Once you start thinking about every movement, no movement feels natural anymore.
That rule of artistic endeavor, IMHO, applies to any kind of art. Teaching is fine, but once the teaching is over and done with it’s time to do or create what comes naturally to me. When I was a vocalist, I could read the music and do what it said, but it was more fun and natural for me to break the rules. I wanted to make the song mine. Same with writing?
Have a great day!
I think the music analogy might be limited by the capabilities of the accompanist. But in general, yes–it goes back to my rule that there are no rules.
Oh yes, totally agree. If I’m breaking rules, my accompanyist has to follow me, not the other way around.
👍
I was a “self taught” golfer when I first took up the game, late, at age 40. I read and studied books (hmm, just like I did when learning how to write). I practiced the drills. But I did take some lessons, and the teacher saw something I was doing and said, “If you don’t change that now, if you keep doing this, not even Jesus Christ will be able to fix your swing.” He was right. I also invested in a video course that came with physical items that helped me “feel” the proper grip, swing, putting motion, etc. It all helped, and though I’m not going on the Champions Tour any time soon, I got to the point where I could go on any course and not make a complete fool of myself.
As to your immediate conundrum, Brother G, i.e., two plotlines unfolding together, one of the best legal thrillers IMO is Against the Wind by J. F. Freedman. Line #1 is in First Person Present. Line #2 is in Third Person Present. That’s a distinction. Further, the text of #2 is in sans serif font. Thus, it’s easy for the reader to know which line is which. (This is better than italics, which is legit, but hard to read great blocks of).
Might that work?
And when you chip, pretend that your wrists are in plaster casts. I got that tip from a book by Ken Venturi, and chipping became the best part of my game.
A question on the physics of golf. Lets assume that we are of equal ability on the links. In real life, you are easily 5 or 6 (or more) inches taller than I, so you would use longer clubs (right?). All else being equal, will your shots travel farther than mine?
Farther, maybe. But more accurate? That is the question!
Good morning, John.
“But sometimes, it feel more like carpentry–making those pieces you cut wrong somehow join together anyway.” So true! Have you ever read what Ernest Hemingway said about Beryl Markham’s book West with the Night? Here’s a part of the letter he wrote to his friend Maxwell Perkins in 1942.
“Did you read Beryl Markham’s book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer’s logbook. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and sometimes making an okay pigpen. But this girl who is, to my knowledge, very unpleasant,… can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers.”