The Order of Things
Victoria
Grossack
Recently I had tea with the mother of a friend of mine. She told me that
she was working on a family history and that writing it was proving more
challenging than she anticipated. The difficulty, she said, was figuring out
in what order to put everything.
The sequence of events for your story has several dimensions. One aspect
of this means the order of what happens to your characters. But it also
means deciding upon the order in which you tell everything to your
readers. These are not always the same thing.
We can call one type of order the “author’s absolute time” within the story. Certain
events happen on Monday; other events happen on Tuesday. But the reader does
not necessarily experience the story events in this order, for the story may
not be told that way. Events which occur on Monday may appear after
Tuesday’s events in the novel. We’ll call this second type of order the
“reader’s relative time.” (If someone knows better terms for these concepts,
please let me know.)
There are many examples of stories not told in chronological order. A
novel may open with a frame story which is set at the “absolute time” end of
the story. For example, in our novel, Iokaste: The Mother-Wife of Oedipus,
we start with a prologue in which Iokaste’s unnatural marriage to her son
has been discovered. One of their daughters wants to understand how such a
thing could happen – and the rest of the novel answers that question,
jumping back forty years in absolute time and then continuing in
chronological order. It is only when we reach the end of the book that we
catch up with the absolute time of the prologue.
Let’s review some different ways in which you can order the events of
your story.
Chronological
The most straightforward sequence of your writing is to show what happens
chronologically, or the “absolute time” of the story. This means that if the
sun rises at seven and John breakfasts at eight, your reader will read about
the sunrise before she reads about John’s breakfast.
Perhaps it’s important for you to change the sequence of these events.
It’s rather awkward (though not impossible) to change the time of the
sunrise, so if you want to show the reader John breakfasting before you show
the reader the sunrise, one solution is to make John get up and eat earlier.
This means changing the absolute sequence of the events in your story.
Another solution is to start with John eating breakfast at eight, but
then to have him remember the sunrise which happened at seven. This is
called a flashback and is changing the reader’s relative time. Writers use
flashbacks all the time, but they can confuse your readers. If you’re
considering having John flash back to the sunrise that happened only an hour
before breakfast, well, then, you’d better have good artistic reasons for
doing so. In other words, something significant to the story should be
associated with the sunrise. Otherwise, keep it in chronological order, or
simply ignore the sunrise – or even ignore John’s breakfast.
Following a Character
Perhaps you are writing about a couple of characters, Mary and John, who
will meet on page two hundred. You may want to follow the life of Mary for
the first one hundred pages, up to the point where she is about to open that
door and find John. And then, just as she glimpses him in the waiting room,
you stop the story, back up and show the readers John’s life up to that
point.
This is not strictly chronological because the readers first experience
Mary’s life during the nineties, and then experience the life of John during
the nineties. However, this type of organization may help your readers
become really close to Mary, and then later develop a bond to John. So this
approach can deepen your readers’ reading experience.
Perspective of a Character
If you are working with a limited, intimate POV (see the
archives for
articles on this subject), in which the reader only experiences what your
protagonist experiences, then your readers will also experience something
when the protagonist experiences it.
For example, perhaps Mary cheats on John shortly after they are married.
John doesn’t learn about it until forty years later, when she’s dying. For
John the pain is fresh and new, as he’s wondering if his children are really
his children and if his whole life is a lie. In the reader’s relative time –
and in John’s – the affair just happened, even though in absolute
time Mary cheated on John occurred four decades earlier.
Theme Driven
Perhaps you are writing historical fiction in which many different types
of things are happening, for example, World War II. Even though the building
of concentration camps and the fighting of naval battles may occur in
overlapping periods of time, you may choose to concentrate on one and tell
about it for a while before moving to the other. This will help your readers
understand your story.
Guiding Principles
We’ve reviewed a few different ways you can order scenes and chapters.
There are many different options, and that no single way is “right” all the
time. So it is up to you, the author, to decide how to order the events in
both author absolute and reader relative time. But how do you go about it?
These decisions are very artistic and subjective, but in making them
myself I apply a few guiding principles:
Which sequence will best please the reader? I try to minimize reader
confusion and maximize reader satisfaction. I’ve written extensively on
these goals in other columns, so I won’t expound more on them here.
Which sequence is logical? I like to have things make sense, so I don’t
play around with the time of the sunrise. In my own case, I’m also following
certain Greek myths, so I attempt to be consistent with the myths and
archaeological findings. Sometimes I can’t reconcile events completely – the
myths and the archaeology may contradict each other – and I return to the
principle of doing my best to entertain the reader.
Conclusion
As writers we have to make two decisions with respect to order: the order
of how the events happen in the story (author absolute) and the order in
which we tell them (reader relative). These decisions have a huge impact on
your story.
In this column we’ve concentrated mostly on the decisions that are
relevant to the macro level of the story: where to place scenes and chapters
and overall themes. The issue of order is important, too, at the micro level
– within scenes, within paragraphs and even within sentences. However, this
issue is too challenging for me at this time. I may tackle it at some other
time.
Questions? Comments? You wish to use this article? Feel free to contact
me at grossackva at yahoo dot com.
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