Which time the reader is in, and why it is that one
The Craft Behind the Story (Second Edition) — Chapter 8. Part II: The Joins.
In brief. A book told out of chronological order uses the order of telling, not the order of events, as its main instrument of meaning. The arrangement earns its departure from chronology when the order does work that chronology could not: each strand runs on a question of its own, the reader always knows which time she is in and how far it stands from the others, and the point at which the strands meet changes what at least one of them meant. The chapter’s tools are the order chart, which sets the position of every unit in the story against its position in the text, and the strand table, which records for each strand its question, its span, its rate and where it meets the others. Use the chapter when you are planning a book set across more than one time period, when readers say they were lost or skimmed one timeline, or when a draft’s arrangement feels like chronology made harder to read.
What you can do after this chapter
- Chart a book’s order of telling against its order of events, and say what the arrangement gains over chronology.
- Decide whether recurring material in another time is a cutaway or a strand, and give a strand a question of its own.
- Mark each time so that the reader is never lost, at the least cost in headings and explanation.
- Set the rates and intervals of several strands so that their difference does work, and place their meeting where it changes meaning.
- Diagnose an arbitrary arrangement, a lost reader, a strand that only explains, a lockstep braid and a convergence by coincidence, and revise them.
Key terms
Story order and text order; anachrony; strand; instalment; switch; interval; rate; convergence; convergence of times, by cause and by identity; orientation marker; the order chart; the strand table; the braid; the anchored order; the reverse order; the mosaic; the nested order; the threshold of a strand; temporal counterpoint; the temporal domain; the bridging object; the arbitrary arrangement; the lost reader; the explaining strand; the lockstep braid; the convergence by coincidence. Each is defined at first use and collected in the consolidated glossary.
Contents
The first files say what a non-linear book is and what a reader does with one, the central files how its times are kept apart, marked, paced and brought together, and the last are for use at the desk.
- The Problem
A household draft that braids a second timeline through the book, and the chapter’s claim - Definitions
Story order, text order, strand and the terms around them, and what other chapters keep - How It Works
What order does to meaning, what readers do at a shift of time, and what the evidence says - The Taxonomy
Five architectures, and two rulings: the threshold of a strand and temporal counterpoint - The Mechanism
How strands are given questions, marked, paced, switched and brought together, with rulings on the temporal domain and the bridging object - Diagnostic Tests
Eight questions on one page, and how to read their failures together - Failure Patterns
Five recurrent failures, each with a work that commits it and succeeds - Worked Analyses
Slaughterhouse-Five, Where the Crawdads Sing, Station Eleven and Memento, and the household revision case - Checklist and Exercises
The revision checklist and five exercises for your own draft - Coda
What the model assumes, and why an arrangement is an argument about time
A writer in revision can start at the diagnostic tests, with an order chart drafted for the book as it stands. A writer planning a book in two or more times should read the mechanism first, because a strand’s question and its meeting with the others are easier to design than to find afterwards.
The full treatment
This is a new chapter, so the Reference layer holds a single full treatment rather than a corrected original: the theory at greater length, an extended catalogue of architectures and failure patterns, the four rulings in full, the procedures for each test, further analyses (Cloud Atlas, Hamnet, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Dunkirk), the household order chart and strand table, a glossary of the chapter’s terms and the sources.
See also: The Transition (Chapter 5), for the join between two units, of which a switch between strands is the largest case; Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7), for the single cutaway into the past; The Subplot (Chapter 14), for threads that run in one time; The Reveal (Chapter 15), for truths an arrangement withholds.