An arrangement of times has five jobs: give each strand a question, mark each time, set the intervals and rates, place the switches, and make the convergence change something. Two documents serve all five. The order chart numbers every unit of the book by its place in story order and lists the numbers in text order, with each unit’s position in the book as a percentage; it shows at a glance where the book departs from chronology and how far. The strand table gives each strand a row: its question, its span of story time, its rate, its viewpoint, its orientation markers and the point at which it meets the others. The examples below assume both.
A question for each strand
A strand holds a reader across switches only if it leaves her with something to want, and a strand set in the past has a particular difficulty: the reader often knows how it ends, because the present strand is its end. The question must therefore be one the present does not answer. In Where the Crawdads Sing the present tells the reader that Kya is alive in 1969 and suspected of murder; the 1952 strand’s question is not whether she survives but how she becomes the woman the town suspects, and whether she did it, which the present cannot settle. A past strand whose only question the present has already answered is the explaining strand of Failure Patterns. The test is to write each strand’s question in one line and to check that the other strands’ pages do not answer it.
A strand must also be declared early, by its second instalment and in practice within the first fifth of the book, because a reader who has invested in one time resists a second introduced late; The Opening Pages’s formal contract (Chapter 9), the promise a book’s opening makes about its form, is the instrument.
Marking the times
Each instalment must tell the reader which time she is in before she needs to know, which in practice means within its first sentence or two, and the cost of a marker should match the difficulty of the switch. The cheapest markers are a strand’s own: a viewpoint character who lives in only one time, a tense or person kept for one strand, and a setting whose period shows. Headings and time-stamps are reliable and explicit; Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), whose hero travels involuntarily in time, heads its sections with a date and both lovers’ ages, the only way to keep a reader oriented in a book where one character is in two times at once. The most economical marker is an object or a detail the reader can date.
That last category is the subject of The Descriptive Detail’s proposal (Chapter 4), the temporal domain: a detail belongs to it when its work is to establish duration, sequence, decay, repurposing, season or interruption, carried by aspect, wear, residue and maintenance. The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4) adopted it for diagnosis, conceding that six domains are harder to hold than five and that time may be a feature of details rather than a kind, and left this chapter to adopt or reject it at larger scales. This chapter adopts it at the scale of a book, as the domain of orientation. In a book with two times the same place and the same objects appear in both, and only temporal detail tells the reader which time a passage is in without a heading: the shop in March and the shop in July differ in a sign never turned, a coat brushed weekly, a page in a second hand. That answers the second objection at this scale, because a detail can be chosen for which time it places a passage in and for nothing else, and a multi-timeline book needs many such details. Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017), whose thirteen chapters each cover one year, confirms it: the book’s orientation is its calendar. The Descriptive Detail’s concession (Chapter 4) on parsimony stands for the single detail. The domain’s failure at this scale is the undated strand, whose instalments could belong to any time and are placed by their headings alone.
Interval and rate
The interval between strands, and how it changes, is the arrangement’s clock. A converging braid shortens it until the strands meet, and the reader feels the meeting approach; a parallel braid holds it fixed and must supply its pressure elsewhere. Rate is the strand’s story time per page. Strands at different rates can produce temporal counterpoint, ruled on in The Taxonomy, but only where a crossing shows the difference; strands at one rate, crossing without variation, are the lockstep braid of Failure Patterns. The strand table records each strand’s span and page count, from which the rate is a division.
The switch
A switch is a transition across time and usually across a chapter break, so The Transition (Chapter 5) and The Chapter Break (Chapter 6) supply its tools, and three rules are this chapter’s. Leave a strand on an open question, so that suspense carries across the switch; enter the next strand at a point that pays at once, because the reader arrives with her interest elsewhere. Keep the rhythm of alternation regular once it is declared, or break it on purpose, since a reader learns the pattern and reads a break in it as a signal. And watch the asymmetry: a reader who prefers one strand will tolerate the other only if each of its instalments advances its own question, which makes the instalment’s opening paragraph the weakest point in most braided books.
The convergence
Strands meet in time, by cause or by identity, and the meeting must change what at least one strand meant, or it is a coincidence of dates. A convergence of times is the converging braid’s end; a convergence by cause discloses that an act in one strand made the other’s situation; a convergence by identity discloses that a person or object is in both.
The object’s case is The Transition’s proposal (Chapter 5), the bridging object: a physical thing on both sides of a gap whose presence anchors the new unit by identity rather than resemblance. The Transition (Chapter 5) adopted it for revision, conceding as unanswered that identity and resemblance may not differ for the reader, and named Station Eleven and the household ledger as test cases at the scale of a book. This chapter adopts it at that scale, as a means of convergence by identity between strands, on one condition: the object’s condition or custody must change between its appearances, so that the change itself measures the interval. The condition answers the conceded objection at book scale. A resembling object carries no history, so the reader can learn nothing from it about the time between; an identical object that has been worn, written in or handed on tells her how long and through whose hands. In Station Eleven (2014) a glass paperweight passes from Clark to Arthur and Miranda, back to Arthur, and on the night he dies, by way of a child minder, to Kirsten, aged eight, who carries it for twenty years; each change of custody is a link between times (Worked Analyses). The household ledger is written in one hand until 9 March and another after it, which is the interval made visible on a page. Without the change, an object repeated across strands is a match-cut, and The Transition’s concession (Chapter 5) stands.
See also: the full treatment, section 5, with the order chart and strand table laid out for a sample book.