Out of time
No, not you: you’ve still got plenty of time to join us! That’s the joy of the Hindsight 2020 series: you can hop in at any point along the way.
No, this month we’re talking about chronology—the order of events in your story. Sometimes it makes sense to start at the beginning and work your way directly to the end. But could rearranging the order of things make your story more interesting? By starting at the end and working your way back to the beginning, or by switching back and forth from present to past to present, you can keep your reader on their toes. It’s like giving them a handful of little cliffhangers—something to keep them interested from one paragraph to the next.
Ready?
July’s assignment is: write your story out of chronological order. (Maximum wordcount for your submission: 1,000 words)
The whys and hows:
First of all, let’s get one thing straight: we’re not asking for a flashback. Flashbacks are great tools for framing a story, but in the end, you’d just end up writing a new intro paragraph and then telling the same story in the same order all over again.
What you’re trying to do this month is differentiate your story from a journal entry. By breaking it down into the most important pieces and then shaking those up to see what other order they might fit into, you’ll skip a lot of boring text. For example, we once cut two full pages from a book simply by taking out all the “I opened the door and stepped back to let her in. She came in slowly, warily, and stopped a foot into the room, keeping her weight on the balls of her feet as though she might like to leave at any moment and had not decided yet whether the door or the window was her best option.” That’s not unpretty writing, but nobody needs two pages of every single step, breath, shrug, and turn a character made, and when you’re writing in perfect chronological order it’s tempting to include all that just so that you’re SURE that you and the reader both have the same vision of the stage you’re setting. But it turns out the stage isn’t as important as the story that’s about to play out on it, and you might have to lose some of those this-then-that pretty details to make room for the story.
That’s why a flashback won’t teach you anything new about your story. Instead, try one of these other options.
Start in the middle of your story
Skip the opening exposition and backstory and jump in right where the action starts. Grab your reader’s attention right from the get-go. You’ll have to go back and fill in details later, but this technique allows a story to unfold in a non-linear way, which can help you avoid the trap of “I did this and then I said that and then she did this and then…”
Start outside your story
No story exists in a vacuum. Things happened before the start, and things will happen afterwards. Beginning your story at point C might give you insight into how you got from point A to B—and how you might get to point D later. Or it might lead to a deeper dive into your main character’s triggers and motivations. Be careful; this could easily turn into a flashback. Instead of just recapping what happened, use details from your original story to inform the next scene. And remember, don’t just… start in a different place and continue chronologically. You’ve still got to move back and forth.
Swap narrators
You already did this work, right? Use it. Instead of following a character through the whole story, shift part of the backstory into dialogue and let another character tell it later. Huh. That dialogue thing sounds familiar, too…
Start at the end and work backward
Start with your punchline, big reveal, or denouement, then show the reader how you got there. Again, this isn’t a flashback. Do you remember the song about the old woman who swallowed a fly (perhaps she’ll die)? Then she swallowed a spider to catch the fly, then a bird to catch the spider, and so on until she swallowed a horse (she died, of course). You could tell that story the other way round, couldn’t you? “My grandmother died on Tuesday, after eating three legs, the tail, and half the body of a horse named Ruth. She was eating the horse because swallowing the cow whole hadn’t worked…”
A few tips and tricks we learned on the way:
- Think about your story in bullet points. (Don’t worry; that’s not in the plan for this series!) Use that list you made for yourself early on (mentally or on paper) of what the most important things in your story are, and figure out how to slot them in for maximum effect, instead of “this happened and then that happened next.”
- Let go of your darlings. You may find that that perfectly crafted opening line or paragraph is less of a hook than you thought, when it’s in a different place.
- Alternatively, shift your darlings around. Your best line might be more effective at the end of your story instead of the beginning.
- Pay attention to your tenses. When you’re jumping around chronologically, it can be hard to remember to differentiate your “was’s” from your “had beens.”
- Don’t forget to signal your time-jumps! Whether it’s in text with a “because” or visually with a *** it’s important to let your reader know that you’re moving around chronologically.
Need a second pair of eyes to see what you might have missed? Don’t be afraid to ask for help in the Coffeehouse!
Good luck! Talk to you soon…
Loading InLinkz ...Hindsight!
In case you missed it, here's a look back (see what we did there?) at the exercises in our 2020 workshop.
January: Write a story or essay in 1,000 words
February: Write the same piece in 100 words
March: Retain just 25 adjectives and adverbs from your original 1,000 word story
April: Write your story or essay using only dialogue
May: Write your story or essay from a different point of view
June: Write your story or essay in 2,000 words
July: Write your story or essay out of chronological order
August: Record your story or essay and transcribe it
September: Write your story or essay using a different voice
October: Write a poem using your story or essay as inspiration
November: Write a version of your story set in an alternate universe.
December: Write the final version of your story or essay in 1000 words.
About the author:
Christine Hanolsy is a (primarily) science fiction and fantasy writer who simply cannot resist a love story. She joined the YeahWrite team in 2014 as the microstory editor and stepped into the role of Editor-In-Chief in 2020. Christine was a 2015 BlogHer Voices of the Year award recipient and Community Keynote speaker for her YeahWrite essay, “Rights and Privileges.” Her short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies and periodicals and her creative nonfiction at Dead Housekeeping and in the Timberline Review. Outside of YeahWrite, Christine’s past roles have included Russian language scholar, composer, interpreter, and general cat herder. Find her online at christinehanolsy.com.
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
