Writing Excuses 21.22 : The Order of the Telling

[mbarker]

Writing Excuses 21.22 : The Order of the Telling

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-22-the-order-of-the-telling

Key Points: The order in which we present information to the reader, versus chronological progress. Police procedural. Non-linear storytelling. Flashbacks. Use time to create tension. Storylets. Start in the middle, then go back. Parallelism, dual timelines. Order of telling as mechanism for characterization. What's the connection? Don't depend on time or date stamps. Sensory detail. Index cards, notes. Twine. Aeon Timeline. Spreadsheet. Write your scenes, then come back and write transitions.

[Season 21, Episode 22]

[Howard] The cruise ship sailing up to Alaska this summer is completely sold out, except for the cabins we'd reserved for Writing Excuses attendees. These cabins are only available until June 4th. On June 4th, any cabins not reserved by Writing Excuses attendees will revert to the cruise line, and will be sold to the general public. If you want to join the Writing Excuses hosts and 100 new friends on our final annual cruise as we read, write, critique, and learn while reveling in the stunning scenery, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats. Don't delay. We're holding the very last unreserved cabins on the entire ship, and they will not stay unreserved for very long. Again, that's writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 22]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The order of the telling.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] And we are joined again by special guest and occasional house guest of mine, Margaret Dunlap.

[Margaret] Hello. You had me back.

[laughter]

[Margaret] Yay.

[Howard] Well, this week we are talking about the order in which we present information to the reader, as contrasted with the order in which events chronologically actually progressed in the universe of this story. And why those things might be completely different. One of my favorite examples of this is the standard police procedural, where the order of the telling is we discover a body, we start investigating, and we slowly begin revealing what happened. But in so doing, we begin telling the story chronologically about what led up to that body appearing at the beginning of the telling of the story. But there are plenty of other ways in which this, like... In which this might happen. And plenty of other reasons to do it.

[Mary Robinette] So, in addition to things like that, I really started thinking about this when we were talking about this episode as thinking about non-linear storytelling, because I read V. E. Schwab, and she uses this non-linear structure all the time, where we're jumping back and forth in a timeline. Which will happen sometimes in the structure, where you're talking about where we'll get a flashback. Sometimes it's the book that starts with something, and then jumps, and it's like 22 hours earlier.

[DongWon] The wreckers crashed.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] How did we get here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] A classic TV and film device.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So sometimes it's those, sometimes it's just there's a piece of backstory as in the example that Howard was giving us, that we don't get until later. Like, when I talk about the  MICE quotient, I say it's not about the timeline. That's the order in which things happened. It's the order in which we present it to the reader.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I too am interested in why we do this, why we do these nonlinear things. I think it's about using time to play... To create tension for the reader. Does that seem like how it's working for other people?

[DongWon] I mean, I think there's a bunch of different reasons. I think that's a big one. I mean, one reason is the order in which things happen is often very boring.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? A to B to C. Like, if you're thinking about your daily life, you went to work, stuff happened at work, you had lunch, you did more work. Right? Like, that's not an interesting way to tell that. What's a more interesting way to tell it is, this awful thing happened with Frank, and then... But that was also due to the thing that my boss did that morning. You know what I mean? And then, like, you tell it... You give the information in the order in which you need it, to set stakes, to establish tension, and then fill in information when it's necessary. Right? I talk about this a lot when I talk about worldbuilding, infodumping. About the idea that you can tell anyone anything, so long as it's relevant to what's happening in the moment. Right? And so I think people get very rigid about timeline and what the character knows and when they know it. And this is one of the real limitations of having a specific POV that you're locked into that often locks you into a linear timeline, without the ability to jump to future knowledge, past knowledge, things like that. So when you start layering in more timelines, it gives you so much more opportunity to build drama, to build tension, and then also just to give the reader exposition in chunks that feel relevant to the story rather than modeling the reality of the situation.

[Erin] One way I think about this a lot is actually in... When I write interactive fiction. Which is... A lot of which is nonlinear. And there's a concept of interactive fiction which is storylets. And it's basically taking a story and kind of breaking it down into individual chunks that I've often seen described as, like, a hand... Like a card in a hand of cards. And so what the program does behind the scenes is it looks to see if you've met the conditions to get a specific card. And it will then offer you, maybe, like, one of three cards. So, like, if you fought with your boss and you saved the cat and you went to the grocery store, this card is relevant. This one is relevant anytime you went to the grocery store, no matter what else happened. And it offers things to you. That is something that you can't really replicate in prose, but what I like about it is it actually does make you think about what are the conditions for having this piece of information in front of the reader. And those conditions may not be just that we are later in the day, but that this other relevant thing has happened that makes this piece of content the best one for you to experience at this moment.

[Margaret] Yeah. I was sort of... When I was thinking about this topic, and I think, like Mary Robinette, the first place my mind goes is on the sort of, like I was saying, on the TV side of things. The action show, where, like, that the start might be a little slow, so what do we do, we start in the middle and then go back to the start. And now we have introduced the sort of suspense of... I think the Alias pilot does this fantastically.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Where you start out with Sydney Bristow being drowned by who knows who, who knows where, who knows why. And then we go back, and she's like at UCLA taking classes. So we're like, this is interesting, I would like to know more about this.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Margaret] Where we're talking about the Act One setup. It's a way to keep it from being slow, is by saying, no, no, there's stuff coming up. And so it increases tension and stakes. But trying to reflect on other ways that we can use nonlinear storytelling, I was thinking about a movie that came out in... I believe this was 2024, We Live In Time. Which is Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh playing a couple, and there's... If it were told in order, this is a very melodramatic story. It is a bog standard, in some ways, romance of, like, boy meets girl, they have a very weird meet cute, but they meet, they get together, she has... And I mean, great, I'm spoiling something that comes out in the first minutes of the film, is that she has cancer and they're trying to have a baby and will they have a baby? And so, like, if this were told in order, our two questions hanging over the entire film are: is she going to get pregnant and is the cancer going to come back? But because they tell it, and there's no chyrons telling you where we are in the story, you're just going from moment to moment to moment throughout it. A minute into the movie, you know that she has a baby and that the cancer comes back.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] And in a weird way, like, it deflates that tension, but because of that, it allowed me as an audience member to just sort of relax. It's like, okay, I don't have to worry about whether or not the cancer's going to come back. I don't have to worry about whether she's going to have a baby. I know that happens. And so now I can just sort of watch the moments happening. And that deliberate deflation of the kind of classical dramatic suspense...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Is only possible because they are telling it in this sort of out of time order.

[DongWon] It changes it from the question of what if to okay, what do we do in the face of inevitability?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right?

[Margaret] It's the how's.

[DongWon] Yeah. Which sort of leads me to think about one of my other favorite structures when it comes to playing with time which is the use of parallelism. Right? So a book I worked on, which is Sarah Gailey's Just Like Home, has two timelines in it. One is the character as an adult, as she goes home to care for her ailing mother, and the other is a timeline of her as a child, and her relationship to her father. Who, in the present timeline, we know has gone to prison for doing terrible things. Right? And so the parallelism of both those plot lines developing about her relationships with these two parental figures is part of the engine that drives that book. Right? Or there's a movie from several years ago that you talking about We Lived In Time sort of reminded me of, called After Sun, which is about a woman going back as an adult to a resort that she went to with her father as a child, and trying to understand her relationship with her dad, and you get these sort of parallel timeline structures of her as an adult and her as a child as we understand more about who she is in both timelines reveals more information that contextually cross-pollinates in really exciting ways.

[Mary Robinette] What I like about that is that it's, in both examples, this non-linear thing causes you to recontextualize scenes that would otherwise feel fairly ordinary, because it... You bring dramatic weight from the other timeline to it.

[Howard] There's a classic application of the repeated flashback structure where the current story that we are telling, we will flash back to a prior experience that was formative or similar, and we are running that story and the current story forward at the same time in order to mirror... Not just in order to provide context, although it certainly does that, but also to mirror and to echo voice, tone, emotional content, the emotion of the flashback event is ramping up to its own climax as we are ramping up the main story. And the flashback may have had a tragic ending which set up the beginning of the current story, which may have a triumphant ending. Which provides a wonderful contrast, and at the end of the story, you sit back and you look at it and you say, oh, well, that was a perfect use of flashback, because if you told me tragedy up front, I would have been miserable and wouldn't have wanted to read the rest of your book. Let's go to a break, and after the break, I want to quote William Faulkner.

[Howard] In Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner famously wrote, the past is not dead. It isn't even past. I love that line, because what it says to us... And it's... The theme, kind of the whole work there, what it says to us is that everything that's happened to us is kind of still happening, because it's in our memory. It colors who we are. It shapes what we do. It's formative, it's contextualizing, and it exists. When we talk about non-linear storytelling for the writer, it exists as a tool for shaping the story, giving context later on.

[Margaret] Yeah. I think what's really interesting about that is, I know for me, when I think about timeline and linearity, it's very... The default, my default mindset is, this is something that relates to plot. Right? It is the order that events happen, events happening, it relates to plot. But what I think you're really underlining is that the order of telling is also a mechanism of characterization. And it allows you to show contrasts between who were people in the past or before they knew something or after they knew something. Because we are all shaped by those experiences and fictional characters included.

[DongWon] That goes to one of my favorite examples of a way in which you can play with time on a micro level. Right? A lot of what we've talked about are macro structures, but in Shonan anime, for example, you will have a fight scene that takes like six episodes to resolve. Like, 10 seconds of action that takes six episodes. And one thing that you'll... The one thing that's extending that is the sort of microflashbacks or playing with the length of time as these characters have monologues or conversations or moments that reveal deep things about character. Right? Shonan anime's all about the melodrama of the action of violent conflict as illustrating character growth and development. Right? Like, the recent anime Frieren is incredible at this. It's not really Shonan, but still, it does this very, very well. And it's a way to play with time to sort of do the thing that, Howard, you're talking about, in terms of past is not even past, and sort of what you're talking about in terms of using it for character.

[Erin] Yeah. I think one of the things to think about when you are doing something non-linear is what is your connection? Like, what is the thing that is connecting one thing to the next, if it's not time? And sometimes it's character development, sometimes it's emotion, sometimes it's theme. But it is something to think about, because, I think where nonlinearity can get a little, like, tricky and something I think about a lot in interactive fiction is smoothing through transition points.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because we have a lot of language to go linearly from one point to the next. So you can say, like, 3 hours later. You know what I mean? There's like a thing that exists that we know about. But if it's like three emotional revelations later, it doesn't feel like it has exactly the same ring to it. So, like, how do we move through, and part of that is knowing what is the connective tissue from one scene to the next. If it isn't time, and it's character development, how do you end your scene in a way that there is something that the character is about to learn or is about to know about themselves or the world that you can then pick up in the next...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Scene so that even though it happened 16 years before, it feels like you're actually still on some sort of through line.

[DongWon] Linear timelines are not always the most interesting way to get from point A to point B. Right? So...

[Mary Robinette] With those transitions, one of the cheap tricks you can do is to have a visual link.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Even in prose, if someone picks up a coffee cup in one scene, and then in the next scene, someone is putting down a coffee cup, even though they're separated by a giant span of time...

[DongWon] In film and TV, that's called a match cut.

[Margaret] Yeah. And I think another trick of very prose-y way to explore that is, if you're thinking about a writer like Virginia Woolf, and that very stream of consciousness style and... Orlando. Centuries pass in a paragraph, but you always do have that action that carries us through, you have the theme that carries us through. And I was thinking that this actually sort of dovetails with what we were talking about several weeks ago about the perils of Act 2 in a three act structure, of nonlinearity can be a way to sort of force yourself and your reader to be thinking in those process sorts of terms, maybe. Like, if the outcome is known, or the outcome has already happened, it forces us back to that space of progress... Of process.

[Howard] I now have the rubber meeting the road question. What are some technical tools that you use in order to keep things straight in your own head when you are running the telling in a different order than the worldbuilding, the actual events? What do you use? How do you do it?

[DongWon] One thing I want to flag is people will love to display at the start of each individual chapter the date or the time or something like that. That doesn't work. People don't read those and people don't remember those. I mean, there's some percentage of readers who do, but a lot of readers, enough readers, will be very confused because you're relying on just that to communicate the order in which things happen, and, boy howdy, me personally, it never works.

[Mary Robinette] I can tell you that the number of times that I've had people say, when does this story take place? And at the top, it says, 1952.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, yeah.

[Margaret] Yeah. No, it's like the slug lines, even. As a screenwriter, submitting this to other people who read screenplays, nobody is reading slug lines.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like, they're useful when you want to go back and clarify.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But for me, the thing that I try to do is grounding the reader with some sort of sensory detail that is thematically linked to the story, but also tells you something about the time and place, preferably something that the character's interacting with. So if I want to indicate that one story was in springtime, then I'm going to be having them cutting tulips. And if I want to indicate that another story is... Another part of the story is in winter, they're putting a scarf on.

[Margaret] For my own head, I'm... It's like keeping track for the reader, and also just for me as a writer... And, as tempted as I am, it's like I'm a screenwriter. My solution to all things is index cards. Which is sometimes true. But actually, if I'm just working on something for myself, I tend to leave myself a lot of, like, notes. And whatever program you're in, there's some ability to leave yourself that sort of marginal note. And so, I'll go through, it's like, hey, remember to set this up in the earlier scene, or it's like, this shouldn't get mentioned in the next scene, because to them, it hasn't happened yet. And so I just leave these flags for myself, if I can see the pitfall of I might be messing up my continuity, I will try to just leave these flags, and then do a read through later of making sure that my plants are where I want them to be, so that I can pay them off later on.

[Howard] That's an extremely relevant question, because as we are recording episodes, we're often recording them out of order, and we need to remember not to refer to episodes that we've previously recorded, but that you haven't heard yet.

[Margaret] I don't know what you're talking about, I love risotto.

[laughter]

[Erin] Love it. I will say, one way that I do this that is totally unhelpful to anyone who's not me, but I will share anyway, is that I actually sometimes, in terms of figuring out what order I want them... If I'm like, I want this to be non-linear, but I'm actually not 100% sure which nonlinear order I want to go by, what is my connecting thread? Do I want to follow a character, a timeline, the violin that's in every scene, and, like, the... Which we haven't talked about, the lawn linear where there's not much connection...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] From one to the next, the connection is all thematic and, like, the characters change completely, I will put it in Twine, which is a program people use for interactive fiction, and I'll basically create index cards in there that give a summary of, like, what the scene is. And then I will connect them with each other, and play it like a game. And be like, okay, if I go from scene 1 to scene 5, here is the order of things people will get. One, five, three, two. That works that way. Okay. Now. What happens if I went one, two, four, eight? Okay, that's going to be this different story. Which of those is the story that actually I wanted to tell? Because with enough craft, theoretically, I can make any of them work. But it's like what am I trying to have the reader walk away with, which is something I always think about when I'm telling a story. What is the end thing that I want them to, like, take away?

[DongWon] I will say that there is one edge case where it can be useful or interesting to deliberately confuse your reader, for them to not know when things are happening. One is that can be misdirection, of they think something happens in the present timeline, and you later realize it was happening before. And the other is, maybe just an aesthetic one. Right? You mentioned Virginia Woolf. A lot of times in her books, it's very unclear when something is happening. Is this a memory or is this happening now? Or is this something that's going to happen? I don't think it's ever going to happen. Anyways. Whatever. It's often very interesting, and there's... She does make clearly signal to the reader, don't worry about this, it doesn't matter when this happened. What matters is the character feels this, and the emotional quotient of it. And you can use that as a writer in specific circumstances. Obviously, don't overuse it, because confusing your reader on purpose is often a very unpleasant experience.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to flag one other version of the nonlinear timeline, which is the nonlinear timeline between works. So when you're doing prequels, when you're doing interstitial materials where you, the writer, are writing it non-linearly, but you know that someone at some point is going to stack them up linearly. Aeon Timeline is a really useful thing for tracking exactly when something happened. The Lady Astronaut books... I wrote those non-linearly. So if you read them in the sequence that they came out, you start, like, at the end of the story and then you go back... It's like... It is all over the place. And so I use Aeon Timeline now, but I did not originally, which is why, if you actually try to stack them, the times don't line up. And fortunately, most people don't actually notice. The other thing that I'm going to say is, going back to something that Erin talks about, which is the idea of the information arc, that tracking the information that you need when you're moving things around is really extremely helpful. Thinking about when does my reader need to know this information. And sometimes, when you are moving things around, you'll think, oh, I can't move it because they need this information that they haven't gotten. But you can also look at it and go, okay, well, what happens if they don't have that information yet? And that can be kind of a fun thing to play with.

[Howard] I have a... Talking about the tools and multiple works. I have a spreadsheet of the chronology of the Schlock Mercenary universe which I created in order to create the 70 maxims annotated book. Because there's this in universe artifact that got passed around to people, and as  the people... As it was passed around to people, chronologically, they made notes in the maxims that pertained to their life. So as you're flipping through, you will have a page that's got four notes on it, and those notes may have been written 50 years apart, and I had a spreadsheet to keep track of that. And once I built the spreadsheet, first, I looked at it and realized, oh my goodness, there's a story here that I need to tell, because these two people were on different sides of the same war. Wow, that's interesting. And the second thing was, I want to expand this spreadsheet to cover the entire chronology of my story, because I appear to have lost track of some things.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I need to stop doing that.

[Margaret] Were you... I'm curious, as you were doing that, were you also tracking... Because some of the characters you're annotating are characters in the Schlock Mercenary stories. Were you also tracking, like, when in the timeline of the other comics they would have been in possession of this book, making that note?

[Howard] Yes. Yes, I was. And it was... Yeah, it...

[Mary Robinette] Choices were made.

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] Choices were made. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun doing that, but the big value of it, for me, besides the fact that I sold a lot of those books...

[laughter]

[Howard] The big value for me was that I learned how important it is to track chronology even if you think it's going to be linear.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Just tracking it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And a spreadsheet is a great tool to start with.

[Mary Robinette] So we've been talking a lot about this non-linear thing, and there is one other piece that I want to talk about, because it's the experience of writing something non-linearly. When you know that you want to write something non-linearly, one of the hard things is the transition from one scene to the next. And that's hard anytime. But I want to give you permission, if you're doing something non-linear, when you've accomplished everything in that scene, that you can just stop writing the scene, and not worry about the transition until the entire thing is done, and then come back and do the transitions. Because those transitions exist to move you from one scene to another, regardless of whether you're doing something in a linear timeline or not. And so it can be very, very hard to figure out, well, how do I get out of this scene when you don't actually know what scene will follow it. So you do have permission to just stop writing it, and do the transitions later.

[DongWon] And then, one thing I wanted to say as we head towards the end of this particular timeline of this episode, is if this is all sounding very newfangled and complicated to you, a very contemporary technique... I just want to point out that nonlinear writing has been in fiction since the origins of the novel. The first novels were using epistolary as a frame or throughout the book, and epistolary is one of the classic forms of nonlinear storytelling, because they were presenting them as found journals or found letters or all of these different framing techniques. So when we think of the novel, from the very start, it was always non-linear. And actually, strict linearity... Linearacy... Is a very modern construction. And so when you think about playing with time and playing with perspective, I encourage you to think broadly and explore and have fun with it.

[Howard] I think that brings us to homework. Margaret?

[Margaret] Well, if we're taking things in a linear order, I believe that does come next.

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] So, for your homework this week, what I'd like to encourage you to do is find a story, a TV episode, a movie, some contained story that is using... Experimenting with some form of nonlinear storytelling. And enjoy it, go through it, and then go back through and track the gaps. Where is the... Where are character knowledge things changing, and where are we seeing characterization because of our knowledge spaces have changed, and where is audience information changing, and how does that affect where and how we are reading or experiencing what's happening next. Give yourself a little kind of universe outline. Unpack it there.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] Great. So it's time now to pause for our book of the week, since we're in the middle of the episode. And that book is The World Wasn't Ready For You by Justin C. Kay. He's got this great story with the same title, which is a nonlinear story, and it totally recontextualizes. And I want you to be thinking about it as you're listening to this entire episode.

[Howard] This is... has been... Will have been... Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.