What if you were to just toss a cup of scenes onto your pages? Each one was a glowingly written pearl, error free, and just plain awesome. They all involved the same characters. They all could have taken place today in hometown USA. Would you read this book?
I am such a linear creature, reading this random collection of scenes would likely drive me nuts. I am always in search of a progression of events, a character arch of some sort, a resolution to go with the beginning. This is why I don't care for a book of short stories. I actually have to gear myself up for such a book - prepare myself for the fact that the book is full of separate stories and not chapters. I've been taken by surprise a time or two and was really frustrated - didn't pay close enough attention to the title when I picked the book up.
But I digress - Back to our cup full of lovely pearls in need of a string. The string of your story is very important. One scene needs to lead into the next one, and the next one, and on and on. You can't have Mary kissing Billy before she meets him. You can't have Billy showing off his baby boy before he ever knows Mary has moved in next door.
Now let's really make this interesting and mix time travel in. Does that fix our issue with the cup of pearls? It doesn't. It can't. Time travel can be fun to mess with; you get to visit all sorts of interesting places in time, or visit different spots in someone's life, as might be the case in this sample.
Even with time travel in full play, we still need a string for our pearls. The best way to do this is to pick at least one character in your story. I'll flip a coin and...Billy is my main. Regardless of how many loops through time the story takes, the events that happen around Billy happen in order. Billy needs to do this, which means that he needs to go there, which lets him meet Mary, which causes him to do something else so he can go back and kiss Mary, which isn't enough so he needs to go back to the beginning and give his assignment to someone else, so he can go back and win Mary's hand. But then for some reason he needs to go back even further to set some detail right, and... Well you get the idea.
It doesn't matter how many loops and trips through time, forward or backward, there still needs to be something linear, something we can follow from a beginning to an end, through a character arch. Look at Billy. No matter how he traveled through his story, he went from an irreverent time traveler to looking to commit to a relationship, to being a proud daddy. That progression, no matter how glowing the scenes are, is not possible without a string.
Do you tell your story in order? Now, I'm not talking about the opening scene that is essentially the ending, and then the story backs up and gets us there. That's different. Besides, it still has a string. It's just that the clasp is on the other end of the necklace. haha
Showing posts with label order of events. Show all posts
Showing posts with label order of events. Show all posts
Friday, July 19, 2013
Friday, December 14, 2012
One Foot in Front of Another
Most days lately, I have a chunk of the day between when my computer's battery runs out and when we start the generator, to read whatever books I have around here. Some of those books I've received from fellow authors most of whom I met on Facebook. Most are books that have been around here for a while. I just don't get to a bookstore very often. One thing I've noticed in nearly all of them is the varying degrees of attention to one important detail. You wouldn't think it's all that important, but if you ask me, it's one of those subliminal things that can really trip us up if we're not careful.
What am I talking about?
The order of events. No matter what kind of events you want to talk about, it's vital they happen in order. Just try to picture yourself walking across the living-room putting your front foot in front of your back foot - that might be fine for the very first step, but it will certainly hang you up by your heels if you try to do that with any following steps. Last time I checked, to make it across the room, the back foot needed to go in front of the front foot in order to make progress across the room.
This order applies to nearly everything we do. Words are strung along in a particular order as dictated by the language you speak, but there are many things you might not be so aware of that also follow an order. You notice, see, and look at things all in something of an order too. First you notice something, say, out of the corner of your eye, then you turn your head to locate it, and then you actually look at whatever it is, and maybe study it in detail, if it's interesting enough, not that every step needs to be included, but you just can't study some object and then notice it a few moments later.
Okay, so I'm getting just a little too obvious in my examples, but I'm hoping you are getting my point. At the moment, I'm reading a book where the writer has a very coiling style to the way he tells his story. It's all good; as his characters go round and round in their path through the story, they are moving forward, but everything they do or think is generally hashed out in one manner or another at least once or twice before the actual action takes place. It's not quite repetition, something I advise against if I have the opportunity, and yet it is. His story line is more like a spring someone has flattened out across a table. To help you visualize this, lets take a spring from your mattress and then drive the car over it, and lets assume the spring remains flat after the car has gone on. This style took some getting used to, but the story is one I'd read again so it's pretty good. However, if his style was slightly less coiled, the book would be less than 725 pages long.
Why do I mention this book if I'm not going to review it?
Because of his coiling style, he sometimes gets his order of events - whatever they are - kinda turned around. I've only noticed it a handful of times, so he's pretty good at keeping things in order, but it did trip me up a time or two, and made me go back and read a passage through again. Yeah, I'll do that sometimes, if something gives me an unexpected swing. So, my advice to all you budding authors out there, pay attention to the order of events. Even things that don't seem to matter, can end up making a difference to the overall picture.
What am I talking about?
The order of events. No matter what kind of events you want to talk about, it's vital they happen in order. Just try to picture yourself walking across the living-room putting your front foot in front of your back foot - that might be fine for the very first step, but it will certainly hang you up by your heels if you try to do that with any following steps. Last time I checked, to make it across the room, the back foot needed to go in front of the front foot in order to make progress across the room.
This order applies to nearly everything we do. Words are strung along in a particular order as dictated by the language you speak, but there are many things you might not be so aware of that also follow an order. You notice, see, and look at things all in something of an order too. First you notice something, say, out of the corner of your eye, then you turn your head to locate it, and then you actually look at whatever it is, and maybe study it in detail, if it's interesting enough, not that every step needs to be included, but you just can't study some object and then notice it a few moments later.
Okay, so I'm getting just a little too obvious in my examples, but I'm hoping you are getting my point. At the moment, I'm reading a book where the writer has a very coiling style to the way he tells his story. It's all good; as his characters go round and round in their path through the story, they are moving forward, but everything they do or think is generally hashed out in one manner or another at least once or twice before the actual action takes place. It's not quite repetition, something I advise against if I have the opportunity, and yet it is. His story line is more like a spring someone has flattened out across a table. To help you visualize this, lets take a spring from your mattress and then drive the car over it, and lets assume the spring remains flat after the car has gone on. This style took some getting used to, but the story is one I'd read again so it's pretty good. However, if his style was slightly less coiled, the book would be less than 725 pages long.
Why do I mention this book if I'm not going to review it?
Because of his coiling style, he sometimes gets his order of events - whatever they are - kinda turned around. I've only noticed it a handful of times, so he's pretty good at keeping things in order, but it did trip me up a time or two, and made me go back and read a passage through again. Yeah, I'll do that sometimes, if something gives me an unexpected swing. So, my advice to all you budding authors out there, pay attention to the order of events. Even things that don't seem to matter, can end up making a difference to the overall picture.
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