The Catholic Writers Guild

Last week we talked about the importance of accurate order within a sentence or paragraph. Today we’re looking at the same type of problem, but when it occurs on a much larger scale: Zigzagging through time as we move from scene to scene within a story.

Watch out for this problem when writing from multiple points of view. What will happen is something like this:

Scene 1: Clara was eating breakfast, then she worked in the garden until noon, when she tripped over the corpse as she went to toss the dead tomato vines into the compost.

Scene 2: Officer Wilson was arguing with his wife before the 10 AM Mass, then took her to brunch to make-up, and was just eating his third slice of quiche when he got the call about the body.

The two scenes overlap. When we tell the story, the reader expects we’ll follow a clear chronological timeline. There are some exceptions where backtracking to retell actually makes the story easier to understand, but this isn’t that time. When we edit, we are looking for inadvertent or clumsy zigzags that make it harder for the reader to get a clear picture of the story.

In our example above, we can open with Clara, leave her in the garden while we look in at the Wilsons, and then move back to Clara before she stumbles over the body. Keeping to the chronological order of events will help the reader keep the facts straight.

Some of the time, a single great big zig works. When there are two clearly defined, self-contained scenes happening at the same time but which do not intersect, we can do a single step backward to tell the second scene. Clara goes off to inquire if the lady at the craft store saw anything suspicious, while Wilson goes to scour the woods for footprints. We can follow Clara’s entire mission into the village, then step back with a nice obvious “Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .” scene-opener that lets us know we are now rewinding a couple hours to see what Officer Wilson found amidst the poison ivy. This can work if there are big chunks of story with obvious time-markers, and clear start and end points to the concurrent scenes.

But if we have inter-twining, action-packed scenes, the zigzag will confuse the reader. The trouble being that action-packed, intertwining scenes usually involve lots of different characters doing interesting things at the same time.

Use your editing powers to make your characters behave on cue. Imagine we’ve got Clara being held at gunpoint by the villain, the two engaged a battle of wits. Meanwhile, the Wilsons are downstairs trying to find the secret panel that opens the passageway to the buried treasure. The Wilsons are going to be tempted to have a pithy conversation at the same time the bad guy is using his .45 to poke holes in the wallpaper around Clara’s head. And then we’ll end up with a confusing zigzag, as we try to report first on Clara and the stray shots, and then back up and find out what the Wilsons had to say during it all. Resist.

Force Clara and the villain to have their conversation first, and then think of some reason to pause – perhaps he needs to reload – so that the Wilsons can have their argument during a lull in Clara’s scene. We can move back and forth between the two scenes, but the rule is that one scene must be static while the other is dynamic.

“Static” doesn’t mean “nothing”. It just means “the reader can fill in the blank”. We can leave Clara tied in her chair with dynamite underneath and a slow fuse burning, and pause in order to see if the Wilsons have found that secret panel yet. The important thing is, Clara needs to sit quietly (perhaps trying to wriggle out of her bonds, that takes plenty of time) while the Wilsons find the panel. Clara can say something interesting whenever the Wilsons are busy just rummaging, or digging, or trying endless combinations to solve the secret code.

But don’t let them zigzag. Your publisher thanks you.