literature

The Chronology of Storytelling

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Faraleigh's avatar
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Literature Text

Imagine you're reading to a live audience. It can be as big or small as you'd like. It can be your writing or someone else's. It doesn't matter. Indulge yourself in the fantasy. So you're reading to a live audience. They're enraptured. They're engrossed. They're generating a movie in their heads as you weave your tale. Imagine how important every word you produce is to these movies. Every detail you provide adds another layer. They smell the flowers. They feel the roughness of the brick. They see the vivid colors of the clothes.

And then you require they perform time travel to make the movies accurate.

Wait. What?

The chronology, or order of events, in a story is something I've been focusing on a lot in my writing lately. I'm not just talking about the overall chronology. There's obviously a beginning, middle, and end to a story. You progress from one event to the next. Things happen in chronological order. That's how, y'know, stories make sense. That's also not really what I'm talking about. I'm talking about chronology on the micro scale. I'm talking about the chronology of a sentence and a paragraph. What insanity am I talking about, you ask? Let me explain.

Consider this hastily composed example:
Rob took a seat beside the campfire. "I don't like that plan one bit," he said after an hour of stubborn silence. He anxiously picked at the hem of his sleeve all the while.

Perfectly viable, right? Right. It's grammatical. Punctuation's proper. Everything's spelled right. You understand the scene. You understand the dialogue. You even get an idea of what's going on. The chronology is wrong, though. Let me walk you through it to illustrate my point.

So it starts off with Rob. There's a guy. He does something. He sits next to the campfire. That's well and good. He says some dialogue. But wait! What's this? He said it after a significant amount of time? And he was acting a certain way during that significant amount of time? We have to go back on the scene we've constructed in our heads so far to amend what's happened. We have to go back to that first part, where Rob's sitting next to the campfire. Not only is he being stubborn (which suggests posture, expression, etc.) while he's sitting there, but he sits there for an hour before talking. So we've had to double-back to correct what's in our heads. But now it's corrected and we can move on. But wait! What's this? He was doing something during that hour of stubborn silence? Now we have to double-back again on our corrected brain movie and correct it again!

Now consider this hastily revised example:
Rob took a seat beside the campfire. He sat in stubborn silence for an hour, anxiously picking at the hem of his sleeve. "I don't like that plan one bit."

It has all the same information. Rob. The campfire. Stubborn silence. An hour. Anxious sleeve hem-picking. Dialogue. It's just rearranged—with micro chronology in mind. The order in which it happens is how it's described so that there's no need for the audience to go back and correct the scene they've generated in their heads.

So really the moral of this story is that literature can be smoother and more involving if you consider the chronology of not only the whole story, not only story arcs, not only chapters, but also paragraphs and sentences. If you're not forcing your audience to rearrange events and amend what's in their head while they're reading or listening, they're able to get lost in your writing easier. They're more able to lose themselves and forget who and where they are.

And with that, I bid you adieu. I hope this helps you in your literary endeavors!

Peace, love, and bulletproof marshmallows!
First, thank you :iconinkfish7: for the idea of writing tutorials on writing! You're an inspiration. :)

Second, I will repeat myself and say I hope this helps your writing. It's kind of long, for which I apologize, but if you think I should break this up let me know! Any other critiques you've got on this, as it's my first written tutorial, I would love to hear. It shouldn't be necessary to say but I'm highly receptive to criticism! :)

Update: Another thanks to =Inkfish7. He pointed out that the dialogue tag bit was repetative so I removed it. Conciseness is thrilling. :)

Update2: Thanks, ~nikkidreamer, for pointing out my mistaking of "adieu" for "ado". All fixed now, though!
© 2012 - 2024 Faraleigh
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evil0verlady's avatar

I wish more writers would read this. :(