We wrote about the timing of climaxes last week, discussing the realism and conceit involved in making character arcs climax simultaneous with plot and idea arcs in a story. This week’s post addresses a similar issue, but looking specifically at plot. In reflecting on some of the stories I would like to tell, and other stories I’ve read, I started thinking about timeframes.
Most stories provide us with a snapshot in time. If you think of a story like a picture, you have the main subject of the picture, who is in the present, and the landscape around that subject, which is also in the present. Only with some background knowledge can you reconstruct hints of the past from the present image, perhaps by identifying the bricks in the house on the left as having been pried from a road made by some collapsed civilization, or noting a hint of rusty metal to suggest a battle was once fought in what is now a forest glade. History is, in most cases, only hinted at in storytelling – in presenting it explicitly, it becomes less a part of the world, and more, well, historic, in that it is academic knowledge known by the reader, but not internalized. It is less immersive if the history is presented as history, and not as something integrated with and hinted at in the story.
Because of their nature as a snapshot in time, few stories cover a lengthy period. The entire Wheel of Time series, stretching across fourteen books, takes place in the span of ~2.5 years. If you want to tell the story of, say, the rise and fall of a civilization, or even an institution, in a way to fully capture it, you are often left to tell the story of a snapshot of that institution and use it as a lens by which to examine the rest. Even telling the whole life of a single character is beyond the scope of most narratives to capture; I wrote a little of my struggles with the passage of time in Impressions and adequately conveying how Raven is changing throughout the story, and that only covers a span of a couple decades.
A few notable books do cover longer spans of time. The Lord of the Rings technically stretches across many decades, with years passing even between Bilbo’s party and retirement to Rivendell, and Frodo’s flight from the Shire. The more significant exception, though, is Foundation. Perhaps because of his experience writing loosely connected short stories, Asimov is able, in Foundation, to tell the story of the fall of a civilization, the subsequent interregnum, and the rise of a new civilization through what are, effectively, short stories. As readers it is like we are dipping our toe into the timeline at key moments, so that the story unfolds for us as if we are seeing it play out before us, and not as history.
What about doing something in the middle, though? Foundation covers many centuries. What if we want to tell a story that, say, spans a few generations? Asimov’s technique would work here, too, but I’m interested in attempting to tell such a story while maintaining a more intimate connection between the reader and the characters and action. The disadvantage of something like Foundation is that it can still feel impersonal to the reader. In effect, the reader is an immortal watching civilization evolve, not participating in that evolution.
Though fantasy has a dearth of examples from which to learn (at least of which I am aware), this is a problem historical fiction authors routinely encounter. Conn Iggulden writes extensively in some of the notes accompanying his novels discussing how he handles the passage of time. Sometimes, this involves fudging the dates of key events to make them suit the story better, and the pacing readers might expect. Other times, it can mean, well, a longer series. This is the novelization of Asimov’s technique. Iggulden wrote an entire series about Genghis Kahn, and then wrote a follow-on series about some of his children. The same thing is possible to do within a book, by breaking the book into sections, for instance, that cover a certain span of years.
Ideally, I would like to find a means of conveying this passage of time and the evolution of a civilization over decades or centuries without relying on such snapshots and explicit markers for the passage of time. A more immersive technique, a third person omniscient narrator, perhaps, who contrives to carry the reader through the entire narrative of civilization’s rise or fall. There are a few stories I would like to tell that would offer me the opportunity to experiment, and I do think experimentation will be required. If you know of any great examples of managing the timing of a plot, please share them in the comments.
IGC Publishing 