Two Timing—Building Narrative Power by Telling Two Stories at Once

In the 1980s, a writing student asked John Barth to define what a novel is. He said, “a situation of a certain length that has something wrong.”

That’s just the sort of evasion a postmodernist like Barth might say. But there’s truth in it, too. In most novels, the first pages try to conjure a world for readers, while simultaneously revealing something in that world which is quite wrong.

(Using the Process of Storytelling to Overcome Writer's Block.)

If the writer is lucky, in fact, there might be several things out of sorts. Those novels contain multiple storylines, which add layers of events and meaning, and connect somehow in the end.

Countless stories rely, for example, on building a team and then dividing it. J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous trilogy establishes a powerful and unified Fellowship of the Ring. But soon the group is sundered by battles, kidnappings, and escapes, till there are three separate stories underway.

In a different genre entirely, Larry McMurtry’s masterpiece Lonesome Dove would be far less interesting if someone didn’t kidnap the primary female character, and ride off with her in the western desert.

The options are limitless. Divide athletes who are on a team together, separate lovers, require an injured character to stay put while another one goes for help. Multiple storylines can build a rich and suspenseful read.

Another approach is to create a story involving two or more time periods.

Two-timing can have all sorts of advantages. The characters in times close to the present may know how things turned out for the characters from an earlier era. This can create wonderful suspense. Don’t do it, don’t go upstairs during the power failure, because we know the bad guy is waiting up there and he has a knife. That suspense—about many things besides a hidden murderer—can provide a cliffhanger for the end of every chapter. The desire to return to the time period from prior chapters deepens the reader’s connection with the novel as a whole.

Another positive: People in different times dress differently, use different words, listen to different music. Contrasting details between the story lines can make characters richer, more vivid, and more unique.

That brings up one of the challenges of this form: It doubles the research, which can slow the writing. The good news is that the muse often hides in libraries, lying in wait with a bag full of useful details. My first novel had a character from the 1870s, for example. When I learned that most men of that time wore waistcoats, I put on a vest while writing scenes with that character.

The more difficult challenge is to make sure readers know what time period a new chapter happens in. If they struggle to keep track, their interest may wane. It may require another font, an extreme narrative voice difference, or a date at the top of the chapter to orient the reader. It’s a minor practical problem, but it must be solved.

The other disadvantage is more nuanced, and has to do with proportion. Perhaps the two periods’ stories do not require the same number of pages. But they do need comparable emotional and narrative weight. If one story has a person going ashore on D-Day, and the other has someone in present times changing a flat tire, the difference will be abrasive for readers. Ideally one time period instructs the other, or informs it, or raises the emotional stakes in some way.

The trick—or craft, if you prefer—is to line up the stories. One will be longer. One may provide better chapter-ending cliffhangers. Revising therefore means interrupting the weaker story in places where the most is at stake. One time period may organically have stronger material, so you’ll need to imagine ways to give the other story comparable tension, and drive toward a meaningful conclusion—ideally in a way that reflects and enhances the other storyline.

Some of my favorite books use the two-timing strategy. Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece Angle of Repose is a textbook example. This novel tells the story of Lyman, a disabled historian whose wife runs off with another man. Lyman decides to drown his sorrow in studying the life of his grandmother, an artist and writer in Victorian times—who has her own difficulties with marriage and fidelity. In a stunning show of craft, both stories find a gratifying completion in the last sentence.

Audrey Niffeneger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife tells the story of Clare and Henry. He has an illness that causes him to jump forward and backward in time. The clever move is the author’s decision to alternate narrators, so we see the contrasts of time traveling and ordinary life. Henry speaks from whatever era he landed in, while Clare stays in continuous time, like we do.

The Secret Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab, begins in 1714, as Addie makes a deal with the devil. Thereafter she jumps among various centuries and continents, finding and losing love as she learns how fast a life goes by.

In addition to being a favorite thing to read, two timelines is one of my preferred ways to write. In my novel The Hummingbird, a story from 1972 concerns a former Japanese bomber pilot trying to become a man of peace. The other story in that book, set in 2015, concerns an American soldier reckoning with PTSD after three tours in Iraq. The earlier story informs the more recent one, though the two men never meet.

In Pollock’s Last Lover, my latest book, female characters in 1956 and 2006 have what amounts to an argument across the decades about the power of women and how they achieve status. Both women are framed by the artist Jackson Pollock, and what may be his last painting before a sudden and violent death.

Awards and sales are not the only measure of a book’s success. But they do say something about readers’ willingness to keep following more than one era. Stegner won a Pulitzer Prize, The Time Traveler’s Wife sold 2.5 million copies, and Addie LaRue spent 37 weeks on the New York Times Bestselling List. Readers relish complexity in time.

One of my favorite books of time-jumping has sold an average of 125,000 copies each year for the 52 years since its initial publication. The story leaps almost whimsically from the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, to the mildest postwar suburbia, to life in a zoo managed by whimsical aliens. The author gives readers an early alert that Slaughterhouse-Five takes place in an unreliable world, which has a great many things wrong.

Kurt Vonnegut’s warning: “Listen. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”