Mixed Timeline Techniques

So I've pretty much decided (surprise!) that a mixed timeline is the way to go. Now what remains is to brainstorm the best way to carry it off. In order to keep this blog spoiler free, I'm going to speak in generalities about my thought processes in dividing up my timelines.

The basic question is what gets revealed when in each timeline. I don't want my future timeline to be a spoiler to my past timeline. However I do want it to hint at my past timeline, to provide clues about my past timeline. In the context of this book, the difficulty I'm running into is the need to do a character POV set in the future that would, by its very nature, give away the climax of the past timeline.

And so I think I know what I need to do. I need to divide the book in half. The first half of the book is going to alternate between those two timelines, past and present. Each of these will reach a climax at the same point, and the climax to the past timeline will coincide with a climax to the future timeline.

In the second half of the book, I can start to include that character POV I was talking about. The past timeline will continue, and bring me up to the point where the future timeline began, way back at the beginning of the book. Meanwhile, the future timeline will have another climax of its own at the end, which sets up the third book to continue on from that point.

If I were writing the story chronologically, it would just go straight through; in this way, it will double back over itself. By the time the book ends, that entire stretch of time will be dealt with, without gaps. As I indicated before, I may choose to compose the story chronologically and reorganize it later. That still remains to be seen.

As a result, the story will have two slow builds to four big climaxes. They will hit two at a time, in the middle of the book and at the end. Otherwise, the result would be four builds to four climaxes. The best reason not to do it this way is because I'm not certain that two of those climaxes are big enough to stand alone. By coincidence, one of the lesser climaxes is in each timeline. So by layering the story, I'm maximizing the effect of those big moments.