Chronology

During yesterday's post,I started thinking about the different orders in which a story can be told. Chronological is the first and easiest choice, and often the best. The reader is experiencing the events in the same way that the characters are. I think a chronological method of storytelling is preferable when you want to really draw in the reader and make him relate to the character. "That could be me," the reader thinks.

The trick here is that in a lot of ways, the character treated in that way needs to be a vessel that the reader pours himself into. In other words, it's hard to really relate to a character who is hugely different from yourself. That's not to say that such a character isn't attractive to read about--they can be--but in terms of really getting inside someone's head, the more different that head is, the poorer fit it will be.

That all seems pretty self-evident, but what does it have to do with chronology? I personally think that readers are very clever about filling in the gaps in a character's history. The author does not have to specify that the character grew up in a small surburban town, had a sister, was on the swim team, liked the Orioles, etc., unless those elements are vital to the story. The reader has the remarkable ability to fill in those details with details from his own life. In other words, the reader assumes unless told otherwise that the character had experiences different in particular but identical in form to his own.

When I, as an author, want to override those assumptions, I've got to do it by supplying the details. To some extent, I can do this through exposition, but isn't the first rule of writing "Show, Don't tell"? If a major event happened in a character's past, I may need to go back and show that to the reader. Hence the flashback.

Of course, nothing says I have to tell the story out of order. I could make all of the events chronological, even if there are big skips of time. The danger here becomes getting the reader interested in the story in the first place. I personally think that the reader should have an idea what kind of story he's reading within a page or two of starting a short story, and within a chapter or two of starting a novel. If every story starts with the childhood escapades of the hero, what kind of story am I reading?

It's much better to engage the reader on the right level to begin with. Once we care about a character and the situation he's currently in, then we can go back and figure out what motivates him. At that point, we'll want to know about his childhood because we like him.

Anything more complicated than the simple flashback is done to construct a puzzle of some sort. The character in the present day knows something the reader does not, and we gradually uncover the larger picture as we gain more information. That kind of story can be very, very satisfying--but it makes it difficult to get inside the character's head. After all, the more the character knows that we do not, and are not allowed to supply from our imaginations, the less we can relate to him.

I'm not saying that one type of story is better than any other. I think that most stories are on a continuum between the direct, straightforward, relatable character and the mysterious, complex character-with-a-past. The attempt to blend both of these together is why so many stories have a young, naive, relatable character (e.g., Luke Skywalker) who is brought by a mysterious old mentor (e.g., Obi-Wan Kenobi) into the larger world of the story.