Exercise #18: How to Structure Multiple Storylines
Caroline Leavitt, Celeste Ng, Dana Spiotta, Alix E. Harrow, China Miéville, Ann Leckie, N.K. Jemisin, Kate Hope Day, Matthew Salesses
Hi friends,
My novel Appleseed comes out in less than two weeks, on July 13! If you want to be sure you get a copy on release day, you can still preorder it from wherever you buy your books, whether that’s at your local independent bookstore or online at Bookshop or elsewhere. One of my local indies, Changing Hands in Phoenix and Tempe, is also selling signed copies which can be shipped nationwide, if you’d prefer a personalized copy.
I’ll also be putting on a handful of virtual book launch events mid-month, reading or in conversation with some great writers and artists. If you’re interested, I hope you’ll register for one or more of the events below:
July 12: Franklin Park Reading Series, Brooklyn, NY (with Jeanne Thornton, Keenan Norris, and Brooks Sterritt)
July 13: “The Thoughtful Bro”/A Mighty Blaze (with Mark Cecil)
July 13: Changing Hands, Phoenix, AZ (with Benjamin Percy)
July 14: Wednesday Night Sessions at KickstART Farmington, Farmington, MI (with Mitchell Nobis)
July 15: City Lights, San Francisco, CA (with Cecil Castellucci and Brian Evenson)
July 21: Exile in Bookville, Chicago, IL (with Josh Ritter)
Thank you to everyone who has already ordered their copy or requested it from their library or simply helped spread the word! As a heads up, I’ll be sending a second newsletter this month on pub date, to mark the launch with an exercise on retelling myths and folk tales. Should be a fun one, so keep an eye out.
On to July’s exercise: I hope it’s useful! Be safe this month, be kind to each other, and have fun writing!
Yours,
Matt
What I’m Reading:
In the Quick by Kate Hope Day. I was a fan of Kate Hope Day’s debut If, Then, and had been eagerly awaiting her followup, In the Quick, which I’m happy to report I liked even more. This is smart, character-driven sci-fi, a close depiction of the thought processes of scientific breakthrough and the experience of being more comfortable with technical problems than with other people. (It also has one of the most beautiful covers of the year.)
Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. This has been the most talked about craft book of the year, I’d say, and for good reason: it’s such a smart and important book on what craft is, who it’s for, and what assumptions it hides; it’s also full of great practical advice for writing better fiction and running better workshops. I read it when it first came out, and then reread it again this week, enjoying it even more the second time. An essential read for anyone who cares about the practice of fiction writing or creative writing education.
Exercise #18: How to Structure Multiple Storylines
At the beginning of June, Caroline Leavitt posted a question on Twitter that seems to eventually vex many ambitious novelists: “Dual timelines,” she wrote. “Please can we talk about how to do them without losing your mind?”
I joined in a brief conversation about writing storylines with Leavitt and Celeste Ng, where Ng and I both offered our personal solutions, although neither of us had been entirely happy with our processes. There are three timelines in my Appleseed, for instance, which I drafted in alternating 30 page chunks until I had a full draft, after which I edited each timeline solo to make it work alone before cutting them into shorter chapters arranged for what I hoped was maximum effect. Ng said that in her novel she also ended up “writing all the timelines separately (with the others in the back of my mind) and then finding places where they intersect and it makes sense to braid them together.”
My guess is that many writers working with dual or triple timelines draft in some variation of this haphazard method, although others might be more methodical. Dana Spiotta, whose novels often feature multiple storylines, told The New Yorker: “I write storylines, or threads, by moving from one to the other, as they’ll appear in the book, so that I can feel the rhythm and juxtapositions. But, at some stage when I’m revising, I read all the scenes from a thread in one long gulp to make sure that they have narrative and emotional logic. So the novel gets unbraided and then braided back up.”
If so many writers agree that working with multiple storylines is a difficult task to take on, how might we practice to get better at it in advance? What are some of the models we might follow?
Last fall, I taught a class on worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy, and by chance two of the novels I taught turned out to have almost the exact same narrative structure. Then this summer, I read a third novel that utilized the structure again, which reminded of a fourth that does something similar. All four novels are page-turners, with quick-moving plots; all four build out new worlds, meaning that they have to deliver lots of information; and all four ask the reader to ponder questions that turn out to be answerable only after the point where the storylines converge.
Today we’re going to look at those novels: Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, China Miéville’s Embassytown, and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, all of which have multiple storylines, and all of which make the same basic move: one of the storylines is shorter than the other, and terminates at the two-thirds mark of the book or right before the beginning of move to the finale. (I’m using “storylines” instead of Leavitt’s “timelines” because these different threads don’t have to be taking place at different times for this to work, although they often are.)
Let’s break these novels down as quickly and as simply as possible, so you can see how they’re structured.
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice is 23 numbered chapters long. For the first sixteen chapters, it alternates without fail between present and past (let’s call the present A and the past B for our purposes), with the backstory timeline terminating at the exact moment its crucial mysteries are fully revealed, giving the reader a full understanding of protagonist Breq’s motivations as she heads into the novel’s final act. Leckie’s structure looks something like this:
A1, B1, A2, B2, A3, B3, A4, B4, A5, B5, A6, B6, A7, B7, A8, B8, A9, A10, A11, A12, A13, A14, A15
Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January has a similar chapter pattern: for most of the novel, Harrow alternates between chapters recounting protagonist January’s story in chronological order and other containing the pages of an in-book text (also titled The Ten Thousand Doors) about the rules of the many-worlds portal fantasy January finds herself in. If we label January’s chapters J and the in-book text T, we can see Harrow’s structure unfolds like so, with the J thread halting at the end of the second act:
J1, J2, T1, T2, J3, T3, J4, T4, J5, T5, J6, T6, J7, T7, J8, J9, J10, J11, J12, J13, Epilogue
Once past its three-part prologue, China Miéville’s Embassytown also settles down into a back-and-forth structure for its first two-thirds, moving between two streams of the past, in chapters labeled either “Latterday” or “Formerly.” These are numbered independently, so that “Latterday, 1” is followed by “Formerly, 2” and so on, until (after a final four-chapter burst of the Formerly thread) the story catches up to its present action, after which it proceeds from the Latterday thread in chapters which are simply numbered. The book’s chaptering looks like this, if broken down:
Prologue, L1, F1, L2, F2, L3, L4, F3, L5, F4, L6, F5, L7, F6, L8, F7, F8, F9, F10, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31.
The novels above are all dual storyline structures, so let’s add at least one novel with three: N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. In Jemisin’s novel, the story follows three characters across three different time periods: Essun (E), Damaya (D), and Syenite (S). With a few interruptions, the novel alternates between the three storylines, but not always exactly in order or in the same proportions:
Prologue, E1, D1, E2, S1, E3, D2, E4, S2, Interlude, S3, E5, D3, S4, E6, S5, E7, S6, D4, E8, S7, Interlude, S8, E9, S9, E10
As you can see, the Damaya strand is shorter than Essun’s or Syenite’s, but it terminates in a similar place as the shorter strands in the other three novels: at the exact point The Fifth Season moves into its final act—and unveils the secret its structure was keeping. (If you’ve read the book, you know the twist I’m talking about, so I won’t spoil it for everyone else.)
Now that we’ve established how these writers use this successful model at novel length, let’s try adapting it to a shorter form, so that we can practice its moves without committing to writing an entire novel.
Your exercise this month is to write a short story in which two storylines alternate and then converge, extending only one storyline to the finale, with the last third of the story informed by the information revealed in the shorter storyline.
You can model your story on any of the examples above, if you’d like, using the patterns I’ve written out as a skeleton on which to hang your story: anywhere the novelists wrote a chapter, you should write a scene (or maybe just a paragraph-long fragment, if you’d like to aim for something even more manageable). Because a short story is so much briefer than a novel, it’s harder to pull off a full three-act structure, so consider abbreviating the patterns somewhat. As an example, the Ancillary Justice model is the cleanest, and so it’s easy to see how a shorter version might look like this:
A1, B1, A2, B2, A3, B3, A5, A6, A7
Any structure like this will work! The important thing, if you’re following the model, is to bring the B storyline (which, if the storylines are timelines, will usually be the storyline set in the past) to its conclusion as close to the two-thirds mark as possible. In essence, the B storyline is two acts long, while the A storyline is three—but that third act of A is made more complicated and enjoyable by the conclusion of B’s.
You might also try this at the level of the flash, but you’ll have to move faster. You might write each thread as a one- or two-sentence fragment, putting some white space between them, alternating storylines until the two-thirds mark. Let’s say 750 words, 250 words of storyline A alternating with 250 words of storyline B, then finishing with 250 more words of only storyline A, informed by what was discovered in B?
I hope this is useful! Novel structure is one of the most challenging things to learn well, but this kind of breaking down the chaptering of existing novels and then trying out the models at smaller scale can be a great way to practice. It’s also a good way to write an outline: the same story structure I’ve suggested here could be used to create a scale model of a novel you’re trying to write or revise before committing to the full work of the next draft.
Good luck! See you next month!
Thanks so much for reading! If you’re not already subscribed, please consider doing so by clicking the button below. This post is also publicly accessible, so feel free to share!
Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in March 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.