In my current WIP the main characters life spans have been "a bit protracted" as one character describes it. Not quite immortal (far too cliché) but certainly kicking around for a very long time.
Problem is, telling this kind of story means placing scenes and characters in different periods of history and time that are not chronological. I have been struggling a bit to determine the best method to accomplish this. For now, since it is just a rough draft, I headline each new time-scene with the date and place it is happening. I don't know if I want to leave it that way, or find a different way to move through the timeline.
I have read many books that use this method and I didn't feel it was terribly distracting. It perhaps takes a bit more mental effort from the reader than simply hopping on and enjoying the ride however, and I still want to make the story an easy, fun read.
Oh, and just to make things more complicated, the scenes are never sequential. The main character suffers memory loss and the time jumps tell his back tale in the dreams, recollections, and histories of other characters.
Any thoughts on ways to do this effectively?
Hi Timothy.
Heading each mew time-scene with the date is probably the easiest way to do it, although it does rely on the reader following the dates closely enough to make it work. What sort of time differences are you talking about: months; years; decades? Would the world be sufficiently different from one time to the next to allow you to show these differences?
There's no harm in using dates, but there's surely no substitute for littering the different time-scenes with distinct clues. Descriptions that seem too obvious to you won't necessarily be to your reader. You will know your exact meaning for each word you use, whereas someone else may interpret things entirely differently, so leading them by the hand and showing them the way is always worthwhile.
That said, I don't mind if I'm sometimes lost in the telling of a story. I read Brett Easton Eliis's Glamorama a couple of times, and found myself almost as lost as the main character during both readings. It's this shared confusion and lack of control that made the story work for me; that I had as little idea as he did as to what was going on allowed me to build empathy for an otherwise fairly unlikable character. I imagine that memory loss would be deeply disorientating, and it could be that the reader can become even more emerged in your story by sharing that disorientation with your character. So long as there is sufficient clarity by the end of the story, why not allow the reader to share your protagonists confusion throughout the telling of it?
Mark.