Writing the Strata
Mining the layers and why I love multiple timelines.
I love stories with multiple time lines, and so it follows that I write stories with multiple times lines. Some people like them. Some people definitely don’t. But write what you love, right?
(I realize the saying is write what you know, but I think it’s far better to write what you love and do research about what you don’t know.)
I was home visiting my parents this past weekend, which got me thinking about time and the way it is layered in certain places. Although I have lived in several countries and multiple cities, my parents have been in the same house for my entire lifetime. It’s an old stone farmhouse in Eastern Ontario that sits on a river. Next to the river is a towering oak tree that is over three hundred years old. That tree is what I have seen every time I’ve looked out my bedroom window. There’s comfort in that continuity.
In the bedroom of my childhood, I am surrounded by the ghosts of my former selves. Personal layers of my life sit one on top of another like the strata1 of a rock formation. Change is hard to see unless you can witness its accumulation.
As the items pulled from a drawer in my desk demonstrate, this is the bedroom of my infancy and my childhood; it is where I spent hours doing sixth grade math homework, and tenth grade French, it where I came back to after traveling abroad for the first time, where I wrote part of my first play, where I return to see my parents (and myself) aging, and where now I watch my son explore the oak tree and throw stones into the river.
But it isn’t just my personal time layers, which compared to the rings of that oak tree are just a blip. I think my fascination with the timelines under me came from growing up around old, abandoned buildings.
As a child I would spend hours exploring. The treehouse pictured above is up my road. There’s also an old cheese factory, the ramshackle grist mill (recently restored but when I was a kid, it was an enticingly boarded up death trap), and most creepy (or delightful, depending on your tastes, and mine run dark), a small stone building deep in a corn field where bodies used to be kept in winter until the ground thawed and they could be buried. There were always ways to get inside these falling down places and once in, it was easy to start imagining who else had stood in that same spot. It’s not exactly time-traveling, but maybe as close as I’ll ever come.
Stories can work this way too, layering one timeline on top of another. The past layers aren’t just exposition (“this was the place where such and such happened”), they need to be as alive and immediate as the present timeline. Each layer supports and affects the layer above it.
There are lots of ways to handle these timelines, but my favorite is to have them moving simultaneously. Readers can’t read more than one thing at a time, so the trick is to keep the tension taut in each and you move from one to another. What you need is a central anchor. In my first book, Beneath the Stairs, the anchor was a house.2 There were four storylines: the one of the building of the house in 1936, one from 1965, one from 1998, and one from the present. In each timeline there was a mystery involving the house and my goal was that what the reader learned in one timeline would add to their understanding of the next. In my present book, Keep This for Me, the anchor is an event. Like a stone dropped in water, the ripples are storylines that move outward in concentric circles, all originating from one random act of violence, a roadside abduction.
As a writer, it’s like juggling, you have to return to each timeline frequently to keep them all aloft. It’s a fun structural balancing act and at a certain point in the process, my office wall will be covered with color-coded index cards. As a reader, I love feeling that all the timelines are barreling toward the climax and disparate pieces are coming together.
If you enjoy stories with multiple timelines, I’d love to read your recommendations.
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In case you’re thinking, hmm, I think know what that term is (don’t I ?), here is a definition: Rock Strata is “horizontal layers of sedimentary rock, which are usually visually distinguishable from adjacent layers due to their differing composition. Each individual stratum represents a period of geological time when the sedimentary layer formed.” (from Rock Strata Definition, Formation & Importance ) The bolded words are the important ones for the metaphor, in case that wasn’t obvious.
It was actually inspired by a real (and supposedly haunted) house I went into when I was a kid. Again that desire to feel those layers. To touch something that has been through time feels like a kind of time traveling. A connection to people lost to the past.
Beautiful post on time and timelines, Jennifer — and thank you for the thoughtful and informative ways to think about the structure and movement of timelines in the craft of novel writing.
Really enjoy imagining story lines as strata! Of course Makkai's The Hundred-Year House comes to mind, as does Pariat's Everything the Light Touches — would love to hear your other suggestions too!