How (and Why!) to Write a Multiple-Timeline Story

Here’s the nightmare scenario: you write a novel with more than one timeline, because… whatever (we’ll talk more about that in a moment). The reader picks it up, chooses their preferred timeline, and skips the other(s) altogether.

Ack. How can you tell a story that’s clearly best told with multiple timelines—and that keeps the reader’s attention equally throughout both?

The short answer is easy to say and difficult as hell to pull off: you need to convince the reader there’s a good reason for telling the story the way you have, that you’re enabling them to see how past and present inform each other and—if they’re very fortunate—to glimpse both past and future at once.

The first question to ask, of course, is why you want to write multiple timelines. Is this a story that can only be told through two sets of eyes, through two timelines? Sometimes the past is just the past and doesn’t enrich the present story; at other times, it can add texture and meaning and lift a story’s purpose. You need to be able to discern which is which.

A multiple (usually dual) timeline story isn’t simply about era-jumping. The past and the present need to work together in tandem. What is the novel really about, on a deep level? What’s the story that connects the two timeframes? The past has to be at work in the present; the present has to be looming in the past. In a well-written dual-timeline novel, there’s always a sense of working toward what visual artists call the vanishing point.

In a linear perspective drawing, the vanishing point is the spot on the horizon line toward which receding parallel lines diminish. The easiest way to illustrate this in real life is to stand in the middle of a straight road. When you do, you'll notice how the sides of the road and the lines painted on it meet in one spot on the horizon. The center line will go straight for it, and the lines on the side will angle in until they all intersect. That point of intersection is the vanishing point.

The vanishing point in this kind of fiction is where your timelines come together. There needs to be the promise of that intersection throughout the novel. The reader will slowly—or suddenly—realize what these two stories have to do with each other.

The best tool for making that happen is in the transition between each and every timeline shift. Transitions are the glue that binds the stories together, that bring past and present and future into alignment, that move the narrative forward so no one’s tempted to skip one of the eras in favor of the other.

Each transition needs to give a reason for switching from past to present and back to the past. Think of these transitions in terms of a handoff in a relay race: each handoff needs to be clean, keep the forward momentum of the previous racer while providing something important and necessary to the story in the next relay. 

In Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng handles her transitions seamlessly. In one instance, one chapter ends with a mother reading her daughter’s diary; the following chapter starts in the past when the daughter first started writing that same diary as a little girl. The diary is the handoff.

The mystery/crime genre is uniquely suited to multiple-timeline storytelling. Planned crimes are often committed to cover something up, to keep someone from learning a secret, to maintain one’s status or job or reputation or marriage. While most mystery novels begin with the discovery of the crime, the story in fact started much earlier than that—in a sense, its discovery is its aftermath. What happened to make that crime necessary? Using dual timelines is an excellent way to tell both stories.

In Tana French’s The Secret Place, the first timeline is told from the POV of a police detective trying to solve a murder; the second timeline takes place a year earlier, in the months leading up to the murder happening, and is told in multi-POV third-person. Even though the reader knows who is going to be killed (“Chris Harper has just under a month left to live”), French keeps the timelines tight and tense and the reader feels compelled to learn more.

In any multiple-timeline novel, pace is essential. And while the pacing of forward movement in time is vastly different for each timeline, the emotional cadence of the story arcs needs to stay in tandem. The more positive/light-hearted parts come together. The darkest turns appear in consecutive sections as well. This pace keeps the reader from finding a new chapter a convenient place to stop.

On a most abstract level, what multiple timelines fundamentally alter for the reader are levels of knowledge with respect to time.

There are many ways in fiction to manipulate what the reader does—and doesn’t—know. Any time an additional timeline is added, the reader’s knowledge about the universe in the book expands.

To explore whether additional timelines pay off, it may be useful to think about the equilibrium of knowledge between the reader and the inhabitants of the fictional universe (the narrator and the characters).

Broadly speaking, there are three general scenarios for the equilibrium between reader’s knowledge and the characters’ knowledge:

• In the most simple format, the reader and the character learn about and experience everything concurrently; the reader simply observes the character’s life and thoughts.

• In the second scenario, the character knows more than the reader. This occurs, for example, with unreliable narrators, or characters/narrators telling the story from a certain distance of time or geography.

• In the third scenario, the reader knows more than does the character. With any omniscient narrative, readers are privy to other characters’ thoughts, actions, decisions, and so on, whereas each character doesn’t have that advantage.

Generally, multiple-timeline novels fall into this third scenario of knowledge equilibrium. And in fact, what this gives to the reader is a narrative distance: they understand they have an upper hand in knowledge against the characters inhabiting at least one of the timelines.

When a past timeline is told from the future timeline protagonist’s point of view, the reader knows more about the past timeline’s character’s future than does the character herself/himself. When two different timelines are told from two different characters’ points of view, the reader’s advantage of knowledge becomes even more complicated. They know what’s become of some characters or plot points in the past timeline, but they also observe revelations about the past of which the present timeline’s characters may not be aware.

Multiple timelines are most justified when the reader experiences what other authors have called the “poetry of dramatic irony.” The reader is in on a secret—and it’s often a momentous secret, something that will significantly affect characters on one or both timelines. That secret will in fact affect the novel’s outcome in myriad and complex ways. The reader can watch characters who are unaware of the secret move inexorably toward their vanishing point.

And yet, at the same time, the reader should be left with certain strategic blind spots. We don’t want to give everything away too soon; there has to be a certain satisfaction, a feeling of completion, when the reader reaches the end.

 If multiple timelines are pulled off well, what we’re doing is giving our readers an experience that’s outside of time. We’re allowing them to step, momentarily, fictionally, outside our own inescapable confines. A more distant perspective on time affords readers a certain poetic justice: they gain understanding and empathy through an experience of time that’s impossible to achieve in real life.

And that, after all, is one of the fundamental purposes of fiction: to offer readers something they cannot know in their daily lives, and yet with insights that will inform and perhaps even enlighten those daily lives.

It’s a lofty goal. But multiple timelines provide one way of achieving it.