My story takes place in a few different places, then the protagonists come together to finish things. I've written relatively short scenes and hop around between the protags. But the order confounds me. If things are relatively simultaneous, how do I choose which order to present them to the reader? How much should I allow to "happen" before checking in on the other group? If I present the groups in a certain order at start, do I need to keep that order? How do I keep suspense w/out losing rdrs?
There are a lot of different ways you can go about figuring this out, and most of them are going to come down to the specifics of your story and of how you want it all to come together. The length of the piece is going to affect how you piece it together as well.
I’m presuming here that all of your converging plots move around and eventually converge on a central ‘main’ plot. There’s probably an event or series of events that will bring all your characters together, and a lot of times in this kind of story there’s an event that kicked off the plot-lines initially, though they might start at wildly disparate places.
If things are relatively simultaneous, how do I choose which order to present them to the reader?
As with a lot of things, this is going to be subjective, whichever order you choose to show these simultaneous events is going to affect the way that they are read, each new scene will be informed by the one before it (of course), and so each reiteration of the same event will build expectation and meaning.
Think about what will benefit your story the most at each simultaneous event, do you want to build up to a high point? Try starting with the ‘smallest’ moment and building up to the ‘biggest’. Do you want to create suspense? In the first iteration of the event there could be some unexplained element that is later revealed to have been caused by your other characters acting at that same point in time.
I know that at this point the characters and their arcs are separated, but they’re linked temporally, and continuity of time is going to do a lot for the coherence of the story as a whole – event A takes place at sunrise on a Monday, and so you illustrate the individual experiences of sunrise on a Monday for characters 1, 2, and 3, as they are affected by The Event. It can be as simple as a particular phase of the moon or the first crash of thunder from a storm.
A great use of this kind of linkage across vastly separated narrative strands is in A Song Of Ice and Fire, during the Red Comet arc (read a rundown of it HERE, if you like, though it will be spoilery). The Red Comet is seen simultaneously by a number of different characters, and it has a different meaning to each of them, and influences their actions and the decisions that they make, while each of them carries on with their separate plot-lines. The image of the comet remains consistent, but its meaning changes and the simultaneity of the events builds tension across the different plot-lines.
Try putting your scenes into different orders and reading over them, how do they feel to you? Change them around and read them again, think about how the reading order shifts the meaning of each section, and think about what you want to achieve with them.
How much should I allow to “happen” before checking in on the other group?
As much as needs to happen.
Consider each section as it’s own mini narrative, it should have a beginning, middle, and end, and it should be contained enough that when it’s over the reader is confident moving forward into different sections. It’s a balancing act between completing that arc and creating tension moving forward – of course you want larger narrative strands to continue, to pull the reader forward, but each section should resolve some small conflict or problem, while, of course, creating more.
Try charting out each parallel plotline, and marking where the major ‘turns’ in the narrative happen.
I’ve made this awful graph to attempt to give some visual aid:
so each line across is a plot, and each circle is the scene being shown, the thread between is the narrative, shifting across plots. Now the ‘C’ plot has the opening and closing scenes, as well as having the most, so it’s probably the ‘main’ plot-line, B has one less, and A one less again.
Now this is just as an example, you may have as many or as few scenes in any given plot as is needed, and the apparent ‘main’ plot could switch halfway through (Another Song of Ice and Fire example: the Red Wedding shifted multiple plots and eliminated a few that up until that point had seemed like ‘main plot’ material).
If you wanted you could have a diagram something like the above and add in threads for main characters or groups of characters, do they move from plot to plot? At what points? Where do they interact with events from other narrative arcs? It might be that figuring out the timeline and movements of your story on a macro level can sort out for you what order feels best to put your scenes into.
(Also, remembering that in the above graph the ‘scenes’ represented by the circles can involve showing plot before or after the apparent placement on the timeline, you might start in plot C and then have plot B’s first scene include the line up TO the circle, as long as the chronology of events is clear and new information and interest is being brought to the fore, readers will cope with some re-examination of events)
If I present the groups in a certain order at start, do I need to keep that order?
Only if you want to!
A strict structure could be utilised to create tension, but it’s not at all necessary. You should do it only if you feel it will benefit the story.
How do I keep suspense w/out losing rdrs?
Building tension and traction. Make sure that each section raises conflicts, questions, issues, problems, that can’t all be solved in that section, that provide the impetus for readers to want to continue.
I will say that you should be aware of how the beginning of a section works with the end of the previous section – you don’t want to have massive buildup and then cut to something that isn’t interesting, that’s probably where you’ll lose readers. You can step tension down, of course, from the end of one scene to the start of the next, but you’ll do best by giving the readers reasons to be just as invested in the new scene as they were in the one they just finished.
