Dual Timelines Are Hard
(especially when you don't know what you're doing)
The most difficult thing about writing Tell Them You Lied was getting the dual timeline structure to work. At first, I tried to have the narrative jump forward in time, alternating between a 2001 “then” and 2010s “now,” but I couldn’t get past the third chapter. No matter how I twisted the story in my head, I couldn’t get it to make sense. There was no way to keep the big secret1 from the characters long enough to justify such a hop.
After a while (and one particular reader—thank you, Jennifer Close, you are brilliant!) I started over, having the B timeline jump backward instead. This was easy, almost too easy. I drafted many, many pages describing the friend group as they’d been in college. I had no problem coming up with scenes—the first time they met, making art and drinking and getting high and going to parties and to class, snippets of life off-campus too, and the mean things they did to each other, their obsessions and the jealousy and rage and vanity brewing inside them, leading them down the the path that would get us to the “now” timeline.
I slipped the new chapters into the manuscript almost at random—in places where I felt like the A timeline was moving too fast, or when some interaction or some character needed further explanation. Which meant that my past chapters were not in chronological order, and they did not have any kind of structure. Which was a problem, because that isn’t actually a timeline.
It’s backstory.
When CeCe sent me my R&R, she gave me two sage pieces of advice about the B timeline: “something big needs to happen,” and it needs to be more organized, preferably in chronological order.
Somehow up until that point, I had not realized that a dual timeline needs to do more than supply information. That it needs its own arc. Its own big secret. It sounds incredibly obvious now (embarrassingly so), but it was something that I didn’t understand for far too long: a dual timeline is nothing short of a second plot.
Yes, the B timeline will have the same characters as the A timeline. And yes, the A timeline will rely upon things that happened in the B timeline. The two stories will probably intersect. But they are separate entities, like twins. And, like with twins, everything must be doubled: two catalysts, two settings, two midpoints, etc…
Everything you do for A you must do for B.
Once I understood this, I made a three act structure for the B timeline (set-up, confrontation, resolution). It worked pretty well (well enough to get CeCe to sign me, and eventually, with some more editing, to sell the book).
But, by the time the book sold, many months had elapsed, and something about the B timeline still niggled at me. I was worried about it not being good enough, not solid enough. I had become very obsessed with the Save the Cat method by that point (I had rewritten a separate manuscript using STC beats, to great success), and I felt like I could do better.
After we agreed to terms but months before I signed a contract, I asked if I could make some changes to the manuscript. Both CeCe and my editor said yes.
What I did then is something I should have done from the beginning. I divided the manuscript into two documents: A timeline and B timeline. Then, because the B timeline comes first chronologically, I started there. I used an Excel spreadsheet to plug in all my beats, and saw what I was missing— oops— the entire second act.
There was good news, too. The scenes I needed were for the most part already written. I just had to coax them into a structure. I added a big midpoint twist to work toward. I did math (ugh) and figured out just how many chapters I needed for the B timeline to get me to the certain point in the manuscript where the A timeline would take over.
When I was finished, I made a similar spreadsheet for the A timeline. The A timeline was in better shape, thankfully. I made a few tweaks, then I weaved the two documents together again.
Guess what? The way the timelines folded together this time was just what I’d envisioned. I was surprised at first—it really felt like magic to me. Or dumb luck. But after a while, I realized it was neither. Since I’d used the same beat structure in each timeline, they had no choice but to match up they way they did. There were more edits to come (which I will go into next week), but I felt better about my book than I ever had before.
I’ve said many times in this process that I will never again write a dual timeline. It was so difficult, complicated, and messy. But I understand now that all that sticky stuff was the learning process—not the dual timeline itself. Now that I understand how it works, I honestly can’t wait to try it again.
aka, the Major Dramatic Question
Excellent post with some pragmatic suggestions. I am wrestling with something similar with my WIP. For those of you who like to experiment with structure, I recommend Joan Silber's craft book, "The Art of Time in Fiction." There's a good section on what she calls switchback time--moving back and forth between timelines in fiction.
This process insight is so helpful. Again, thanks for sharing.