Disturbed Chronology

Why writers mess with time

I went to see the film of  ‘Little Women’ last week. It was excellent. Somehow it crystalised everything I felt about writing and I must admit I felt the tears welling up as I remembered reading it as a child and so badly wanting to be a writer like Jo. How I wish I could tell my young self that I’d get there in the end!

It seems most people are agreed it’s a wonderful film, although I’ve heard people say the constant flashbacks are a little confusing if you don’t know the story.

I’ve also been watching the BBC one drama, ‘The Trial of Christine Keeler’ another narrative which moves backwards and forwards in time. Maybe it’s a bit of a trend. It set me wondering why writers do this. I’ve come up with the following reasons:

1.     Both the story of ‘Little Women’ and the real life scandal of Christine Keeler and John Profumo’s affair are well-known. Perhaps writers feel they can take liberties with the chronology because people are so familiar with the accepted timeline of events. Mixing it up a little gives a fresh perspective on accustomed narratives.

2.     We live in a post-modern age where all truths (apparently) are relative. Perhaps disturbing the chronology of events enables writers to put a personal, subjective spin on events, and make the story their own.

3.     By establishing what will happen, then returning us to an earlier point in the timeline, we are invested in how events will pan out. When I teach Shakespeare’s plays, my students are sometimes surprised that Shakespeare didn’t create his own plots; he adapted well-known stories, with which his audience would be familiar, thus, apparently, removing the element of surprise. Yet somehow we can still watch ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ knowing they are both doomed, but still hoping for a different outcome. If audiences are capable of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ then readers must be too.

I’m sure there are other reasons, but these are the ones I can think of. This technique can be very effective in fiction but it comes with a warning: whilst the timeline may be perfectly clear to us as writers, we don’t always take our readers with us. Whilst we don’t want to patronise them, I still think we need to signpost the changes in chronology. Sometimes just a date at the beginning of a chapter can do this – or ‘two years earlier/later’ or similar. The late, great Andrea Levy used the tags ‘1948’ and ‘Before’ in ‘Small Island’ and this worked well. If you want to know more about how writers successfully ‘mess with time’ I would recommend Andrea Levy, Sarah Waters (Night Watch), Kate Atkinson (Life after Life, A God in Ruins) and Maggie O’Farrell to look at how the experts do it.