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This is Elizabeth Stark in the Book Writing World. Today we are going to talk about ways to interweave two related stories into one book.
Very often, members of the Book Writing World (as well as other writers I’ve worked with) find themselves writing layered stories, all in pieces, and then struggling with how to connect two major stories—say, a past story and a current story, or a plot and a subplot. Here are several ways you can approach interweaving two stories into one:
1) Insert a back story or subplot on a need-to-know basis. This takes some figuring out, since often you want your readers wondering about something before you supply the answer. Or you may want to give some but not all of the answer. At other times, though, you know you must set something up from the secondary story material before it hits the main story. In this approach, you work your way along the narrative track of the main story and add in pieces of the alternate story as needed.
2) Use alternating between the two stories to create suspense. This is easier to do that you’d suspect. Start with one story. Whenever any question arises, or any as-yet-unexplained action takes place, you can simply end your chapter thre—raising the stakes, hooking the reader, who wants to know what is going to happen next or why something just happened. Then switch to your other story and take it to a similar place of suspense. Often these places can be uncovered by looking at what currently happens in the middle of a particular scene or chain of actions and instead interrupting it in the middle!
3) Consider the epic approach: if the two stories are a back story and a current story, what would happen if you started at the beginning and went through to the end? Don’t rule out chronology, an arc through time, without considering it first as a solid option.
4) Think of establishing one picture or set of expectations and then using your secondary story to alter that picture slowly or to build it. In this approach, you are setting up a status quo or set of circumstances and then revealing additional information or events that change the readers’ view of what has been established. Your strategy is to create a strong and convincing opening world and then unroll the secondary story so that each new bit forces re-evaluation of the given world.
5) You can always create a form or formal structure, in essence a rule for the shape of your book and then use that to order the material. For instance, People of the Book has a front story that moves forwards in time while the back story is given in alternating chapter. Each chapter is basically a stand-alone short story and the material in the back story moved backwards in time. You might decide that you are going to move through a year in each story, and alternate that way, or in some other formal way shape your book.
6) Conversely, you might take a more poetic, intuitive approach. Imagine your storyteller is enchanting a group around a campfire. Pull the elements into your book as you feel appropriate. Here, too, you might make the connections more imagistic—creating links between the stories more by the echoes between the content, so that one chapter might end with a ship sailing away on a stormy sea and the next will begin with the water in a bathtub, in an entirely different story, setting or era.
You will choose your structure based on the material, on your premise and the goals you have for your book and also on what you love as a reader. In the end, the structure doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to work really well—to make a wonderful story.
This is Elizabeth Stark in the Book Writing World. Happy writing!
The lecture offers some great examples of structure. I’m still finding my way into what kind of structure my book will have. I do have multiple stories. I think at this point, It feels like I have two main stories narrated by one 1st person narrator. She (Lucy) is an actor in both of the stories and is affected by both. One of the story lines involves searching for, and finding her aged aunty in a remote backwater of Kerala- that story line delves into the family’s past. The other story is unfolding as we read it. It will intersect when the current story starts to overflow into the place where the aunty lives in India.
I also have a secondary narrator ( The night watch man, Samudra) who weaves the stories together for us by his observations. He tells the story through the 1st person but he feels a little bit omniscient to me- he lives in a tree and sees a lot of the action on the ground from above. He also has his own part in the story.
Sometimes it feels like I should just tell one story and not try to interweave them, that I’m setting myself up for complication- not sure. Also, I have found a well known device to allow one of my characters to tell her story in the first person (the aunt) by simply letting her run on in a monologue, where a lot of the family history is told to the protagonist. @Elizabeth, can you say more about the use of monologues to tell or fill in pieces of the story? I haven’t started my 500 words of revision a day yet- I have read the MS but need to figure out how to start revising. Or I need to lay out some structural changes first. a bit overwhelming. May make into part of the call Monday. will be on the East Coast for the rest of the month, writing a lot ( I hope) and calling in from there. I’m dying to be well into revision mode, so I can get back into my writing rhythm, something’s holding me back- errgh!