Writing About Writing: Parrallel Stories

Keeping the timeline straight in any fictional story is hard. Keeping it straight during a sequel is even harder. What's even worse is keeping the sequence of events from becoming a tangled mess in stories that take place at the same time, but in different places or from different perspectives.

In other words, parallel stories

There might be moments when the plots of those stories converge briefly, then part ways again. People in one story might hear of the events of another, without interacting directly. Or there might be more significant amounts of overlap, with the characters being connected and in communication with each other, just not in the same place physically.

That is where things get dicey.

In my twisted fairytale series, Book 4 takes place between Books 1 and 2, and the main character is the (very) estranged sister of one of the recurring characters in Books 1-3. The estrangement made for a very good reason why Character A was only hearing about Character B in the form of rumours and hearsay, and why she couldn't just go and ask what the heck they were up to.

While Character B was related to Character A's development over the course of the story, they weren't plot-essential and didn't enter the story much. That lack of interaction made it easy to keep things running smoothly, as the two stories had very little overlap, and any discrepancies were easy to pass off as the result of rumour getting things wrong.

The side-stories for my series The Queen's Blade was less straightforward.

While most of the short stories are prequels or sequels, taking place well outside of the main story and mostly serving to expand on the backstories of certain characters, a few take place during the story itself. The problem there is working out what vital information the characters know (or don't know), and the hurdles in either communicating something that the other characters should know, or a damn good reason to keep it a secret.

For example, not telling your grieving sibling that you survived what everyone thought was a fatal experience...

In this case, there was a good reason: keeping their enemies confused about where the titular Queen was located, and the fact that said Queen had made herself had to find, much less communicate with, during a rebellion aimed at de-throning her.

But during their reunification efforts, taking place during Book 2 and lasting up to the last few chapters, I had to work out why these efforts at confusing the enemy never reached the ears of characters who would be listening for that sort of thing specifically. I also needed to figure out how it integrated with the rest of the story and series epilogue.

That sort of thing is harder than it looks.

My more recent series, A Surfeit of Sisterly Affection, was more difficult. While books 2 - 5 take place mostly after Book 1, the first couple of chapters of Book 4 take place concurrently with Book 1, and several more chapters at the same time as Books 2, 3 and 5.

This makes it even more important to work out who knows what at which time, and where they can be feasibly unaware of important facts without appearing stupid or blindly ignorant.

An event or circumstance that certain parties are keeping close to the chest, or a recent event delivered by snail mail (regular post), can be a mitigating factor in why another character has no clue that something has happened, and having it come as a surprise. After all, why would they know about something happening far away that they have limited connection to? Their information is out of date, but not necessarily wrong.

At the same time, matters relating to family who are in reasonable communication with each other means that the characters have to find out within a reasonable timeframe. In the part where the stories don't overlap, it can be hard to work out what counts as a reasonable timeframe, and where the events fall in relation to each other.

Ultimately, it involves a lot of re-reading your own work to figure out the fine details, and where you can slip in a revelation that wasn't overtly mentioned in previous books.

A character being reasonably distracted, or events not described in detail, are excellent opportunities. So is something that could have reasonably happened when a previous viewpoint character wasn't present, and therefore didn't find out until they were told. In the worst-case scenario, you can have a character actively keeping something a secret, for some mostly plausible reason.

You can also hope that your readers just weren't paying that much attention to the fine details, but that's a fool's gambit. Somewhere, at least one reader will remember, and point it out. Probably on Reddit or a fan-forum.

When writing parallel stories, the best thing to do is have a basic timeline sketched out in advance.

It doesn't have to be beat-for-beat, but should at least involve where the stories overlap and the important bits that are likely to trip you up later.

You'll save yourself a lot of grief (and laughter from anyone you try to complain to) that way.