This post was precipitated by a conversation I was having with @mcbaer about some of the differences in our two styles of writing. In particular, I told him that I appreciated his stories and the style of his writing because the choices he makes about where (and more importantly when) he focuses lead to quite different stories than I would have written, given the overarching narrative and plot. He wanted me to elaborate on that, but I was heading to bed, and now that it’s a new day, I realized it was going to take a bit of extra space to explain what exactly I was talking about, so I thought I would expound a bit on the concept of chronological focus, and it’s role in determining what sorts of stories we tell.
First, let me explain what I mean by the term chronological focus. To help explain what I mean, we’re going to use some diagrams of a possible narrative, let’s all it Narrative X. We might represent this narrative like so:
Narrative X involves a few plot points we’re all familiar with. There are two characters at the start. At point A, the two characters encounter a MacGuffin with some power to change or control the two characters. At point B, the two characters interact with the MacGuffin and become new, sexier, men. And finally, at point C, the two characters are in a new, sexual relationship of some kind–a new status quo different from the start.
Narrative X is very generalized–a good chunk of my stories, as well as the ones written by a fair number of other authors, can be said to be various versions of Narrative X. Often, what differentiates these stories from one another is content–in one version, the two characters might become a muscle bears thanks to magic gym equipment. In another, a magic cigar might turn one character into a leather bear dom, and the other into his submissive fat pig. I want to set these various content differences aside for the moment, however, and instead discuss the ways in which we can get different stories out of Narrative X not by applying different content, but by varying structure instead.
Before getting into the meat of this, however, I want to clarify one more distinction which will be important here. I’m going to be using the words “narrative” and “story” distinctly here, such that “stories” are defined as different versions of a more general “narrative”. The former are more specific than the latter. If you don’t keep this in mind, what I’m about to discuss will seem very confusing, and I will do my very best to be precise.
We have established already that two stories of the same narrative can look very different because of content–but structure plays just as important a role, and generally, this structure has to do with what point of the narrative we focus on within the story. That is, not every story is going to traverse the narrative from “start” to “end”. Instead, we can imagine, say, three different stories–Red, Green, and Blue–which all traverse different portions of the narrative–that is, each of these stories will possess a different chronological focus. Those three distinct stories might look something like this, when laid over our previous diagram of narrative X:
All three of those stories focus on different chunks of the narrative timeline. Let’s say, for a moment, that all three stories draw from the same narrative content–the characters are two friends in college, and one friend finds a smoking pipe in a thrift store–this would be point A to point B. He smokes the pipe, and becomes a older daddy bear, and when his friend arrives, he becomes his younger cub son–this would be the space from B to C. Lastly, reality shifts around them giving them new lives as a wealthy gentleman, and his obedient, horny cub slave–From C to the end. Now, given how the three story bars are structured, each story is going to end up omitting some of this content. The green bar, in the middle, would cover most of it–say, from the point of discovering the pipe, and ends around the point of reality changing for them both. The red story, on the other hand, spends more time developing the characters at the beginning, and stops right after the changes have begun, leaving everything which is to come up to the reader’s imagination, with help from the author by way of foreshadowing. The blue story is the opposite–it focuses after the change, as the two characters adjust to their new reality and forget their old lives. It’s all the same *narrative* but each *story* would be wildly different, with their own distinct climaxes and conflicts.
The choices an author makes, about where to start and where to finish their story–within the broader context of the narrative–is one of the more important things we need to consider. Do I want to focus mostly on the transformation? Then I’m going to go with something like the green story, but perhaps shrink it at each end even further. Do I like the idea of watching these two students find their minds overwritten by personalities which aren’t their own? That would be more along the lines of the blue story. Do I want to tease the reader a bit, setting up conflict and characters and then providing them something which stimulates their imagination? Then I’d go closer to the red story.
Of course, not every story is linear, either! You can imagine a completely different story in the narrative being told backward, in chunks. You begin with the older gentleman and his slave cub for a while, examining their life. You back up to the midst of their change, looking at them struggle. And then back up once more, showing how they arrived at such a predicament. The length of time you’re covering in the narrative also has no bearing on length of story. In the diagram above, it’s perfectly conceivable that the green story could be covered in fewer than a 1000 words, while the blue story span the length of a short novel. There are an infinite number of ways to cut up and tell a narrative structurally, and each one yields a unique story. The challenge as an author, is in figuring out what you want the story to *do* and then selecting a chronological focus which best accomplishes your goal.
Bracken's Corner 