Wandita

Thursday, October the eighteenth

Oct. 18: - Plot: Outline Revision #2 ▼

(1) Review your plot elements thus far and organize them into your outline.
(2) Add a chronological timeline to your revised outline, using whatever measure of time is appropriate in your story. Determine when plot events happen in time (which is not necessarily when you will reveal them in your novel.) See this example composed by JK Rowling while outlining one of her famous Harry Potter novels.
(3) Optional: Brainstorm the best chronology(ies) for your story and work it(them) into your outline.

Chronology Strategies
Linear Narrative - the story is told in the order the events occurred.
Non-Linear Narrative - the story is told out of order.
Reverse Chronology - the story is told backwards.
In medias res - the story starts in the middle, goes back to explain how it got there, catches up, and then resolves.
Flashback/forward - individual scene(s) that take place prior to or after the current action.

Note that the difference between these chronological devices can be minute. Read the examples below to see how most stories use more than one style of chronology. Your job is to plan the order in which you will tell your story to the reader. Don't get hung up in the nomenclature.

EXAMPLES:
Lord of the Rings is mostly linear. The events of the story are revealed to the reader as they unfold for the characters. Some flashbacks occur, such as when Gandalf tells the Fellowship how he defeated the balrog and what happened when he visited Saruman.

The hit TV drama "How to Get Away with Murder" begins in medias res, with a group of law school students burying a body. The rest of the story is generally non-linear because it routinely moves back and forth in time. The screen will display "3 months ago" on a series of scenes, and then flash back forward to the body-burying scene again, then move back in time to "2 months ago," using flashbacks to build the story for the viewer. Also, some scenes are repeated multiple times as flashbacks, often as visual-only scenes replaying while a character is explaining something to other characters or building a defense in the courtroom, but through careful camera angles or a few additional seconds of footage, the scene reveals more about the mystery than was obvious the first time the viewer saw that same scene. In this way, the show plants red herrings to fool the viewer and later prove their assumptions wrong.

The hit TV drama "The Walking Dead" is famous for beginning episodes in medias res and then going back in time to explain how the characters got there. On an academic level, these opening scenes could also be construed as flash forwards because, much of the time, the scene at the beginning of each episode is not actually the climax, or the action in the middle of the story, but rather, it shows where the characters end up at the very end of the episode. In medias res is technically the middle, not the end.

One episode of "The X-Files" featured a character who woke up each morning to find that it was one day earlier than the previous day. On the "first" (last, for the character) day, he was on trial for murdering his wife. On the "second" (previous) day, he was meeting his attorney. The plot continued to move backwards in time until it reached the day of the murder, at which point, the protagonist had enough information to prevent the murder from occurring at all. This is an example of reverse chronology, a rare but effective tool for revealing mysteries.