Guest Post by Jody Hobbs Hesler
Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the novel, Without You Here (September 10, 2024; Flexible Press) and the story collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better (October, 2023; Cornerstone Press). She serves as assistant fiction editor for The Los Angeles Review and a lifelong Virginia resident and she teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA. You can visit her at jodyhobbshesler.com.
The defining event in my novel Without You Here takes place almost twenty years prior to the narrative’s present arc. Conventional wisdom, echoed in early feedback, advises writers to avoid stretching stories across such broad spans of time, arguing that compressing the timeline heightens stakes, speeds pacing, and ups a story’s overall payoff. Sound advice—but it didn’t fit.
The defining event: the suicide of Noreen’s kindred spirit Aunt Nonie when Noreen is eight years old.
The story traces how the loss defines relationships and conflicts Noreen experiences throughout her life, landing her in a dangerous marriage by the time she reaches the age Nonie was when she died. The heart of this story lies in how trauma and grief cycle in and out of time, affecting the characters as sharply ten or twenty years later as the first day, and influencing their most intimate decisions. Compressing the timeline sacrifices the most crucial elements of the story.
So how can we compress action without compressing a timeline?
Picture what happens when you toss a pebble into a body of water. First, the dramatic splash. Then, a series of ever-widening circles that eventually reach the shore. That’s how I wanted time to work, always circling the central event. Below are five tips I followed to build my story this way while maintaining the reader’s trust.
Invest in the characters.
When we shake up a timeline, we risk disorienting and alienating our reader. One way to ground them is to create compelling, believable characters who remain recognizable across the narrative.
In Lori Ostlund’s After the Parade, another novel that spirals in time, the main character, Aaron, appears in the present as a socially awkward, tentative forty-year-old and in the past as a familiarly trepidatious, outsider child. No matter where a scene is fixed in time, we recognize Aaron, and this roots us to the story and renders the switches in time-scape seamless.
Build a present arc with its own momentum.
A present arc can provide an axis for a story that spirals in time. Two recent literary crime thrillers, Joanna Pearson’s Bright and Tender Dark and Polly Stewart’s The Good Ones, involve murders and/or disappearances that take place more than ten years before the present action, which, in both cases, follows a friend of a victim revisiting and digging into the past much later. Their investigations, coupled with the coinciding tribulations of their current lives, trigger new events and conflicts. Discoveries about the past pressure the experiences of the present and both push the story forward.
Might I reiterate that these two books are literary crime thrillers, a genre especially valued for pacing. A non-chronological timeline is perfectly capable of building even thriller-level suspense. In these examples, the present arcs take the form of informal, friend-driven investigations. In my novel, the present arc follows Noreen through several months of her adult life as her marriage becomes increasingly hazardous. In all of these books, the past scenes offer context and perspective on the present, continually heightening the tension.
Shape each chapter/scene with its own arc and urgency.
The timeline is linear in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing but on such a grand scale that I imagine Gyasi wrestled with similar questions about how to sustain the reader’s buy-in. To tell the generational saga of two families split by the slave trade in the 1700s, Gyasi offers a sequence of episodes featuring descendants at different time periods, in Ghana and in the US. Gyasi invests in every single character (tip #1), and places them in consequential moments of their lives where the stakes are clear and pressing, keeping the reader curious and engaged.
Play with associations versus chronologies.
When we step away from a timeline as an ordering principle for our stories, what replaces it? Here I’d like to recommend Jane Alison’s insightful craft book, Meander, Spiral Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, where she introduces and explores several plot shapes as compelling as the typical Freitag triangle—which she likens to the male orgasm. She argues that nature shows us plenty of other patterns whose shapes stories can imitate—a leaf falling, a river wandering, to which I’ll add my splash metaphor from the introduction above.
These shapes can yield associations among events that don’t depend on time. The action in Without You Here spirals in time, so chapters abut other chapters that share something fundamental—a theme, a type of experience, an emotion.
I’ll be honest here. Figuring out a non-linear order terrified me. My kids pitched in to help. Early on, I’d written descriptions of each chapter onto index cards so I could spread them out on a table and find gaps or redundancies. One of my kids input every index card into a spreadsheet. The other studied the spreadsheet and proposed a sequence. Their support encouraged me to trust the novel’s nonlinear shape and inspired me to chart it.
Embrace headings.
Never underestimate the straightforward. A chapter division declares a change to the reader, so why not shift between timelines at a chapter break? Chapter titles can go even further, outright declaring what the writer intends for the story to do in that space. In Without You Here, I used time stamps to help readers navigate the story.
We’re writers. Our ultimate goal is to help readers understand the stories we’re telling, so I’m in favor of any tool that gets us there.
Without You Here by Jody Hobbs Hesler
Noreen, now twenty-seven, is the same age as her Aunt Nonie when she died by suicide, a haunting parallel that weighs heavily on her. As a child, Noreen shared a unique bond with Nonie, who was her namesake and confidant, but her aunt’s struggles with reality and addiction led to a tragic accident that would forever shape Noreen’s life. Now a young mother in a troubled marriage, Noreen fears she is following in her aunt’s footsteps, questioning whether she can break free from the past or if she is destined to repeat it.
Order the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Leave A Comment