Chapter 70: Chronology is (mostly) Your Friend

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

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I am not a straight line thinker. I know this because often my wife, who is a straight line thinker of Olympian proportions, will sometimes feel the need to jump in when I am making a point to say, “what Michael means to say…”

I do not take offense. I recognize that my brain does not operate sequentially, that while I may begin at Point A, I can somehow neglect Points B through E on my way to F. Oh yes, I see, people say when my wife explains the missing links, now it makes sense. Sometimes they smile at me, as if talking to a young child.

It is much the same with my writing, and here I suspect I am not alone. I can see the whole story at once – where it begins and ends and what will occupy the vast, murky middle. I know where I need to land. The question is how to get there.

Because readers cannot avail themselves of my wife’s guidance, I need to ensure that I am not racing ahead, skipping key junctures in the story, thereby leaving them scratching their heads in bafflement before quitting on my story, never to return. And yes, when a reader stops reading your story it is always your fault. The reader is never wrong. 

So I must do what does not come naturally to me: impose order on what can otherwise feel chaotic. I need a clear narrative spine. 

Early on, my frustration in harnessing the processes of my thoughts led me to conclude that this spine had to be as rigid as tungsten. It worked. My stories stopped meandering and if not propelled with laser-like clarity, nonetheless began to gain order and direction. My writing improved, and as it did, the work, paradoxically, became a little easier because I wasn’t struggling to balance so many thoughts racing around my brain like a vaudevillian spinning plates.

There were any number of spines I could choose from, but over time the one that I drew on again and again was time, or rather chronology. Chronology was ideal for someone like me because the relentless tick tocking of time worked like a metronome, keeping me on track, laying down a rhythm for me to follow.

I became such a devout believer in the maxim that “chronology is your friend,” that I preached it to students and writers who came to the Review with their stories. In fact, when a chronology presented itself, I rejoiced on that young writer’s behalf, telling them how lucky they were to have such a treasure.

Except.

Much as I believe in the importance – and really, the essential power – of a narrative spine, I recognize that the kind of rigidity that I embraced presents risks. As it happens, I am feeling this acutely just now, in a book I am working on. I hope you don’t mind my sharing my dilemma with you.

Years ago, I wrote a book about a single baseball team – the Brooklyn Dodgers – over the course of a single season – 1956. I chose the year because it would be the last time the Dodgers (sorry but those will always be my Dodgers even though I was too young ever to see them play before they moved someplace west) went to the World Series. A baseball season offers a terrific chronology; there’s a game pretty much every day from April to October, which means there are endless contests (read: dramas large and small) that reveal things about the players and those around them. In fact, that spine is so effective that I can sustain all manner of digression for character development, context and even a parallel narrative. In short, a nonlinear writer’s dream. 

But now I find myself wrestling with a very different narrative and chronology. It is not limited to a single season, measured in months. Rather, it unfolds over 140 years, three continents, five countries (one of which no longer exists), and four generations of two distinct but connected families. It includes, in no particular order, two patriarchs (one who wrote down everything, the other who wrote nothing), five children, eleven grandchildren, six great grandchildren, many acquaintances, business partners, colleagues, and enemies along with a library of 20,000 volumes that one of the central characters packed and moved along with his family whenever he set out to find a new job. I know where the story begins – at a grave – and where it ends – with a poem. In other words, I have been at this long enough to have a good sense of what I have, and what I still need. 

And so the time has come to impose order.

I have resisted this. I have spent the past two years working at my own deliberate pace, gathering and learning and thinking and opening a menagerie of Google docs. I have paper file folders filled with Jstor articles, and a growing collection of books - Must. Buy. That. History – and to be honest, it’s been as much fun as I have ever had with a story. It is at once intimate – it begins with a decades-long delayed/avoided visit to my best friend’s grave in the middle of the Negev Desert – and vast - in all that I must learn to make sense of a friendship that has endured for me for the 37 years since my friend’s death at the age of 31. 

Chronologically speaking, it begins in 1881 in the Pale of Settlement in what was then the Russian Empire and ends, well I am not quite sure though I suspect now or pretty soon, when I return to Israel to complete the journey I have started.

When you have been at a story for a while – it doesn’t have to mean years; weeks or months of intense work will produce the same level of emotional engagement – you do begin to wonder whether anyone will care about your story as much as you do. And if you don’t wonder and worry, you should. No one has to read your story. There is no should in reading, unless what you’ve read will appear on a final. 

I need to find a way to make you want, need to read a story that unfolds over tens of thousands of words (100,000 words=roughly 300 book pages) about people you have never heard of and events that have little if any bearing on your life.

In other words, like every writer since Homer – and surely before – I have to hook you and keep you until the final word.

So I seek chronology. I seek my narrative-propelling friend who has served me so well so often. 

But is chronology my friend this time around?

If I adhere to a timeline, I give my unwieldy story structure. But by sticking too closely to the chronology I risk diluting the drama, given that the moments the drama hinges on take place early on. Give them away too soon and the mystery is resolved. But veering off the chronological path risks chaos.

I suspect that many writers find themselves in much the same situation, caught between instinct and experience. Experience has taught me to keep to the chronological script. But my instinct, my sense of how to tell a story, leads me to want to play with time, to bend things around, to skip around, moving readers back and forth between characters over the decades. 

And that can be a perilous business. I cannot take the chance of having readers pause, even for a brief moment, to scratch their heads and ask, where are we now? And when?

So I need to balance two competing forces: drama and order. 

I am leaning toward drama. And yet, the old worry – “what Michael means to say…” exercises a powerful hold on me. 

Whether or not you are a nonlinear thinker and writer, I suspect you will find yourself at such a moment. For linear thinkers there is the desire to be more daring, more “creative,” just as for people whose brains sputter and stop and race in an order discernible only to them, there is the longing for order. It is akin to people with unmanageably curly hair wondering why anyone with straight hair would ever get a perm.

For me the solution may well come in accepting that as much as I want to tell the story in a vast sweeping narrative, I will need to break things down, section by section, chapter by chapter. That approach will allow my brain to follow its own particular paths while still keeping those thoughts in a succession of confined spaces. Better to endure the bruises from running into walls than to let the whole thing spill out in a vast, hot mess.

I am not compromising my approach to writing, my voice. I am accepting reality: My brain works the way it does, and there is nothing I can do about that – nor, to be honest, would I want to change it. 

Like every writer, I have had to learn craft, which offers all sorts of techniques designed to make sure stories get read, chronology among them.

If that feels like stating the obvious, bear in mind that I’ve been doing this for a long time, and have written a lot of stories, and I still struggle balancing what I want to do with a story and what I’ve learned I need to do.

If – no when you find yourself in this situation, know that you are not alone, and know too that it is best to accept that this battle is eternal. 

And it is a good thing. The battle creates tension. The reader feels it. And the reader will stick around for it. 

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