Stephen Hawking calls ‘the arrow of time’ (Hawking 1988). If you look
closely at how any narrative is structured, it’s very different from just telling
it ‘how it is’. In this section I’m going to talk you through some of the differ-
ent aspects of organising a narrative. However, in doing this, I will not resort
to well-known models for structuring the order (e.g. end before the begin-
ning; story within story). That is not because there is anything wrong with
these models: you may find yourself using them, or discover that your own
schemes approximate to them, and that is fine. However, the systematic
approach that I outline below may enable you to think of more intricate and
original means of ordering your material and intimately relating it to the
subject matter. That way, you do not rely on standard structures for story-
telling, but are free to adjust the parameters to suit your own purposes.
The past, the present, the past, the present
In structuring a narrative you need to think about the time sequence:
the relationship between the past and the present. This is the focus of
Exercise 9 which asks you to write a piece which moves between different
points in the past and the present (and to consider, if relevant, how the
structure of your piece relates to the operations of memory). Strict
chronology doesn’t necessarily make for evocative storytelling, so in order
to obtain the best effect you will probably have to shuffle the events, in
other words real-time is very different from story-time. If you just start at
the beginning and work through to the end of the story, it is likely to be
rather boring; you need to think about the order in which the events will
seem most effective. Structuring the material may mean radically altering
the chronology, and it may mean cutting out a lot of events. When you
organise the structure you decide what to put in, and what to leave out,
you build or deflate expectation and control pace.
In common usage the idea of going back into the past has been known
as a flashback, and going forwards into the future as flashforward. In nar-
rative theory a flashback is known as an analepse, and a flashforward as a
prolepse (analepse occurs much more frequently). Again these are more
technical terms which emphasise the non-linear aspect of time in memory
and history.
In a narrative of any complexity there is never just one past or one present.
A story can go back to several different points in the past and, of course, it can
progressively move forwards in the present. So the relationship between the
past and present is a very fluid and complex one. When you sequence a
narrative you have to think about how to interrelate these different points
in time. It is also useful to think of the past as discontinuous and never as
one homogenous block: there is a near-past, or a mid-past, or a far-past (or
104 The Writing Experiment