5 Tips on Connecting Characters From Different Timelines
Multiple perspectives is one thing—adding multiple timelines is another. Here, author Stephanie Marie Thornton shares 5 tips on connecting characters from different timelines.
Sometimes history is a writer’s best friend.
“Oh, look, my two characters really were at that salon Thomas Paine hosted in Paris.” The writer cracks her knuckles over her laptop and grins like a maniac. (Or a true history nerd.) “Now it’s historically accurate to have them swap gossip there together over wine and pâté d’assiette!”
And other times, history makes things so gosh-darned difficult...
Take my latest novel—Her Lost Words—about feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and her famous daughter, Mary Shelley, as an example.
One might think that crafting a mother-daughter story would be relatively simple—save perhaps parenting during the teenage years, which is never simple (says the mother of a 16-year-old daughter)—except my two subjects lived a grand total of 11 days together before Mary Wollstonecraft succumbed to a dreaded childbed fever. That’s not a fact a historical writer can fudge, unless writing alternate history. Or perhaps something with a sci-fi twist, probably involving a time machine.
This meant it was necessary to pull out some writerly fancy footwork.
Without further ado, here are five tips for writing about characters who live in disparate timelines…
1. Tease out common themes
A shared theme between Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley was that both were prolific writers, so one could assume they shared a passion for books and reading. That meant shared volumes, bookstores, and even writers they both enjoyed reading—or meeting—made for excellent physical links between the two narratives. Another beloved theme at the heart of many dual timelines is a powerful secret that links the two stories—Jennifer Robson’s The Gown is a perfect example of this as Heather Mackenzie seeks to unravel the truth of priceless embroideries found in her Nan’s possession.
2. Location, location, location … and objects, too!
A snapshot of one character visiting or living in a particular place can make a perfect echo as those spots show up again in the second timeline. Tangible objects also have the power to braid two different timelines together. Kate Quinn did this to perfect effect in The Alice Network—key locations showed up in both the World War I and World War II timelines, as did Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Even more fun is when a reader anticipates a link between the two timelines and then cackles gleefully when their assumption is later revealed to be correct. (Or am I the only one who does that when I read?)
3. Make other characters do the heavy lifting
While it’s ideal to have a narrator who bridges the entirety of a novel’s timeline, sometimes that’s just not feasible. (Hence this article.) When it’s not, consider using secondary and tertiary characters—those non-narrators who did live through the entirety of a story and knew both narrators—to create links in the chain of a dual timeline. And when history is really inconvenient, or the two timelines are so far apart that no character could have possibly lived long enough to span both, this can also be done via letters and journals—written in one timeline and revealed in another—as seen in Sarah Penner’s bestselling debut novel about poison and revenge, The Lost Apothecary.
4. Mine those memories
The memories of the older narrator—or even a secondary character—can also be sifted through in order to reveal scenes that the younger narrator is seeking to uncover. One chapter may have the younger character seeking information or suspecting something that happened, followed by a chapter in which the older character informs the reader of that actual event. Memories can also revolve around the five senses—what can two narrators share when it comes to sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells? This can be especially poignant in multi-generational family stories. Chanel Cleeton’s Next Year in Havana—a lush tale of revolutionary Cuba—does this perfectly as she twines together the stories of modern-day freelance writer Marisol Ferrera and her grandmother, Elisa Perez.
5. Lean in to the different eras
While the above tips have involved ways to weave together multiple timelines, don’t forget that different historical eras should feel distinct. Sometimes vast swaths of time will separate narrators—think Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr or Jamie Ford’s The Many Daughters of Afong Moy—and other times, mere decades part the storytellers. In Her Lost Words, Mary Wollstonecraft lived in revolutionary France while Mary Shelley came of age during the late Regency period, but I still aimed to tease out differences between the two time periods. What foods were particular to that time period? Clothing? Jargon? Technology? Just as narrators have separate personalities and voices, so should different time periods also read differently—is this a time of eel pie and horse drawn carriages, or hot dogs and tail fins? After all, readers of historical fiction love to feel totally immersed in eras long since gone. That means a novel set in multiple timelines allows them to make two different stops in their reading time travel.
And what, I ask, could be better than that?
Stephanie Marie Thornton is a USA Today bestselling author and a high school history teacher. She lives in Alaska with her husband and daughter.
