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Chapter 19: Making Good (Use of) Time in Your Writing
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2. Draw two timelines, one for each character in the story (for how to
produce a timeline, flick to the earlier section ‘Working with Time in
Conventional Narratives’).
3. See whether you can work out parallel events for the two narratives.
I knew that would happen!
Writing with hindsight
Telling a story with hindsight, when the narrator is looking back at events
that happened previously, is a common technique in contemporary writing.
It enables the narrator of the story to have a degree of omniscience, because
she knows the whole story and what will happen at the end; as a result she’s
able to comment on events as they happen, to hint at what’s going to happen
and even to jump forwards and tell readers. I look briefly at telling a story
with hindsight in Chapter 8.
Enjoying the freedom
A story narrated retrospectively gives you considerable freedom to jump
around in time and tell the tale in a different order. As long as the narrator is
clear and tells the story in a way that makes sense, readers go along with it.
Kazuo Ishiguro uses this technique in Never Let Me Go (Faber and Faber, 2005).
Paragraphs and sections begin with phrases such as ‘All of this . . . reminds
me of something that happened about three years later’ and ‘I want to move
on now to our last years’. The unfolding of the story is carefully controlled
but sounds entirely natural, as if the narrator is telling the story to readers
directly.
You can relate a story with hindsight in a number of different ways:
✓ The narrator tells a story to others, with a conversational tone.
✓ The narrator writes a journal, diary or letter, either to a specific person
such as her child or for posterity.
✓ The narrator addresses readers, although this usually isn’t stated explicitly
but taken for granted.
In some stories, the narrator tells the story just after the final events took
place. In others, she relates events that happened many, many years ago.
These stories are a little different in that generally the narrator of a more
recent story is able to recall the story with much greater accuracy. A story
narrated many years after the final events may become slightly unreliable, as