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| From this amazing site showing a variety of past-present photos |
Welp, I'm at the halfway point of proofreading THE VALLEN (like p. 185 in my double-spaced manuscript) and I'm pausing to reflect on why I've organized the chapters in the way that I have.
Essentially:
- Odd-numbered chapters: Essa's past
- Even-numbered chapters: Essa's present
The purpose of this flip-flopping back and forth between past and present serves a thematic purpose: the past informs the present, the present doesn't exist without the past, etc. A flow purpose: The book's more page-turney and gripping to read with a doubling of cliffhangers and skimpier chapter loads. A plot purpose: events in Essa's past, in parts, have 'immediate' next chapter consequences in her present.
Plus an entertainment purpose. The chapter structure's just different. People, audiences, readers like different when it's done well and forms its own consistent, easy-to-understand patterns. This particular style of past-present flip-flopping is unique to my novel and unique to Essa's journey, as she struggles to escape from her past.
I've read in other sci-fi books, like N.K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky, the 3rd installment of her Broken Earth trilogy, a similar flip-flop.
Here, the flip-flop happens either as a straight, third-person flashback to another time and place (though through the perspective of one of the main characters who's, yes, thousands of years old...) or as a changing of POV, where events have happened through, say, Essun's POV but they're only just noticed by the second POV, Nassun, as we switch and read through Nassun's chapter.
In the first instance, an ancient past is revealed and we, the reader, learn why the present world is as it is because of this "dead-civ" civilization.
In the second instance, we're not reliving the same event from just two POV's, we're rather having different reactions, different emotions, different empathy as we switch from one POV to the next. The flip-flopping doesn't tend to take any toll on the plot. Rather, both plots are intertwined and have their own subplots and happenings, until those dual POV's and plots come clashing together in a climactic end, as Essun finally confronts Nassun.
There may be a reason, or multiple reasons, why sci-fi stories, or sff in general, tend to use these flip-flop devices in past, present and future. Why, say, sci-fi tends to be about technology and the future, and why fantasy tends to be about magic and the past. But I won't go into all that here.
I'll just point out that feature of my upcoming, THE VALLEN, and leave this Sunday Easter post at that.
Thanks for reading. Come again!