Monthly Archives September 2013

We may not think of reading a work out loud as being a useful technique for critiquing a work, but it can be. Before a piece ever reaches a critiquer’s hands, though, authors can use the technique too. This article, then, is more for authors than critiquers, but both can benefit from it.

If you’ve been writing for any time at all, you’ve heard the advice that you should read your work out loud, or have it read to you. The reason is, you’ll hear things go bump or clank in the text that you might not have discovered otherwise. Your brain processes information through different channels when it comes in through your ears as opposed to when it comes in through your eyes. That can be truly eye- (or should that be “ear-”?) opening.

Like a lot of authors, I used to think I ...

I was originally going to title this article “Confused Timeline” but as I put my notes together I realized time isn’t the problem (other than me not having enough of it). Of course it’s important that a story flow in a logical sequence of events from its beginning to its end (with some exceptions I’ll get to in a moment), but that sequence doesn’t have to follow a time-linear order.

In fact, more than likely, it won’t. Consider:

• If there’s even one flashback, flash-forward, or instance of a character remembering something, the perfect time sequence is broken. This is true even if the story is written in the present tense.
• Same thing if there are multiple plot lines or point of view characters...

In a way it’s hard to say that a story’s plot is overly complex. Many stories have multiple plot lines, each with their own subplots, and yet the story “works”: the reader can understand what’s going on, the plot lines all make sense (eventually, anyway), and things come together at the end. Maybe the conclusion doesn’t tie everything together in a pretty bow—if the book is part of a series, it shouldn’t unless it’s the last one—but the story doesn’t end in a Gordian knot, either.

So the question isn’t whether a story’s plot is too complex, but whether it’s too complex for the space allotted to it...