Chiropractic for MSS

manipulation--an arrangement of dramatic elements to produce an emotional effect in a story; distortion or exaggeration of narrative events; the deliberate bending of perspective and/or time in a story; use of implication and subtlety to engage readers; use of a red herring to alert or divert readers' suspicions.

Writers are the literary equivalent of chiropractors, adjusting, kneading, articulating; they are looking for a design pattern to provide the best posture for a story. A basic approach to such adjusting is to rearrange the time sequence. Mystery writer and teacher Leonard Tourney is an advocate of "a slice of the crime," in which he advocates beginning a narrative with a crime being planned or executed by individuals we will meet later on in the text. James Joyce manipulated temporally in his Finnegan's Wake, beginning the huge, complexity of a novel with the last half of the opening sentence, then, hundreds of pages later, ending with the first half of the sentence. Tim Gautreau's The Missing, narratively acute and suspenseful from the opening line, actually manipulates dramatic convention in the sense of providing a double hit of backstory before the main issue is introduced.

In addition to time manipulation, the writer may perform narrative chiropractic with point of view, choosing first-, second- third-, omniscient, and multiple points of view, and in some cases venture into authorial intrusion to make commentary on the characters and their doings. This last approach is amply demonstrated in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and William M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

Characters, their motives and activities, may be manipulated to the extent of influencing the way other characters and readers will respond to them, and indeed, motives may be manipulated to provoke reader sympathy or antipathy.

Manipulation works best when it does not call attention to itself but seems the most natural presentation. Such control is exemplified in the entire presentation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières.

The Time Machine

time sequence--the temporal arc of a story or novel; the chronological order of events in a narrative; the arrangement of narrative events to effect the most dramatic result.

Time plays an important role in a story or novel. How long between events? How long has this--whatever this is--been going on? How long before he gets the idea? How long before she asks him if they have a future together? How much times does a Harlen Coben protagonist have before being discovered rifling the files in an office he has no authority to be in? The pacing or beats per minute is another way to measure the way theme and plot establish themselves within the reader's sensibility, helping the reader to remember bits of information as they come forth, We realize also the contrivance behind such manipulation, resenting it if we do not find it.

The skilled writer knows ways to manipulate time, showing an event in progress, exhuming an event from the past, switching away from a character who actually or metaphorically be hanging from the side of a cliff. Nor is it necessary to remain with a time line, instead juggling the various scenes and confrontations like the dealer in three-card monte.

Example of a relatively brief time line, Romeo and Juliet. In more modern times, James Grady's 1974 novel, The Six Days of the Condor, was successful enough to have evolved into a movie in which the time line was cut in half to The Three Days of the Condor. William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's novel, Logan's Run, had a time-line imposed by population explosion: When a character reached the age of thirty, along came the Sandmen to put the character to sleep, as in the final sleep. Somewhere along the way between the penultimate draft and the draft submitted to the publisher, Nolan and Johnson decided to cut back on the arc of character life from thirty to twenty-one.

The Iliad begins with the story already having been set in action some seven years previously. Tim Gautreaux's 2009 novel, The Missing, takes place largely in the late 1920s but begins in the final days of World War I, then flashes back to an earlier time yet before delivering the reader back to the time the protagonist, Sam Simoneaux, returns from his experiences in World War I France to his job in New Orleans, where the main action sets forth.

Time in story is meant to be manipulated, is asking to be manipulated. Time may be compressed in narrative, frozen within the boundaries of a scene, projected into the future with a cheery "And they all lived happily ever after."

Some stories are about lost or stolen time, others are about travels in time, others yet are about waiting to grow up or trying to forestall the age process, while an entire sub-genre exists in which the focus is on the extent to which characters will go to deny the effects of time. Peter Pan did not wish to grow up, but even more worth further study and consideration is the character Jo Stoyte, from Aldous Huxley's engaging satire, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Stoyte, a Hollywood millionaire, at first wants merely not to grow older, but this desire morphs into his not wanting to die

Timing Is Everything

time frame--time scheme in which events in a novel or short story take place; a narrative paradigm that helps readers see the relative position of events in a dramatic narrative; verb tenses used as identifiers to help readers orient to dramatic sequence of events.

Although there is no organized lobby to establish a convention of a strict chronology in a story, there is the tradition of a dramatic unity in which a drama shall proceed in real time from start to finish, hence questions about the "legality" of flashback or other interruptions of time sequence.

It is a rare twenty-first century story that trudges forward from A to Z without some pause for reflection about past events or an actual shift back to events that took place before the story at hand began. Although his novels are set largely at the time of Elizabeth I, twentieth- and twenty-first century crime writer Leonard Tourney frequently begins his mysteries with what he calls "a slice of the crime," in which the novel begins with an out-of-sequence scene in which the reader sees a crime being committed, a crime being contemplated, or a crime being discovered. Other crime writers (Richard Price, George Pelecanos, P.D. James) begin with some provocative event as a preface to the story at hand. Yet other writers (John D. McDonald, for example, in his non-Travis McGee novels)use a combination of a shift in time sequence and a shift in point of view to create a cliffhanger effect. Tim Gautreaux's 2009 novel, Missing, begins at the tail end of World War II, moves forward a few years to a major defining moment, then reverts back in time well before the beginning scenes.

One of the most extreme examples of time bending appears in the opening of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which begins with a fragment of a sentence, "... riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." A few hundred pages later, the novel ends with "A way a lone a last a loved a long the..." which, were you to connect it with the opening fragment, would form a complete sentence, setting forth in some degree Joyce's intent of an unending circularity.

A simple recipe for use of time line in the short story or the novel: at least sixty percent of the action takes place in the present. Two-line space breaks separate all scenes, but when jumping from time to time and POV to POV, the writer must let the reader know who, when, and where ASAP.

See also backstory, flashback