What's Next?

If you’re a fiction or a non-fiction writer (did I leave anyone out?) I wanted to talk with you about something. It had to do with the departures that a story about a killing might take. And it has to do with time. That is, it has to do with my usual penchant for taking the parts of a story as it occurs to me and putting them into chronological order. If left alone with the pieces of a story for very long I will inevitably start sorting them into the things that happened first and the things that happened later. If you do that long enough you’ll have everything in order from first to last, though in your memory the last thing may have been the first you took up as you tried to sort things out. And you found your way to the first thing only at the last. This is my biggest problem right now. I’m confused or unwilling to allow things to stay in their “found” order.

There are undoubtedly all kinds of “order” for the items in any set. The best order for things in a story might be (1) to leave them as you FOUND them, or (2) to hack them into the chronological order of events in real time. Or (3) to arrange them in what might be called the dramatic order, one that would most effectively present the parts of the story, regardless of time or fortune. The dramatic might also be called the supenseful order. It’s the order you’d use for a film or a stage play or the sequence you’d use when telling the story to someone in a bar. I’m pretty sure I can get the sequence right for the time-based order, the rendition I’d prepare for a writer or an editor or a director. These might be notes I’d use to help them figure out what they’re going to do with the tale/plot. Of course the order most susceptible to variety would be the one where the order is arranged for dramatic effect. There might be just one place to start the story, but in between the beginning and the end there might be an infinite number of collations for the parts.