Blueprint Your Bestseller: Organize and Revise Any Manuscript with the Book Architecture Method by Stuart Horwitz

Author:Stuart Horwitz [Horwitz, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781101596685
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Action Step #15: Your Central Series

Choose a series that reflects the basic timeline of your work, one that your reader can identify and track. You will use this central series first in each of the next three steps to learn tools that you can then apply to all of your other series.

Narrative Order vs. Chronological Order

Once you have selected your central series, the first decision you will have to make is whether you want to put it in narrative order or in chronological order. Let’s start with chronological order. In chronological order, events happen one after another in time: today, tomorrow, next year. “The Ugly Duckling” is reported in chronological order. There are no flashbacks, flash-forwards, or multiple timelines.

Narrative order means the events are not presented in the order in which they happened. There are good reasons to do this—and as we will see in the next section, there are not-so-good reasons to do this. To some degree, this is the natural way to tell a story: reorganizing what happened into a different order to make a particular impact.

Say you are out on a date. You just got out of a long-term relationship, and your new love interest asks you about it. The chronological order of events might have gone like this:

Meeting Unexpectedly

Falling in Love

Climax*

Falling Out of Love

The Breakup

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