Hitting the Timeshift Key

When I'm writing, I find structure one of the hardest things to tackle.  Stories, situations and characters, and the language with which to describe them, come to me reasonably easily -- but structure!  I think I'm with David Lodge, when he says in his excellent book The Art of Fiction that we should avoid, "presenting life is just one dam thing after another," a trap that it is easy to fall into if you are writing a linear narrative, but in my bid to avoid this trap I find myself turning what I have written inside out, upside down, back to front and often it still doesn't feel quite right.

Lodge's solution is to use time shifts because he says that this, "allows us to make connections of causality and irony between widely separated events." This makes sense to me, as a story that has a strong thematic resonance can be more engrossing because you have to work a little bit harder to make the necessary connections.

Sooo, if you want to open a new door, creatively speaking (and because I just can't resist another picture)

have a go at writing something that moves about in time.  This will give you the opportunity to experiment with devices such as who knows what information when and the effects that that might have, and to see what happens when  cause and effect are separated by several decades -- does that make events more potent or less so?

Repetition : The Get-Out Clause

In my writing class we have the literary equivalent of a swear box, an automatic penalty for anybody committing the offence of repetition.  I've blogged before about how slack your writing can appear if you use the same word more than once in close proximity -- it gives the impression that your vocabulary is limited and/or your editing is careless.

However, as with all good rules, there are exceptions. Many writers use a device known as a leitmotif, where the same phrase or image re-occurs at key points in the narrative to highlight an emotion or underscore a mental state; rather than being laziness this is a kind of orchestration which needs careful handling.

The idea I'd like to float today is the way in which you might use repetition in the structure of your work.  Perhaps you could take a key scene in the life of your protagonist, a critical moment on which the plot hinges, and revisit it again and again as the story develops, casting it a little differently each time so that something fresh is revealed.  Think of it in terms as a camera panning back slowly, going from close-up too long shot (or conceivably in the opposite direction) so that the picture which emerges is amplified (or concentrated).  It's a way of adding depth and resonance to the story you are telling and of allowing the plot to unfold in a way that goes beyond  the simply linear.