Unlocking Time: How Jumping Timelines Can Revolutionize Your Writing Craft
The last paragraph of the author’s note from my memoir states: “The spiral creates the space for time — past, present, future — to meld together. This book, like the spiral of time, brings together moments when it is the right time and not necessarily in chronological order. Embrace the spiral, dear reader, and journey through time with me.”
In my mentoring work with memoir writers, we typically reach a point in the process where they start to worry that what they want to write about doesn’t line up with the perfect timeline, whether that is the timeline of the specific story or the timeline they have plotted out when planning the book. At those moments, I remind them that time isn’t linear, life doesn’t work like a novel: a chronological series of events that transition us easily from inciting incident, climax, falling action and resolution. Our lives are complex and weave in and out of time as our understanding of self and experience matures. And when we are diving deep into the tangled web of our stories, we sometimes need to return to a past self, seek out an ancestor, or lean on the future self all while remaining present and in the now of writing the story.
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