Alternating storylines

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

It’s been a while since I talked about structure, and Rose’s question in the last Open Mike made me realize that I normally talk about structure in general, not about specific story structures. So this time, I’m going to dig into alternating storylines.

I’m not talking about plots and subplots here. I am talking about a structure that alternates between two separate but related storylines in a mostly-regular rhythm.  The two storylines can be in alternating scenes, alternating chapters (which is the most common), or even alternating sections, depending on the story that’s being told. It’s very similar to the multiple-viewpoint structure, and has some of the same advantages and pitfalls.

In order to make this kind of story work as a single novel, rather than as two completely different novellas that have been randomly cut apart and shuffled together, the two storylines have to be linked somehow. The link can be a single plot, as when one storyline follows the serial killer meticulously planning his next victim, while the other storyline follows the detectives trying to catch him before he kills anyone else. The link can also be alternate plots, as in Jo Walton’s My Real Children, where each storyline follows an alternative timeline that the main character might have lived. The link can be time itself, as in Ian Banks Use of Weapons, in which the two storylines follow two different parts of the main character’s life. The link can be thematic, as in Peg Kerr’s The Wild Swans, which alternates between two very different but thematically related retellings of the titular fairy tale, one a straightforward retelling set in the 1600s, the other a more allegorical version set during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Robert L. Forward’s The Dragon’s Egg contrasts time and plot–one storyline follows the humans who are investigating a neutron star and making a first contact with the aliens who live there, the other follows the aliens, who live at high speed, such that civilizations rise and fall, over the course of an hour or two on the human side.

In other words, two alternating storylines have to have some kind of link between them, but the link can be practically anything.

The catch is that both storylines also have to be strong enough and interesting enough to keep the reader interested in them. This is less difficult when there’s a strong link, as in a serial-killer plotline, where there’s a single, overarching plot that each storyline is following. This is because each storyline is developing one primary story, just from a different direction. Each scene or chapter will make progress on the novel storyline, which drags the reader along even if they aren’t quite as interested in what’s going on in that chapter. The overarching plot acts as a throughline.

When the link between the storylines is less obvious, each storyline has to be interesting and involving on its own merits. If the reader gets to the end of a chapter, sees that the next one is about an alternate storyline, and skips that chapter completely in order to “get back to the real story,” the structure isn’t working effectively.

“Interesting and involving” is, of course, a moving target. Different readers (and writers) have different preferences. The thing to remember is that both of the storylines in an alternating structure need to appeal to the same reader. If one storyline is a slam-bang science-fiction action-adventure and the other storyline is a slowly unfolding literary psychological study, the resulting novel is like to appeal only to readers who like both types of story…and even they may be annoyed by the whiplash of switching reading gears every chapter or scene.

There are a couple of ways to keep readers interested in alternating storylines. I already talked about the strong plot-link, when each scene contributes to a single main plot, converging on the same climactic moment, regardless of which of the alternating storylines the scene is set in. One can get the same effect with a time-and-character link, where both storylines cover different parts of the protagonist’s life.

For example, Brust’s Taltos could have been told “in order” (that is, putting all the scenes in chronological order as a single story), but for my money, it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting, nor as smooth. The storyline that covers the protagonist’s life from birth to the start of the “main” storyline might lose a lot of readers if the novel spent the first five or six chapters on it, because it’s a long, slow build. By sandwiching it between the central action and the long, involved spellcasting, the reader gets the background in smaller bites, once they’ve already gotten interested in the protagonist and the troubles he’s having in the current timeline and want the long, slow answer to “How the heck did this guy get into this mess?”

An alternative is for completely different stories to be linked through protagonists who have a very similar problem, but who make very different choices about what to do about it. There are several novels in which one storyline follows an archaeological expedition, while the other follows the lives of the people who live on the site centuries before, and left behind the items the archaeologists are arguing about.

Ultimately, the link can be almost anything that can be an answer to the question, “Why are these two different stories being presented in the same novel?”  As long as it does actually answer that question.