Tool: Put Events in Time Order

Have you ever been reading something and thought, that just doesn’t sound right. Here’s an (admittedly extreme) example:

The carriage came rumbling down the road, its wheels throwing up dust visible before it even rounded the corner. I turned my head, and I stepped off the pavement. Somebody screamed. The horse’s flanks were dark with sweat and their eyes were wild, whites showing. The carriage had a wheel missing. Was that Annie’s carriage? Inside I saw the terrified faces of the passengers. I stepped back onto the pavement moments before the contraption clattered past. 

What’s wrong with this paragraph? Aside from literally putting the cart before the horse, the events are all out of order from the way that the perspective character would perceive them.  What is the actual order of the events, as the point of view character witnesses them? Here’s what I have:

• I stepped off the pavement.
• Somebody screamed.
• I turned. 
• A cloud of dust billowed around the corner. 
• The horses eyes were wild, whites showing, 
• their flanks were dark with sweat. 
• The carriage came rumbling down the road. 
• It is missing a wheel.
• I stepped back onto the pavement
• the contraption clattered past. 
• Inside I saw the terrified faces of the passengers.
• I know one of the passengers!

Rewritten to: 

As I stepped off the pavement, a scream pierced the air in the distance. I turned to see a cloud of dust billow around the corner, along with a great clattering. Four horses, their eyes wild with the whites showing, pulled a carriage off kilter from a missing wheel. I stepped back onto the pavement moments before they thundered past. Inside the carriage, I glimpsed the terrified faces of the passengers, Annie and her two friends. I must help them. 

Is this good? Maybe not yet. I would want to intensify the description to make it more specific. But it is better than the first paragraph because each event occurs in time order, even within the sentences. 

Putting events in time order is one of those revision steps that is definitely easier to spot in someone else’s work than your own. Reading your work aloud, or getting some time away from it can be helpful in spotting it. 

Sometimes the order is on the sentence level: Ursula Le Guin gives us this brilliant mess in Steering the Craft: “She fell down as she stood up and broke her nose,” and then tells us: 

“Think of it like this: There’s one best way for the parts of a sentence to fit together, and your job as a writer is to find it. You may not notice anything’s out of place till your rereading to revise. All that’s needed may be a slight rearrangement of order, or you may have to rethink and rewrite the sentence entirely.”

Delany makes putting events in order one of his “Emblems of Talent” in his About Writing: 

“In complex sentences with multiple clauses that relate in complex ways, the talented writer will organize those clauses in the chronological order in which those referents occur, despite the logical relation grammar imposes.” (pg. 7)

And Dwight V. Swain in Techniques of the Selling Writer points out that when you control the order in which events happen, you can use it to give more information about the point of view character and place emphasis on different events or objects. 

“...You arrange events for your reader, in what you fondly hope will prove to be effective order…Order does make a difference. Show a gun, then a coffin, then tears, and you put your focus on heartbreak. If coffin comes first, then tears, then gun, the issue may be vengeance. So you arrange.” (pg. 24)

Challenge: 

• Write a short piece about an accident with at least two characters where the events happen deliberately out of order as I have done above. Then rewrite it from the perspective of a person in the scene. How does the language need to change to accommodate the new order of events? 
• Consider your scene again. How does the event occur from the perspective of the other person in the scene? Write it so that at least one event happens in a different order from their perspective. How does that change the impact of the event? What additional details do you need to add to make their perspective believable?

Cover Image cropped and colored black and white: Retrieved Library of Congress: Virgil, Active 4Th Century Servius, Tiberius Claudius Donatus, Cristoforo Landino, Antonio Mancinelli, Domizio Calderino, Sebastian Brant, Johann Grüninger, Maffeo Vegio, and Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. Opera cum commentariis Seruii Mauri Honorati grammatici: Aelii i.e. Tiberii Claudii Donati, Christofori Landini, Antonii Mancinelli & Domicii Calderini. [In ciuitate Argentenum, Impressum opera & impensa I. Grieninger, 1502] Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/48041306/.