Pulling Off Dual Timelines: An Exercise in Cohesive Storytelling

Stories with dual, or multiple timelines, make a frequent appearance across media. From Arrival (2016) to Citizen Kane (1941), dual timeline stories are a mainstay in Hollywood. However, for writers, how do you successfully execute multiple timelines with only the written word in your toolkit? This blogpost will explore the core problems presented by using a dual timeline narrative structure and how to best navigate those pitfalls to pull off an amazing multiple timeline story.

Pros and Cons

Multiple timeline stories intentionally pull the reader in and out of the narrative, and this poses several risks.

1. The reading experience can be jarring and lack cohesion. A reader might wonder why they are now reading about a different timeline when they were becoming invested in another. Pacing needs to adjust accordingly.

2. Readers may become far more invested in one timeline, making for an uneven experience when they’re forced into others.

3. Plot points can become muddled if executed poorly: a reader must keep track of information learned from multiple timelines.

Now, what about the pros? Why would someone choose to write a dual timeline story in the first place?

There are several reasons why. The most foundational is that a dual timeline serves to enhance the overall story. Think carefully about how your story might look using a more typical linear narrative structure. It should gain something by being written as dual timeline. This a big structural undertaking for a writer and being intentional will go far toward a successful story.

A large component of successful dual timeline stories is that the reader can experience backstory as it happens versus being told after the fact. This means that a dual timeline story can be extremely immersive. Dual timelines can also provide interesting moments of revelation in a narrative that can’t necessarily be achieved in a linear story. Something that occurs in one timeline can have huge impacts on another, and once the reader puts this together, it can be a huge moment of realization.

Ways to Tell a Multiple Timeline Story

By nature, dual timeline stories can differ quite a bit in how they are structured. In general, they fall under the following buckets:

1. Timelines are told interchangeably, and the reader is taken back and forth through timelines. Narrative time spent in each timeline can be relatively equal or can be unbalanced. Short sections of jumping timelines are considered flashback.

2. Timelines are told independently. For example, an entire novel’s first half is spent in one timeline and the entire second half of the novel is spent in another.

The other consideration for multiple timeline stories is whether your timelines intersect.

1. Timelines eventually merge or intersect, meaning there is technically a point of time in common between two timelines. For example, a murder mystery story that explores the time before and after a murder. The murder is the point of time that both timelines have in common.

2. Timelines do not merge or intersect at all. For example, an apocalyptic story with one timeline about the world ending, and a second timeline about a captain on a spaceship a hundred-years later.

Whatever you choose, think again about what serves your story best. You also want to manage reader expectations. If a reader is expecting timelines to merge, and they never do, they may not experience the story as intended. 

How to Manage Emotional Investment and Pacing Across Timelines

The core issues outlined earlier: a jarring reading experience and becoming unequally invested in timelines, are both related to emotional investment and pacing.

Say you are writing a story using the typical three-act story arc structure. While your overall story should match the rise and fall of action, so do your individual timelines. If one timeline is amping up the tension, but the other is not, you risk a reader wanting to stay in one timeline over another. One technique to troubleshoot this is to map out all your timelines according to the three-act structure. Are your main points of rising and falling action working together across timelines, or are they working against each other?

It is also helpful to think of the characters in your story as inherently different across timelines. This will obviously be true if each timeline has its own set of characters. However, this can be true if the characters are the same. For example, Jane Doe in a pre-apocalyptic timeline has not yet experienced the devastating world-ending event that sets off the post-apocalyptic timeline. Jane is two different characters, and the way you would get a reader emotionally invested in her story in each timeline will be different. 

Studying Dual Timeline Stories

There are many multiple timeline stories out there, and there is no singular right, or wrong way to write such a story. The best tool is to read multiple timeline stories and identify what makes them successful and why. A few examples are provided below:

The Actual Star by Monica Bryne

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

While there are many risks, there is nothing like a well-done multiple timeline story. Good luck and happy writing!

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About the author: Hien Nguyen is a speculative fiction writer who hails from the Midwest. She is interested in the uplifting and haunting forms of human connection, and how SFF writing can lay those bare. Hien’s work has been published by Speculative City, All Worlds Wayfarer, and others. She is a mentor for WriteGirl & Round Table Mentor, and a member of the Codex Writers Group. Hien’s debut young adult novel, TWIN TIDES, is coming out Fall 2025.