The Historical Novel Society highlighted my article on dual timelines

I recently wrote a guest post for the Historical Novel Society about one of the challenges—and opportunities—of writing fiction with multiple timelines.

How do you keep readers equally invested in both stories? How should the timelines connect? And how can transitions, pacing, and dramatic irony bring past and present together?

In “How to Write Dual Timelines that Captivate Your Readers,” I look at the techniques that can make a dual-timeline novel feel like one compelling story—rather than two competing ones.

Here’s how it starts:

Here’s the nightmare scenario: You write a novel with more than one timeline, because . . . whatever (we’ll talk more about that in a moment). The reader picks it up, chooses their preferred timeline, and skips the other(s) altogether. 

Ack. How can you tell a story that’s clearly best told with dual timelines—and that keeps the reader’s attention equally throughout both? 

The short answer is easy to say and difficult as hell to pull off: You need to convince the reader there’s a good reason for telling the story the way you have, that you’re enabling them to see how past and present inform each other and—if they’re very fortunate—to glimpse both past and future at once.

Read the full article on the Historical Novel Society conference site.