Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

This is what momentum looks like.

Despite work deadlines, two days down with a stomach bug, a major financial planning session, and getting a windshield replaced, I still managed to get another scene completed and entered. This was Scene 3 (begun last week), which ends Chapter/Day One, and it was the first time for a couple of things.

As described in my last post, Scene 3 was my first opportunity to get inside the head of the male MC from the modern storyline. Whereas the main characters in my previous books have shared many traits with me, this guy does not. Sure, we have some things in common—an appreciation of single malt whisky, the ability to focus on something beyond what is good for us—but in other, very basic ways, we’re quite different. He’s a people person. He’s comfortable in denial. He’s not a fan of introspection. He doesn’t use a lot of foresight. So, writing about his thoughts and intentions, I have to stretch myself a bit.

The other “first” for me, in this scene, was that I also had a chance to dip into the historical storyline. Both storylines, modern and historical, will be interlaced as the action jumps between Now and Then, each time with more length and specificity, but here in Scene 3, it was my first opportunity to experiment with making that jump. I wanted to make it seamless, fluid. I didn’t want to use the standard blank-line scene breaks—I’m already using those for POV shifts between characters—and I didn’t want to use italics or extra indentation. In fact, I don’t want to set off this “internal” shift at all. I want the shift from modern to historical (and back) to read as a consistent whole.

It’s similar to a flashback. It’s a scene within a scene, which authors commonly signify via a shift in verb tense. I have flashbacks in this novel, too, and I use this method as well. The main action is in Simple Past tense (she ran to the phone, he cooked the meal), but when a POV character thinks about past events, I switch to Past Perfect (she had run to the phone, he had cooked the meal). The shift isn’t hard and fast—all those hads make for cumbersome prose—but I use them at the beginning and end of the flashback, minimum. This creates “depth” in the timeline, nesting the distant past inside the more recent past, and it helps the reader navigate, giving them clues that we’ve left the current timeline and are dealing with events a bit older.

But that won’t work in this case. The shift to the historical storyline isn’t the memory of the modern MC; it’s from a different point-of-view, and a different character altogether. I don’t want to give too much away, plot-wise, so I’ll just say that even though both are written in Simple Past tense, I think it’s working. I have other options, like switching to Simple Present for the historical timeline, but that seems just a little too precious and I’d rather not go there without reason. When I get a little further along, I’ll pass the first chapters past First Reader and see what she says.

For now, though, on to Chapter/Day Two.

k