Chronological stories

Notice that this paragraph is not arranged in chronological order. Take the ten different events that make up the story and rearrange them so that they are in chronological order. 

There are, of course, many possible ways of using transitional words and phrases to put this story in chronological order. One paragraph might look like this ... 

As you read about events in the newspaper or in other places, put the different pieces of each event in chronological order, as you did with the story about the International Dinner. 

Follow a logical time sequence. Many narrative essays—and virtually all brief stories used in other kinds of essays—follow a chronological order, presenting events as they naturally occur in the story. Occasionally, however, a writer will use the flashback technique, which takes the readers back in time to reveal an incident that occurred before the present scene of the essay. If you decide to use shifts in time, use transition phrases or other signals to ensure that your readers don t become confused or lost. 

Is the story structured in chronological order or does the writer shift time sequences through flashbacks or multiple points of view Does the story contain foreshadowing, early indications in the plot that signal later developments Again, think about the author s choices in terms of communicating the story s ideas. 

A note on Character by choosing a murder story-frame, Van Diem catapults us into the story. The strategy energizes what would otherwise have followed a slower chronological structure. 

Levees Broke, a four-hour dommentary about New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, generally follows the chronology of events that devastated a city and its people. As described by supervising editor and co-producer Sam Pollard in Chapter 23, there is a narrative arc to each hour and to the series. But the complexity of the four-hour film and its interweaving of dozens of individual stories, rather than a select few, differentiate it from a more traditional form of narrative. 

As is already probably clear by the discussion of structure, moving a story forward through time does not necessitate resorting to a plodding narrative that is strictly a chronological recitation of events in the... 

There is one very important caveat. You may not distort or falsify chronology. What we are discussing is the order in which you tell the story, not the order in which you are saying the story occurred. 

Suppose you ve unearthed a story in the archives of your local historical society. The following are the events in chronological order ... 

How is this film handling the underlying chronology of its story If it began in 2009 and went back to 1968, then returned to 2009, then went to 1973, then 1984, then back to 2009, did that movement back and forth in time feel motivated, and if so, by what ... 

On some projects, producers pitch their stories at in-house development meetings, not once but several times as the film or series take shape. We did this during the planning of I ll Make Me a World A Century of African-American Arts. Rather than survey 100 years worth of dance, theatre, visual art, literature, and more, the six-hour historical series presented two or three stories per hour arranged in a way that moved forward chronologically. The century s thematic arc, revealed in our research, helped producers and project advisors decide which stories best exemplified a particular era, and we were careful to include a range of artists and art forms. Here is the pitch for one of three stories, called "Nobody" for the purpose of quick reference (but not titled on screen), that was to be included in the series second hour, Without Fear or Shame. 

So many videos that are boring—and you talk about that local historical society video I ve been in the midst of those kinds of proposals and discussions as well. A collection of facts in chronological order does not make a story. What makes a story is when you are able to take those facts and figure out how they connect with the universal human condition, what it is to be a human being. And when you can do that—when you can find a way to take whatever story that you re telling and connect it back so that a person who s seven years old or 80 years old, a person that lives in rural Kansas or New York City, they can all look at that and see a piece of themselves in that story—then I think you tell an effective story. 

---