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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46437
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46437
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Here's an example of multiple timelines done in a way I found not just confusing, but random and unnecessary. Chronological can mean in order by date and time, or it can mean that the different POVs line up with each other (even if each story is moving forward). My example is more of the former but also contains the latter. _[A Place for Us](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36840397-a-place-for-us)_ by Fatima Farheen Mirza, contemporary fiction about an American family.

The grounding thread of the narrative is the wedding of one of the daughters. Scenes from these few hours run strictly chronologically, with a short chapter near the beginning of the novel and others throughout (randomly and not marked as separate).

The vast majority of the novel consists of scenes told from the point of view of different family members: the above daughter, the son, and the mother (I can't recall if there are more).

Imagine a box of photos with the family gathered around. Close your eyes and pick a photo out randomly. At least one person recognizes the time and place of the photo then one family member tells the story. It really is that random to POV and time, with the addition that this isn't a family telling stories to each other, but a narrator relating different people's stories to the reader.

The individual stories are well-written and engaging, but it does take a while to learn enough about the characters (we don't know them like the writer does!) to make sense of what they're telling us. Sometimes one character will tell a story another one did several chapters back (which I liked).

So far it's not a terrible approach. The author did put each POV and time period into its own chapter, at least. As the book goes on, you get a sense of the family dynamics, what the family secrets are (and who hasn't told anyone else s/he knows). It's choppy and hard to follow at times, but it kept me reading. A solid 3 out of 5.

Then the author did something inexplicable. Almost at the end, she added a new POV character! The father. We now get several chapters (not just an epilogue style one, but dozens of pages) going through the entire timeline of the family more or less chronologically, from his point of view. While it adds something to the story to hear his thoughts, the way the author did it completely threw off the pacing and narrative.

So, yes, absolutely, you can run your multiple POVs chronologically or not, or you can run each individual one chronologically but not have them in sync with each other.

What you need though is intention. Do it in whatever way you choose because it makes the story better, not because it's easier to write. Balancing out the POVs through the narrative might be important, because they come together at the end, or for other reasons. So in that case it might work well for one character's scenes that take a few hours be spread out such that they interweave with another character's scenes that take a week. Or one character might need to tell randomly timed stories from the past in order to move forward in he present.

Original score: 4