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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5576
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5576
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Each character or set of characters has their own arc. "How will this develop?" is that arc.

The simplest way to tie all the arcs together is to **set them all in the same period of time.** Try starting with the same event at the beginning of each character's section — for added emphasis, use exactly the same wording for a paragraph or two — and then track each character or set of characters for roughly the same amount of time.

For example, a wormhole rips open in the middle of Main Street in Wichita, KS, and seven aliens fall through and land in the lobby of Mary's Bait & Tackle & Library. Your sections cover the next 48 hours.

Section 1 follows Mary as she tries to clean up and figure out what to do with the visitors.

Section 2 covers Pete and Mark, who watch the wormhole on the news. They live in Albany, NY. They've been having marital difficulties, but this event reorders their priorities and suddenly their problems seem rather small and silly.

Section 3 is the POV of FBI Special Agent Chen, who is an amateur astronomer and a conspiracy buff, which is only exacerbated by his job. He tries to work his way onto the task force dealing with the aliens.

Section 4 is told by Giovanna, a seven-year-old living in Rome who just saw _E.T._ and learns about the visitors from her teacher in school.

You can present them sequentially and repeat the time period for each arc (like Tolkien did in _The Two Towers_), interweave them (like Peter Jackson did in _The Two Towers_), or group them according to geography (like George R.R. Martin did in _A Feast for Crows/A Dance With Dragons_).

Another good example of this is Dean Koontz's _Strangers_. The Event happened some time before the story opens, different people had their memories wiped or altered in different ways, and they are overcoming the wipe or alteration each in their own fashion and to different degrees. Everyone is geographically scattered _and_ not everyone experienced the same thing.

You need some constant for the reader to measure the process against. Time, as Dana Scully once told us, is the universal invariant. Start there.

Original score: 3