In a post for Writer’s Digest, Ella Carey offers advice on how to incorporate parallel narratives into our stories. Parallel narratives are two stories, with distinct characters and sometimes separated by time, that connect to and reflect each other in some way. Carey’s novel The Paris Maid features two narratives, one set after the liberation of France in 1944, featuring French women accused of collaborating with the Nazis, and the other set in the present, featuring the descendant of one of those women.
“Each storyline must be as strong as the other, otherwise a dual narrative will not work,” Carey writes. The stories must also be connected, by location or family or some other key element, as well as by narrative. “To find this, I think a very good idea is to ask yourself what was the one thing that inspired you to write this story?” Carey says. Once she’s found this compelling story idea, Carey then looks for conflict between the narratives, a disconnect between the timelines. “I think at this point, it is important to ask yourself what is at stake?” she says. “Why is this conflict so strong and significant, and if things don’t work out, what is at stake for your characters in both storylines?” Now it’s time to work out your characters and research the setting, where the denizens of each timeline will live.
For structure, Carey alternates chapters between each timeline, one set in the past and one set in the present. During the drafting process, she is likely to make more thematic connections between the narratives. “I might have my characters going through a similar problem at a similar time in the book, and because those characters are so different, they will react to the same problem, in a different time, in a very different way,” she explains. “I think that once you have your characters set, and you give them agency, and you know who they are, then you can really play with and strengthen the fact that you have two storylines to build contrast.”
