These come from [[Gerard Genette]]'s book, [[Narrative Discourse - An Essay in Method (1983)]]. ### Order You don’t have to narrate things in strict chronological order. In fact, events are *rarely* (!) narrated in such a way. For example, a writer often throws in little bits of background information here and there, and these bits of background info disrupt the flow of the story. You can very subtly and quickly narrate things that happened before the events of the main narrative ([[analepse]]), or even narrate events that will happen after the events you are currently narrating ([[prolepse]]). Here's an example of an analepse: > The gunslinger walked in to the bar. He had a scar on his cheek. It was still healing. **He had received it over a month ago when he. . .** This is actually a fun [[teaching exercise]]. Just start a document project on the board. Type out the start of a story, and then tell the class, "Okay, give me an analepse. What do I type next?" ### Duration You can spend as much or as little time as you want narrating something. You can spend 300 pages painstakingly describing the events of 30 seconds. You can sum up 300 years in a single sentence. ### Frequency There are a few ways to play with frequency. Consider the difference between this: > Every Tuesday for the entire semester, I went to English class. ...versus this: > On the first Tuesday of the semester, I went to English class. Then, on the next Tuesday, I went to English class. On the Tuesday after that, I went to English class. The Tuesday after that I was running late, but I eventually went to English class. After that... [etc.] Another way to play with frequency is to narrate the same event more than once. Think of TV shows that do the [[Rashomon (1950)|Rashomon]]-style episode, and retell the same event a few times, each time from different character’s perspective. (In TV episodes, this often involves a court case or an investigation into “what really happened.”) In narratives with multiple points of view, you often see events narrated more than once when you switch from one POV to the next, with some slight overlap. The events at the very *end* of the first POV are repeated at the *start* of the next POV, partly to help orient the reader or viewer.