Simultaneity

The dog is barking. The baby is crying. The phone is ringing. The pot is boiling over.

And it's all happening at the same time. At least, in real life.

Not in good fiction.

Simultaneous events are a lot like oysters piled on a beach, waiting for a writer to separate what's relevant and string the important treasures together in logical progression. There's a cause-and-effect pattern to emotion that when replicated in fiction evokes feelings in readers. The secret to keeping the reader connected to the feelings in the story is the order in which events are presented: chronologically.

Instead of presenting readers with a jumbled pile of events, pretend that one thing follows another, like pearls on a necklace. Example: The dog barks, and then the baby cries, and then when you try to soothe the baby, the phone rings, and then when you rush to answer the phone, the unattended pot boils over.

These things don't happen all at once, even if that's the way they would happen in real life.

What about art being true to life? If things happen at the same time in real life, shouldn't they happen that way in fiction?

No. Because real life--or more specifically the many routine tasks that make up so much of life--is boring. If it wasn't, reality shows wouldn't hire story editors to shape hundreds of hours of real life into thirty minutes of something interesting.

That said, there are times when simultaneity is perfectly logical in narrative description. It's okay to write, "Loving the strength of his arms, she snuggled deeply into his embrace," or "Growling, the dog watched the cat cross the yard," or "Dicing the onions for the stew, she started to cry."

Most of the time, however, narrative logic is best maintained by presenting events in sequence, one at a time. The reason is simple: simultaneous events confuse readers. Simultaneity breaks the cause-and-effect pattern that connects readers with the feelings on the page. When many things are going on at once, how can a reader determine which one is stimulating a certain emotion? Why not all of them? Because people feel differently about a dog barking than a baby crying. Add the phone ringing, and at the very least there should be a difference in intensity of the feelings involved.

Go ahead and write, "Everything happened at the same time," if that is how the point-of-view character experienced it. Then write the simultaneous events in strict chronological order.

Then everything happened at the same time. The dog barked, and the baby, his face turning red, burst into startled cries. In the hallway, the telephone rang and wouldn't quit. Jane snatched Sam, Jr. out of the high chair, and dashed to answer the phone. She took two strides away from the stove before the soup boiled over and hissed on the burner.

Some words can sneak simultaneity into description where it isn't intended. Words like as, while, and -ing. Try to keep up with the cause-and-effect of this simultaneity-riddled passage:

Rain slicked his face while he ran through the jungle. As he stumbled over a protruding tree root, an unseen snake hissed overhead. Staggering from exhaustion, he wondered if he'd make it out alive.

There are no less than six separate things happening in the above paragraph, but readers are given little hint how they are connected with each other or with the point-of-view character's feelings. Given more such jumbled piles of simultaneous description, readers will feel jerked and jolted.

Let logic guide you in stringing events together into a necklace of glimmering description. Filter real life through the fictional necessity of cause-and-effect. Train yourself to sense overuses of as, while, and -ing conjunctions that undermine readers' emotional connection to the story.

Readers may never thank you for it. If you do it well, they won't even know what you're doing. That's the point. Art isn't real life, it only imitates real life--the interesting parts, that is.