Time skips vs duel timelines

[Devouring Wolf]

I'm writing a story in which there's exactly one major time skip ( a span of nearly a year). Before the time skip the story is told primarily from the POVs of two characters, but after the time skip its told mostly from the perspective of a third character caught in the middle of the conflict between the first two. I've been considering how I should write the story and I'm not sure whether it would be better to splice the the two timelines together and have the story flip-flop between past and present or whether it would be better to just say "one year later..." and keep the story linear so I thought I'd ask you folks to weigh in on the drawbacks and merits of either approach.

 

[La Volpe]

I think it would be pretty confusing to jump to the future and past by splicing the two together, unless you make it really clear which period is which.

Maybe your story would be better served by having the time skip, depending on how long each part is. How far into your story is the time skip? Is it possible to gloss over the past bit and start the story at the future bit?

An alternative is to do a Kringe in die Bos (Circles in a Forest, Dalene Matthee) or Carrie style thing where you play up the dramatic irony by showing where the past bit will end up, and revealing bits of the future at a time until the two finally intersect. But that could be tricky to do well.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

Splicing together future and past would be very confusing. I would avoid having more than one timeline going at once. A time skip is much simpler.

 

[Caged Maiden]

One way I've discovered to splice times is to allow a single thought to move from one to the other. For example, if a character is acting in the future point, on a task, a thought, whatever it is, and then the past comes next, connected by that thing.

Say, your character is readying a catapult for an attack. The chapter might cut as the order to loose the catapults is given, and then the next chapter opens with a block smashing into a fortress wall two years earlier, when a previous battle was fought, one that determined some outcome that has a bearing on the future?

I hope that makes sense.

Sometimes you see this with memories or whatever. A subject will be the main point. Like, today, I have a feeling, and then I reminisce to the first time I dealt with that feeling, or whatever. I think this is a great tool to tying the future to the past.

 

[Devouring Wolf]

I think it would be pretty confusing to jump to the future and past by splicing the two together, unless you make it really clear which period is which.

Maybe your story would be better served by having the time skip, depending on how long each part is. How far into your story is the time skip? Is it possible to gloss over the past bit and start the story at the future bit?

An alternative is to do a Kringe in die Bos (Circles in a Forest, Dalene Matthee) or Carrie style thing where you play up the dramatic irony by showing where the past bit will end up, and revealing bits of the future at a time until the two finally intersect. But that could be tricky to do well.

I originally didn't have the past bit and started with the future bit, but I lost a lot of really important character development and there's really no other way to put it in. Talking about it as backstory, just doesn't have the same impact as showing it. So I haven't actually written the "past" part at all and I'm trying to think of the best way to implement it, but it should be a pretty significant chunk of story since its about half a year's worth of events.

I worry having just a straight time skip might be kind of disconcerting because at first glance the two parts are about different things. One moment you would be reading about a religious fanatic who thinks the new priest in his father's court has made a pact with a demon, and then it would skip a year and you'd be reading about the priest's brother on the run.