Hello all, I think this post should be in Plot Development, if not please point me in the right direction. I've completed a first draft of a novel. It contains a few flashback scenes (what I'm currently calling interludes) to fill in some of the character's motivations but I'm struggling on how to label them to keep the timing straight in the reader's minds. A complicating factor is that the interludes themselves - while pretty short - happen across different times. For example, my first interlude has a heading that says "Three Years Ago." Then I show what happened; I then have another heading that says "Two Weeks Later" and show what happened then (in this case, the first thing is that the protagonist meets a woman; two weeks later he has an affair with her). I can probably write around that particular one, but some of the other interludes have sections that take part a few months apart, and another has four different sections. So, my question is how do I label them/ let the reader know when they happened in relation to present day? Another issue is that some of the interlude events happen right after others, while other events are separated by months so I end up with something like this: Three Years Ago Two Weeks After That Two Years Ago Eighteen Months ago A Month After That (or Seventeen Months Ag0) For ease, I could refer to everything by weeks but for the longer time periods I thought it sounded funny, i.e. "One Hundred Fifty Weeks Ag0." The main events of the book all take place on one day, on a very specific date (in this case, July 2nd). So technically, I could use actual dates but I've always tried to steer away from that so the book doesn't seem dated.
I definitely agree with you on not using the dates. "Three years ago" is just very clear. When I read the first "Two weeks later" in the post, I didn't immediately know whether it was in relation to the three years ago or the present day. The "Two weeks after that" makes it very clear, though. I would generally try to present the day in relation to the present (as in "Seventeen Months Ago > "A Month After That"), but in the two weeks case, you went the right direction. So any time you have just one time measurement (ie Year/month/week), I'd relate it to the present. If there are two or more, I'd probably go with "X time later." The issue with this approach could be something like: Two years ago Thirteen months ago as opposed to Two years ago Eleven months after that Here I prefer the first option. I think it's because the later date is closer to one year than two, but I have no idea. Make it understandable above all (Exception is, of course, when you want to throw the audience off), then prioritize flow of the sentence. My biggest suggestion is to get a bunch of people to read the examples, and ask them if there's any confusion.
This is where I believe clarity trumps elegance. Rather than 'two weeks later,' I would identify what the 'later' refers to. As in "Exactly two weeks after Cicily left home, her brother Jeff was loading the dryer when the phone rang." Okay, that's definitely not an elegant example. But if you can nail the time difference a bit more specifically than just 'two weeks later,' it will register more strongly with the reader.