Order and Pace: Story Time and Telling Time

Think of the most important day of your life. Maybe it was the day you came to faith, the day you married, or the day you held your first child. If you wrote about that day, you might spend ten pages on a single hour. Then, in the next chapter, you might cover twenty years in one paragraph.

That uneven pace is a strength. It is one of the most powerful tools a writer has. Every story runs on two clocks: the time the events actually took, and the time it takes to tell them. Scholars call these the time of the story and the time of the narrative. In plain words: story time and telling time.

Where these ideas come from

People have thought about the shape of stories for a very long time. In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote about what makes a story whole. In S. H. Butcher's public-domain translation, he puts it simply: "A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end." A beginning does not need anything before it. An end follows from what came before and needs nothing after it. A middle connects the two.

In the twentieth century, the French critic Gérard Genette gave writers a sharper set of tools. In a 1972 essay later published in English as Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, he studied how the order and timing of events in a story compare with the order and timing of their telling. He built his study around Marcel Proust's great novel In Search of Lost Time. Genette sorted the relationship into three questions: order, duration, and frequency. His book became a major work of narratology, the study of how stories are put together.

His ideas are easy to use, even if you never read his book. Here they are in plain words.

Order: when do we tell it?

Events happen in one order. A writer can tell them in another.

• Chronological order tells events as they happened. It is clear and steady, and it builds trust.
• A flashback steps back to an earlier moment. Genette's technical term for this is analepsis.
• A flash-forward jumps ahead to something that will happen later. His term for this is prolepsis. "I did not know it then, but that phone call would change everything" is a small flash-forward.
• Beginning in medias res, Latin for "into the middle of things," drops the reader into the action and fills in the background later.

Many strong memoirs open with a gripping moment from the middle of the story, then go back to the beginning to show how the author got there. Others move steadily forward from childhood. Both can work. The question is which order best serves the story you are telling.

Duration: how long do we linger?

Duration is about speed. How much page space does a stretch of time get? Genette described four basic speeds:

• A scene tells events at roughly the pace they happened, often with dialogue. A five-minute conversation takes a page or two.
• A summary covers a long stretch of time quickly. "We spent the next three years planting the church."
• An ellipsis skips time entirely. The chapter ends, and the next one begins a year later.
• A pause stops the clock while the writer describes, explains, or reflects.

Good storytellers change speed on purpose. They slow down for the moments that matter most and speed up through the rest. A common mistake in first-draft memoirs is giving every year equal space. The result reads like a list. The fix is to find the turning points and give them room.

Frequency: how many times do we tell it?

Frequency asks how often an event is told compared with how often it happened.

• Most of the time, a writer tells once what happened once.
• Sometimes a writer tells once what happened many times: "Every Sunday, my grandmother sat in the third pew." That one sentence stands for hundreds of Sundays.
• And sometimes a writer tells more than once what happened only once, returning to a key moment from new angles as the book goes on.

That last move can be deeply moving in a faith story. An author might return to the night of their conversion three times in a book, each time understanding it a little more deeply.

Why this matters for memoir and testimony

Most legacy books are built on true stories. Handling time well is what turns a string of memories into a story readers cannot put down.

When we study an author's voice, we pay attention to how they already handle time when they tell a story aloud. Some people always start at the beginning. Some jump straight to the dramatic moment. Some circle back again and again. These habits are part of their voice, and we want the book to keep them.

At the same time, we help authors use these tools on purpose. We might suggest opening with a scene, summarizing a quiet decade, or returning to a key moment at the end of the book. The goal is always the same: to help readers feel the weight of what God has done.

Try this

Take one story you want to tell in your book. Write down every event in the order it happened. Then ask three questions:

1. Where should the story begin for the reader? It might not be the first event.
2. Which moment deserves the most space? Slow down there.
3. Is there a moment worth returning to later in the book?

Your answers are the start of a shape. And shape, as Aristotle saw long ago, is what makes a story whole.