The ‘Timeline’ Story Planning Technique - Fabula or Story?

The crux of the storytelling technique I teach in my Nurture Email Mastery course is the timeline technique. The timeline chronologically maps the main events of a story on a timeline from left to right.

For instance:

Drawing a timeline before you put pen to paper serves three purposes:

1. It forces you to be selective about what you include in the story. Most stories told for business purposes need to be brief yet illuminating, so you don’t want too many events or multiple threads. More than 7 timeline events is usually too many.

2. It highlights whether you have sufficient contrast in the story. Do you have good things AND bad things happening? Most business stories only contain good things – and are mind-numbingly dull as a result.

3. It forces you to pick an end point where you will reconnect to your message, which I call the ‘One Idea’. The One Idea on the timeline above is 'trust'.

All of this holds up for a short, anecdotal story. But if you’re planning a longer story (as part of a presentation for instance), mapping the flow of events doesn’t necessarily capture the internal growth or character arc. In a longer story, events put pressure on the protagonist, who is forced into decisions. The consequences of these decisions lead to a degree of internal character change. (Hence the ‘arc’.)

So, I've been wrestling with the relevance of the timeline technique for a few years. Until this week...

This week, I’ve been reading a book called Narratology by Mieke Bal. Bal explores the difference between the text, the story, and the fabula...

“A narrative text is a text in which an agent relates (‘tells’) a story in a particular medium. A story is a fabula that is presented in a certain manner. A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors. An event is a transition from one state to another state. Actors are agents that perform actions.”

Narratology Second Edition, page 5

I read that and was like “Ahhhhhhh! The timeline maps the fabula, not the story. The story is an interpretation of the fabula!”

When you’re planning a story, mapping the fabula is still the starting point. You might then tell the story differently depending on you medium and audience. You can re-tell the same story multiple times and in different ways!

On that bombshell, I’m off to spend Christmas manically drawing timelines with renewed vigour.

See you in January!

Rob

P.S. The other insight I got from Narratology was that third person narration is actually still first person, only by a non-active external narrator. There is always an active ‘speaking voice’.