How do you use time jumps to create suspense?
Spoiler warning: This post is going to reveal a few of the plot elements of Black Sun, although I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum. This novel repays careful attention and rereading, however, and I think you will enjoy it just as much if you know some of the plot pieces beforehand.
As we’ve discussed in earlier posts on Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun, opening a fantasy novel poses extra challenges as authors must introduce readers to the story world alongside the characters and their stakes. Roanhorse raises the bar even higher by using four different point-of-view characters to tell her story, which means that she must also teach us about the conflicts, goals, motivations, and stakes for each one. How does she build all of that groundwork for the story while delivering enough action to keep readers interested?
One solution comes from the way she handles time in the novel. I discussed her use of datelines at the beginning of chapters briefly in my blog post on the opening of the novel. Chapter 1 is labeled “Year 315 of the Sun (10 Years before Convergence).” Chapter 2 (which I analyzed in detail in this post about word-building) jumps forward ten years to Year 325, now twenty days before convergence. Roanhorse continues to jump around in time as the novel unfolds, but the datelines let us know that some kind of major reckoning is coming for all of these characters.
Chapter 3 even gives us a brief glimpse of the day itself, opening with the memorable line, “Naranpa was not dead, even though the witch Zataya thought her so.” This is our first time meeting Naranpa (and we will not see Zataya again until chapter 28). Very quickly, however, Roanhorse moves away from the Convergence and into a flashback to Naranpa’s childhood, which she spent growing up in the poor Coyote’s Maw district, being taught that she had very restricted choices in her future. At the end of the chapter, we learn that she somehow escaped those strictures and is now Sun Priest—and yet clearly the Day of Convergence has brought calamity.
Let’s take a closer look at how Roanhorse orchestrates this complex plot structure to uncover other techniques that you can adapt for your own work. The graphic below charts the four point-of-view strands as they unfold, showing how they jump around in time and where they overlap and converge.
You’ll see that twenty days before convergence serves as a kind of introductory baseline to all of the plots except for that of Okoa (the gray spade), who we meet later in the novel. Xiala’s story (the blue arrow) starts at that point and both Naranpa’s strand (the yellow sun) and Serapio’s strand (the red circle) settle at that point after their excursions backward and forward in time. In the top right of the graphic, all four strands cluster together, appropriately, on the Day of Convergence.
Let’s focus on Serapio’s strand for a moment. Notice how his is the only strand that jumps back and forth between the present action and the deeper past. Other characters do dip back in time to reveal significant memories, just as we saw in Naranpa’s chapter 3, but Serapio is the only one who gets self-contained backstory chapters. His strand regularly seesaws back and forth between past and present until his last two chapters, with the backstory chapters moving steadily forward in time, until the last one is set five months before Convergence. (We saw Laura David use the same technique in The Last Thing He Told Me, which has a similar kind of D-Day event—the husband’s disappearance—to organize the time structure of the novel.)
Why is Serapio (red) the character who gets this treatment and not one of the others? The key here is to understand that Serapio’s appearance at Convergence is the event that irrevocably changes this story world, moving us from one epoch to another. We can’t fully understand why and how he achieves this shattering change without seeing him come to comprehend it himself over time. We need to see him learning the powers he ultimately unleashes, and we need to have some empathy for the reasons he chooses to unleash it. Because Serapio, alone among these POV characters, knows exactly what will happen on Convergence (and appears to have very little doubt it will come to pass), Roanhorse can’t spend too much time in his present POV without revealing too much.
Xiala (blue) and Serapio are traveling together toward Tova, trying to reach it before Convergence, and that fact also allows Roanhorse to show us Serapio’s POV only sparingly. Xiala and Serapio both have eleven POV chapters, but almost half of Serapio’s are set in the past. There is a particularly long stretch in the middle of the novel, from chapters 18 to 28, where we lose touch with Serapio’s present POV altogether. However, Xiala has three POV chapters in that section that help us know Serapio is steadily moving toward the end-point of his journey.
Naranpa (yellow), the erstwhile Sun Priest, is Serapio’s inverse. Notice that we often step forward in time in her strand first, with subsequent chapters in a different character’s POV often falling back a step. See, for example, the chapters from 9 to 14, as well as chapters 27, 33, and 36—in addition, of course, to that initial glimpse at Convergence in chapter 3.
Roanhorse often chooses to show an event from Naranpa’s POV first because she often has the least understanding and agency of the group, and thus having access to her internal thoughts and deductions about the events of the novel don’t reveal so much that we get bored. In fact, Naranpa is so often wrong in her assessment of other people that her bad guesses fuel the suspense. At the same time, her motives are generally admirable, which fuels our hope that one of these times she’ll be right or be able to make the moves that will allow her vision for the city of Tova come to pass.
In chapters 9, 10, and 14, for example, we see Naranpa encountering a number of challenges: a thwarted attempt to assassinate her, the unexpected death of the powerful matron of the Carrion Crow clan, and attacks on her power from amongst the priestly Watchers, a group she, as Sun Priest, supposedly wields power over. In chapter 15, we are introduced to Okoa, the son of the dead matron, for the first time, and it’s here that we learn just how wrong Naranpa has been. The matron did not die in her sleep, as reported to her, but was found in the river, a presumed suicide—though Okoa has his doubts about that assumption as well.
When we finally reach the long-awaited Day of Convergence in the final chapters of the novel, Roanhorse moves carefully between points of view as the day unfolds in order to maximize the drama and suspense. The day dawns in chapter 36, where we return to the supposedly dead Naranpa, going back a little further in time before the action of chapter 3 to find out how she came to be pulled out of the river by the witch Zataya, presumed dead. (Zataya picks up Naranpa’s strand in chapter 41, marked by the black sun symbol on the graphic, the only chapter she narrates.)
Chapter 37 actually steps backward in time again, to show us Serapio positioning himself on Sun Rock the night before, where we know the Convergence ceremony is due to be held. In the next chapter, now back to the Day of Convergence itself, Okoa learns that Serapio has been spotted on Sun Rock. We then move to Serapio to see his destiny come to final fruition, in what is the climactic chapter of the novel. Xiala shows us the immediate aftermath, but from a distance, before we move to Zataya and then, finally, Okoa who gives us a closer view of what has transpired and whose final actions constitute the falling action of the novel.
If you are struggling to build suspense and reader engagement in the early sections of your novel, especially a fantasy novel, it’s worth looking at Roanhorse’s Black Sun in detail to see if some of these strategies could be useful for you.