: Re: A novel consisting of three separate stories joined only by a theme. A bad idea? I'm writing a novel where a person who has decided to commit suicide can hire some murderers to kill he/him

The book "Holes" (also a Disney movie made in the mid-2000s) features three stories that play out over the course of the novel that all contribute to the first story's conclusion to some degree or another. Part of the enjoyment of the book is the way the two side stories connect with the main plot.

One way this is achieved is that the stories are told concurrently to the events in the novel's main story (along with flashbacks to the main story's back story). So the first chapter sets up the main story and the only one to be set in the present. The other three stories (the Back Story of the hero, the first story in the past, the second story in the past).

It's been a while since I read the book, but to my recollection, the order was something like

main story
back story
recent past (early 1800s)
older past (late 1800s)

All so that there was a sort of order to them in a chronological sense (though not an order), though the movie has the First Story as a Flashback that occurs in the Backstory (and a small portion of the Second Story).

This allows the hero/view point character to experience the history behind the larger narrative with the reader. Both the Back Story and the First Past story are his own recollections of the events while the Second Past story is told to him from a source he meets in the main story.

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: Re: A novel consisting of three separate stories joined only by a theme. A bad idea? I'm writing a novel where a person who has decided to commit suicide can hire some murderers to kill he/him

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: Do too many scenes exhaust the reader? I'm now analyzing the scenes in my manuscript. I broke my manuscript into scenes using the definition that a new scene begins when a person, place,

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