Order

There is a small part of story writing that seems obvious and simple, and yet I quite frequently see it played with, both to a stories benefit and its downfall. The order in which thinks happen. This can mean a variety of things, of course, but the first and most obvious is the timeline of your story. You want there to be an order of events, an understanding of when things happen, and a clear distinction of the relationship between one event and another. At least, most of the time you do.

Rules can always be broken. When you want your story to be unsettling and uncomfortable, telling the events out of order is always a good starting point. And of course, there are many stories that start just before the pivotal moment, and then flashback to the story of how they came to that point in the first place. Many don't even reveal until the very end of the story how it began, revealing in the final moments that the narrator is really the main character telling their story from some other point of view that casts the entire thing into a different light.

But there is another type of order in stories. An order of how things must be done, rather than an order of how they are actually done. On a very basic level, this is more or less the same. A character can't die before they are born, after all. But assume that a character is on a quest? An errand is set before them, an errand of epic proportions, and in order to accomplish that adventure, they must do things in a very specific order. Talk to this person to collect this item so it can be brought to another person in exchange for another artifact, so on and so forth until he ultimate goal is accomplished.

But what happens when these orders are broken?

As I see it, there are two possibilities. The first, and the more preferable, is that the rules of the world begin to collapse, giving the main character new capabilities and importance in their story, as they become the moving force, rather than an effect of that force being pushed on them. The second possibility is that nothing changes. The order becomes irrelevant. The entire story begins to fall apart, because by changing the order, you reveal that nothing actually matters. Any growth that once could have been is eliminated, because the events that built upon each other to culminate in that growth are torn asunder.

An excellent example of what I mean by this is the film adaptation of the book, The Dark Is Rising. Under only one circumstance should you ever watch the movie if you enjoyed the book - because you want to see how spectacularly something can fail. Many things are changed needlessly in the movie, but the biggest of them all is order. In the book, five rings must be collected, and in a very specific order, for only with the power of the previous can the next be unlocked. In the movie, this order is shot to hell. Not a single ring is collected in the same order in the movie as they are in the book.

Why was this change made? What advantage did it have over the original?

None.

It completely changed the pacing of the story, making the rings completely irrelevant to each other. In fact, the climax of the book, the big final battle, in the movie is moved to before the rings are even fully collected, forcing the final ring to be changed to an idiotic explanation that has absolutely nothing to do with anything that has happened. Each scene in the movie is its own beast, completely unrelated to any scene that preceded it, other than the fact that the main character is in them.

It's amazing how important such a small detail can be. It can make or break a story. It can instill a sense of time, or it can make a reader question what the hell is even going on. Such a small matter, yet one must think long and hard about what they want their story to be before deciding on it, else risk utter ruin. Pretty impressive for something that seems obvious.