How timeline compression works in Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

This post discusses the entire plot of Wild Dark Shore, including multiple backstory mysteries.

During our Novel Study book club discussion of Wild Dark Shore, one participant observed that the novel felt “like a play in a very small black box” and others discussed the “creepy” or “ghostly feeling” that permeates the story. Suddenly the entire shape of the novel unfolded in front of me and I frantically wrote the words containers and ghosts in my notebook to pin the thought in place.

Now I get to walk myself—and you—through what I saw in that moment. Here are my two insights: First, all novels are, in a sense, containers for ghosts. The ghosts are the backstories that fuel the characters, especially the protagonists and antagonists. These backstories are often the causes in the cause-and-effect engine that moves the plot forward, explaining why characters choose one action or response over another. When planning and writing your novel, you must decide exactly how to weave these backstories into the structure, specifically when and how to reveal them to the reader, and when and how to have the characters confront their backstories and take the critical action that is going to move their character arc forward.

Second, one reason Wild Dark Shore is so effective is that McConaghy has packed an extra layer of ghosts into her novel, which amplifies the tension and suspense we feel as readers. I’ll walk you through the timeline in detail below but, in essence, the primary characters have old ghosts that haunt them, the familiar backstories typical of most novels. What’s not as typical is that there are a number of fresh ghosts haunting this novel—events that occurred in the weeks before the novel opens.

I’m calling this period the midstory. These ghosts work differently because the characters haven’t yet had time to come to terms with them, even in the sometimes partial ways they’ve dealt with their backstory ghosts. In addition, these ghosts still have plot power in a way that the backstory ghosts do not; they can come roaring back to life to set new events in motion. I’ll walk you through how the frontstory, backstory, and midstory layers work and then help you decide whether this is a strategy that could work for your own novel.

Let’s start by laying out the frontstory timeline, which is the reader’s map through the novel and also carries most of the tension. The frontstory is the always-moving dividing line between what has happened and what will happen. In the frontstory, neither the characters nor the readers know where the plot will take them. The characters must keep moving through their hours and days, and readers must keep turning the pages, to find out.

The inciting incident is that Rowan washes ashore on Shearwater Island, a remote research station near the Antarctic. The only inhabitants are the Salt family, who are in the process of shutting down the seed vault on the island, which is threatened by climate change. The most important of the remaining seeds will be transferred to a new facility on the mainland by a Navy ship scheduled to arrive in about seven weeks’ time. Those seven weeks contain all of the plot action readers see over the course of the novel.

As you can see from the intensity figure, the plot follows a typical thriller pattern similar to what we saw in King of Ashes. There’s a spike of intensity in the opening, as Rowan washes ashore and Dominic discovers the extensive damage from the same violent storm that capsized the small boat she was traveling in. They can’t call for help because the island’s communications equipment was destroyed weeks earlier.

Rowan, we soon discover, came to Shearwater looking for her husband, Hank, who was in charge of the seed vault and had sent alarming emails about being “in danger.” As the weeks pass, Rowan falls in love with Dominic Salt, as well as his children, but also comes to realize that there is some mystery about what happened to Hank that they are all keeping from her.

At the midpoint of the novel, there’s an extended spike of intensity when Dominic’s teenage son Raff and Rowan almost drown after a humpback whale leaps out of the water and comes down on top of their small Zodiac boat. The mystery about Hank is finally revealed in the final, high-stakes climax, which occurs during another violent storm that floods the seed vault. The novel ends with the arrival of the ship and their departure from the island.

The frontstory is driven by three primary story questions readers want answered:

As usual, all of our point-of-view characters have backstory ghosts to contend with. Rowan has two, and the older ghost answers the question raised by the first sentence of the novel, which I discussed at length in my post on the opening: “I have hated my mother for most of my life but it is her face I see as I drown.” Rowan’s younger brother drowned while he was in her care. Rowan was still a child herself, and she blames her mother for their little-supervised life on a houseboat—and for holding Rowan responsible for the death. The more recent ghost is the total destruction of her house and land in a bushfire, which deepened a rift in her marriage. Hank had wanted children, while Rowan believed it unethical to bring children into such a fragile and damaged world. After the fire, Hank accepted the job on Shearwater, leaving Rowan behind, mired in depression.

In the case of the Salt family, their primary ghost is the death of Claire, Dominic’s wife and the mother of the children. When she was twenty weeks pregnant with Orly, she discovered she had cancer. Rather than terminate the pregnancy, she carried the baby to term. During her stalled labor, Dominic was the one who had to make the impossible choice between saving the baby and giving his wife a possible chance to survive. He chose the baby, knowing it was what his wife wanted, but the choice has warped his love for his son. The ghost of his wife is quite literal to Dominic, who speaks to her frequently.

Nine-year-old Orly is also haunted by the presence of the mother he never knew, though he speaks to a different set of ghosts: the spirits of animals that were hunted and killed on the island in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including an entire species of seal that was “wiped out entirely.”

This array of frontstory plot and backstory ghosts is more than enough to fuel a successful novel, with the two elements working together to explain characters’ choices and motivations. The climax typically dramatizes the moment a character confronts their backstory ghost, laying it to rest through a cathartic action, and that’s exactly what we see in Wild Dark Shore.

However, the entire novel is given an extra layer of intensity due to what I’m calling the “midstory” ghosts—events that further activate the backstory ghosts and raise the stakes for the frontstory.

Let’s walk through those midstory events so we can imagine a version of this novel in which the frontstory covers three months rather than seven weeks. In that version of the novel, the inciting incident would be the news that the seed vault is shutting down, meaning that the Salt family has to leave the island that has been their refuge for the past eight years.

Pulling the timeline back reveals an island with four additional inhabitants; it is their ghosts who populate the midstory, adding suspense and intensity as Rowan discovers them. She arrives already in pursuit of one apparent ghost—her husband Hank. Readers and Rowan slowly start to piece together what has happened. After learning the seed vault will shut down, Hank begins to go mad under the task of selecting which seeds will be preserved and which will be abandoned. Orly senses that something is awry with Hank and decides to destroy the island’s comms equipment so Hank will be forced to stay and finish the job. Orly has no memory of a life off this island; the seeds and animals and ghosts of the island are his whole world.

In the meantime, Hank has begun an affair with the seventeen-year-old Fen. When she tells him she is afraid she is pregnant, he tries to drown her. Fen escapes; Dominic almost beats Hank to death (the mysterious blood he cleans up, discussed in my post on chapter four), then imprisons him in a storage shaft in the seed vault. Rowan discovers him there, still alive—a ghost that comes back to life.

The other three ghosts are truly dead and gone, but only recently. Tom and his fiancée Naija were researchers working on the island. Tom’s younger brother Alex followed him to the island and fell in love with Orly and Fen’s brother, Raff. The two spend a night together in one of the research huts. When a violent storm sweeps the hut into the sea, Raff and Alex escape, but Tom and his fiancée Naija drown trying to save them. Soon after, Alex commits suicide.

In a version of this novel with a longer frontstory timeline, the Raff–Tom–Alex sequence would likely have been at the midpoint, where we often find an all-is-lost moment, with Rowan’s appearance soon after providing a new twist and additional pressure on the still-unresolved Hank plot. I think this version of the novel would have also been quite compelling, but it doesn’t achieve the almost claustrophobic black box effect McConaghy is going for.

Now visualize that three-month frontstory timeline bent in half. By starting the novel with Rowan’s dramatic arrival on the island, McConaghy traps a whole set of very fresh (and thus very high-energy) ghosts in the now-smaller container of the novel, while the older backstory ghosts are still out in the ether, waiting for their opportunities to haunt the plot. I think it’s this single choice that gives the novel much of its power. Every page is thick with ghosts whose presence we can sense even before we know exactly who is haunting the characters and why.

Late in the novel, the author actually dramatizes this compression for us. In chapter fifty-seven, Dominic’s flashback connects all of the pieces. First, he lays out to Raff, Alex, Tom, and Naija the impossible situation they face with Hank:

This is a classic best-bad-choice scenario, and McConaghy brings that home for readers by having Dominic lay it out clearly.

Then, in the final lines of the chapter, Dominic explicitly lays out the shape and tension of the longer, three-month version of the plot, in which this already damaged family must confront a new series of tragedies, followed by a big new complication:

The passage reads almost like a blueprint for the novel’s structure, showing us exactly how the fresh ghosts are connected to Rowan’s arrival and the frontstory that follows. This is a technique to remember in a novel with an especially complex plot. McConaghy is using another classic plot device here: putting her characters in a fraught situation and then finding a way to increase the tension even further.

From a structural standpoint, the choice to compress the frontstory timeline also gives Rowan a much bigger presence in the novel. As readers, we begin the novel in her point of view rather than waiting to experience it until after the midpoint. Rowan and Dominic both have twenty-five POV chapters, though Dominic gets much more page time (44 percent to Rowan’s 25 percent).

The strategy also works because both ghosts and containers, those two words that inspired this post, are important thematically and structurally. I discussed ghosts a bit in my scene study of chapter four, but they pop up everywhere. When Rowan almost drowns for a second time, during the whale incident, she has a vivid memory of her younger brother who drowned: “Shearwater is a place of ghosts, after all, and it has found mine and delivered him back to me.” Not long after, Fen decides to free her father from her mother’s ghost by burning her remaining mementos in a bonfire on the beach. That exorcism fails, but in the tense climax of the novel, Dominic’s ghost says to him, “Look at what you have done.” Dominic finally realizes this cruel voice can’t be that of his wife. Rather, it is a monster of his own making, an amalgam of his grief and guilt and shame. That recognition finally unlocks the purity of his love for his son, fueling his successful effort to save his life in the last chapters.

And the structure, the container, of the novel owes a great deal to the conventions of the locked-room mystery, which intensifies the Hank subplot. If something has happened to him, then there are only a limited number of people on the island who could have been responsible. The island is one container, but it is full of others: the lighthouse the family lives in, the seed vault, the storage shaft where Hank is trapped and where the climax of the novel occurs.

The seeds in the vault are at once containers and ghosts—harboring the potential for a future plant or tree while also hosting the ghosts of all of the evolutionary ancestors that produced them. Embedding the theme in the structure of your novel and vice versa creates a work that feels magical for the reader, like a seamless, organic whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

Another version of this novel might have started two months earlier—and perhaps did in McConaghy’s earlier drafts or outlines. Would this compression technique work for your own novel? It could if you are struggling with a story that has too much plot for the length you are aiming for, if you need more motivations to explain characters’ actions (more causes for the effects you want to show), or if you want to intensify the reader’s experience of the plot.

Create a story spreadsheet or rough outline of your plot, then move forward in the timeline, asking yourself, What if the novel started here . . . or here . . . or here? If you move a big chunk of your plot to backstory, do you still have enough plot to fuel your frontstory? Will this structural change resonate with the theme you are exploring in the novel? If the answers to those two questions are yes, it’s a choice that might lead to an exciting new structure, for both you and your readers.

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