How do you use time jumps to create suspense?

This post discusses the entire plot of Black Sun, including the ending.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts on Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun, opening a fantasy novel poses extra challenges because 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. The figure below shows the chronology of the novel and identifies which chapters are narrated by which point-of-view character. Black Sun is a long, complex novel, so I’m not going to walk you through the details of the plot. But a top-level view will reveal some familiar tropes and plot strategies that will allow you to understand Roanhorse’s artistic choices and apply them to your own work—no matter what genre you write in.

As you can see from a quick glance at the figure, most of the action occurs over a twenty-day period leading up to the day of Convergence, with our point-of-view characters trading off narration duties in a somewhat regular cadence. However, Roanhorse’s strategic departures from this pattern are the key to understanding how the novel works. We’re going to look at four aspects of the chronology of Black Sun: the opening, Serapio’s backstory chapters, the introduction of Okoa’s POV strand, and the ending.

Let’s start, of course, with the opening. As the figure shows, the first three chapters take us to three distinct points in time:

In the space of these three chapters, Roanhorse gives us a balanced tripod of present (Xiala beginning her journey), past (Serapio’s blinding), and future (whatever calamity befalls Naranpa). All readers are familiar with journey narratives, so we can immediately use that storyline to ground ourselves. Roanhorse uses time stamps (as discussed in more detail in my post on the opening) to orient us in time; we know that Convergence must be the climax of the story, and we know from the beginning of each of these three chapters where we are in relationship to it. The time stamps also activate another story intuition, telling us that Serapio’s past must have something to do with Naranpa’s future; Xiala’s journey then represents the steady narrative line sailing across the chapters to connect these two moments in time on the day of Convergence. This clever opening helps us understand the structure of the complex plot and stokes suspense for what is to come.

Now let’s look at how Serapio’s backstory chapters operate and why Roanhorse positions them where she does. While Xiala and Serapio both have eleven POV chapters, almost half of Serapio’s chapters pull us backward into the past. There is a particularly long stretch in the middle of the novel, from chapters eighteen to twenty-nine, where we lose touch with Serapio’s present-day POV altogether. However, Xiala has four POV chapters in that section, so we see Serapio from the outside, if not the inside, and we know he is steadily moving toward the end point of his journey. We learn in the final chapters of the novel that our initial intuition is correct. 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—and that’s the purpose of the backstory chapters. We need to see him learning about the power he ultimately unleashes, and we need to have some empathy for the reasons he chooses to unleash it.

It’s quite likely that Roanhorse wrote those backstory chapters sequentially, and they may have even been grouped together originally as part one in an earlier draft of the novel. Keeping those chapters together and allowing the story to unfold in chronological order would still achieve the goal of showing readers how and why Serapio fulfills his destiny on the day of Convergence. However, starting the novel with this set of chapters would have dampened the suspense of the opening. The four additional backstory chapters skip forward years at a time, showing us Serapio being taught by a series of tutors and learning, from them and from himself, the extent of his powers, his family history, and his future. It’s a classic coming-of-age narrative and by that last backstory chapter, set five months before Convergence, we know the end of Serapio’s story: Whatever force he is destined to unleash on the day of Convergence will consume him too. Instead of grouping these backstory chapters together and giving us a coming-of-age narrative followed by a journey narrative, Roanhorse mixes them by manipulating the order in which the reader encounters these story threads. She places the last backstory chapter, in which Serapio (and the reader) fully understands his destiny, in the last third of the novel, a hundred pages from the end, where it can become part of the suspenseful climax rather than the end of one narrative strand that saps suspense from the next.

Naranpa, the Sun Priest, is Serapio’s inverse. While Serapio’s chapters often pull readers backward in time, Naranpa’s chapters usually shove us further forward. When we see the past through her eyes, as we do in chapter three, it’s in the form of embedded memories rather than standalone backstory or flashback. Roanhorse never lets us get too far away from Naranpa’s present-day stakes, which are always quite high. In chapters nine, ten, and fourteen, we see her 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 by the priestly Watchers, a group she, as Sun Priest, supposedly wields power over. Naranpa has the least understanding and agency of the POV characters; in fact, she is so often wrong in her assessment of other people that her bad guesses sometimes serve as red herrings, which heightens the suspense for readers. At the same time, her motives are generally admirable, which makes us hope that one of these times she’ll be right or be able to achieve her vision for the city of Tova.

We aren’t introduced to our fourth POV character—Okoa, the son of the dead matron of the Carrion Crow clan—until chapter fifteen. Roanhorse uses Okoa’s POV to show us just how wrong Naranpa has been. For example, the matron did not die in her sleep, as was reported to Naranpa, but was found in the river, a presumed suicide—though Okoa has his doubts about that assumption as well. I suspect that Roanhorse wrote more chapters for Okoa, likely showing us more of his storyline reaching further back in time, that were cut for this final version. Those chapters might have given us more context, but they wouldn’t have led to any plot fireworks. Instead, Roanhorse waits to introduce this POV character until the moment he can also travel to Tova and start influencing the unfolding plot. Whatever backstory we need to understand his motivations is, like with Naranpa and Xiala’s story strands, given in brief passages of memory and flashback.

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. Let me give you a high-level tour, just as I did for the opening of the novel:

I want you to notice two things about Roanhorse’s choices at the end of the novel. First, she presents the events in the order she wants readers to experience them, not in chronological order or in the order characters experience them. It can feel unnatural to mix chronology in this way, but as long as you use time stamps or other clear markers, your readers will willingly follow you backward and forward in time. Second, Roanhorse establishes early in her novel that each POV character has a specific role, making it easier for her to decide which character should reveal which slice of story. Serapio is the main protagonist, whose actions have the biggest plot consequences. Xiala is the well-placed observer, as well as an outsider whose motives sometimes run counter to those of other characters. Naranpa is a source of chaos and tension, as well as a focus for the reader’s sympathy. Okoa is the explainer and resolver. Each of these narrative roles gets a turn to do their work as Roanhorse moves through their points of view in the final chapters.

The overarching lesson? It’s your job as the writer to control how the reader experiences the story—and you have more latitude than you might think. As we saw in my post on The City We Became, you don’t have to distribute POV chapters fairly, like cookies to preschoolers. And, as we’ll see again in the chapter on Mick Herron’s thriller The Secret Hours in the book, you don’t have to tell your story in chronological order. If you handle your materials with self-assurance, readers will follow where you guide them and won’t even notice your behind-the-scenes machinations.

Get new craft breakdowns like these right in your inbox, plus sentence studies, craft tips, and book reviews.