How to use parentheses (round brackets) to convey simultaneity in fiction

6/6/2022

Parentheses (or round brackets) can help fiction authors evoke a sense of simultaneity in their viewpoint character’s experience – one that challenges a more conventional linear narrative. Here’s how it works.

What’s included in this post

What are parentheses?
Parentheses as convention breakers
Parentheses as satirical and viewpoint-switch markers
The question an author posed
Why parentheses can convey simultaneity
How readers process sentences in a linear fashion
Showing sensory assault through simultaneity
Showing conflict through simultaneity

What are parentheses?

Parentheses come in pairs and separate a word or phrase from the surrounding text. If the parenthetical information is removed, the surrounding text still makes sense.

This is what they look like: ( )

Dashes and commas can perform the same function in fiction. Take a look at these examples:

Parentheses:
Tell me about parentheses (round brackets) and how they work.

Commas:
Tell me about parentheses, round brackets, and how they work.

Spaced en dashes:
Tell me about parentheses – round brackets – and how they work.

Closed-up em dashes:
Tell me about parentheses—round brackets—and how they work.

Parentheses as convention breakers in fiction

All the examples above are grammatically correct, though parentheses are used far less frequently in contemporary commercial fiction.

This might be because they’re large and therefore visible marks – ones that demand a reader’s attention. That they’re interruptive could be a good reason to avoid them, though it could equally be the very reason why you want to use them.

The key to using any punctuation mark effectively is to understand its purpose and consider how the reader will interpret it. And so just because the use of parentheses is infrequent enough in fiction to make it unconventional isn’t a reason to ban them from prose.

Parentheses as satirical and viewpoint-switch markers

I most often see parentheses used in fiction in these two ways:

For satirical purposes – an external narrator wants to poke fun at a focus character’s behaviour, thoughts or dialogue.
For viewpoint purposes – the narrative is written from a viewpoint character’s perspective and therefore limited to their experience, but an external narrator wishes briefly to interrupt.

If you’d like to explore my analysis of these two uses, read How to use round brackets (parentheses) in fiction writing.

Scroll through the comments on that post and you’ll see a fantastic question raised by a reader that got me thinking about parentheses again.

The question an author posed

That reader is Ellen Gwaltney Bales, a fiction writer, and she said:

‘Louise, I'm writing a short story in which I have inserted a couple of parenthetical phrases (I don't even know what to call them) which separate one part of a sentence from another. I've seen Stephen King do this and it fascinated me. The character (narrator) is reflecting on a dream she has just awoken from. What do you think of this style, and what is it called?’

I replied admitting that I didn’t know quite what this is called in terms of literary style but that she’d got me thinking, and helped me consider a third function of parentheses that I hadn’t interrogated before: simultaneity.

Here’s her example. It’s from a short story tentatively titled ‘The Woman at the Window’.

I could see my brother Rick running through the Black Forest looking for a place to hide from
(the bombs bursting in air)
bombs that were dropping by the hundreds from a fiery sky.

There are a couple of interesting things going on in Ellen’s example – not just the parenthetical phrase but also the placement of it. It takes its own line, which makes it stand out even more.

Why parentheses can convey simultaneity

I told Ellen that I liked her excerpt very much. The round brackets and the new line mean the phrase is certainly interruptive. And while I’d interpreted the effect of her choice of punctuation in a particular way, I was keen to understand what she’d hoped to achieve.

‘I wanted to shake the reader up a bit by writing it that way,’ she told me.

And she succeeded. Parentheses do stand out. So does the separate line. But my reading of her work led me to consider another effect she’d created, albeit unwittingly – simultaneity.

How readers process sentences in a linear fashion

Here’s another slightly edited excerpt from Ellen’s short story:

More and more I dreamed of her at night in confusing, surrealistic visions mixed up with dreams about bombs and my brother Rick. One night just before Labor Day I woke up screaming, terrified, seeing missiles exploding, and the rockets' red glare, and the sky alight with flames.

This is linear description. We absorb the story in the order the phrases are presented to us – first the dreaming, then the waking-up on a night just before Labor Day, then the terrified screaming, then seeing the exploding missiles, then the glare of the rockets, and finally the flaming sky.

But actually, that’s not how Ellen wrote it. Here’s the unedited version:

More and more I dreamed of her at night in confusing, surrealistic visions mixed up with dreams about bombs and my brother Rick. One night just before Labor Day I woke up screaming, terrified, seeing missiles exploding
(and the rockets' red glare)
and the sky alight with flames.

The rocket-glare phrase is now bracketed and takes its own line. And I think this changes that linearity subtly. It’s as if the glare of the rockets is experienced at the very same moment that the missiles are exploding. It’s another layer of experience that sits behind the explosions.

That’s how we often experience traumatic events in reality. Our brains work so fast that we process multiple pieces of information and feel multiple emotions all at once. The difficulty comes in expressing that in linear text.

In Ellen’s example, the parentheses act as a signal of this simultaneity of experience, and show rather than tell an onslaught of emotional, auditory and visual information.

Showing sensory assault through simultaneity

Let’s revisit Ellen’s first example and explore it through the lens of simultaneity.

I could see my brother Rick running through the Black Forest looking for a place to hide from
(the bombs bursting in air)
bombs that were dropping by the hundreds from a fiery sky.

The way the parenthetical phrase punctuates the prose makes me feel uncomfortable. It jars me visually. And that’s why I love it. It shows rather than tells the assault on the senses that I can imagine a person would experience if they were in an environment where missiles were exploding and falling around them.

The character awakes. She’s likely still shaken from the dream, and trying to process what she experienced. And so she narrates what she saw, which pared down is this:

I could see my brother Rick running through the Black Forest looking for a place to hide from bombs that were dropping by the hundreds from a fiery sky.

But as she's thinking about this, the bursting bombs is there too, behind the more expository narration, right at the same time. And it’s the bracketed line that shows this.

An alternative might have been:

I could see my brother Rick running through the Black Forest looking for a place to hide from while bombs were bursting in air as they dropped by the hundreds from a fiery sky.

In that revised version, 'as' tells the simultaneity. It's told prose. Instead, Ellen as author, has shown us with the parentheses, and it's far more dramatic.

And so we might consider parenthetical statements such as this as devices that help authors create layers of simultaneous experience that are warranted when there’s sensory assault in play.

Showing conflict through simultaneity

There’s another way in which you might use parentheses as a simultaneity device: to convey conflict.

Here’s an example that I have written more conventionally, using italic and a tag to convey a thought.

Louise read the text. Her friend had an idea, one that had been on her mind for ages. The words ‘editing podcast’ and multiple star-struck emojis spilled over the screen. Was she up for it? They could do it together, D said – less work that way.
Say no, she thought. You don’t have time.
Yes yes yes yes, she typed, because it would be a crap ton of fun and the alternative was D asking someone else, and that was unthinkable.

This approach encourages the reader to approach the prose in a linear way: First D texts Louise with an idea. Then a thought process takes place. Then Louise responds.

But look what happens when we experiment with parentheses.

Louise read the text. Her friend had an idea, one that had been on her mind for ages. The words ‘editing podcast’ and multiple star-struck emojis spilled over the screen. Was she up for it? They could do it together, D said – less work that way.
(Say no. You don’t have time.)
Yes yes yes yes, she typed, because it would be a crap ton of fun and the alternative was D asking someone else, and that was unthinkable.

Now there’s a signal that two conflicting emotional responses are in play simultaneously. Thinking ‘no’ and typing ‘yes’ are occurring at the same time.

Summing up

Using parentheses in fiction takes a little courage because they inevitably jar the reader, force them to step back and take notice. Some writers and editors fear that it’s a distraction too far, one that risks pulling their audience out of the prose and into how that prose is punctuated.

However, used purposefully, parentheses can enhance that moment and create a sense of simultaneity of experience – perhaps involving an assault on the senses or competing emotions fighting for primacy in a character’s mind.

There are no rules in fiction. Instead, what writers (and the editors who work with them) must strive for is how best to communicate a character’s emotions, perception and actions in the moment, so that the reader can get under the skin of that experience.

And it might just be that – once in a while – a pair of round brackets helps with that goal.

Other resources you might like

Editing Fiction at Sentence Level (book)
How to use round brackets (parentheses) in fiction writing (blog post)
How to Start a Fiction Editing Business (free course)
Narrative Distance: A Toolbox for Writers and Editors (course)
Preparing Your Book for Submission (course)
Punctuation resources (resource library topic page)
Switching to Fiction (course)

Computer screen with image of books and title saying Narrative Distance

About Louise Harnby

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.