In this epically long phase of editing my novel, my biggest stumbling block has been figuring out how to deal with time in my book. Yes, time. My story takes place over several decades and, obviously, I’m not going to show every moment of those decades. I’m not even going to show a snippet of every year. There is lots of jumping around–back and forth. That’s just how my mind works. My friend once joked with me, “Do you have to Tarantino EVERYTHING?” Yes, apparently I do. All of my novels have involved some kind of conversation between the past and the present. It’s interesting because I’m not someone who looks back much in my everyday life. My characters do though. They are constantly wrestling with before.
I had an epiphany when I realized my first draft included a lot of unnecessary details. As I revise, I ask myself: “Does this move the story forward? DOES IT?” I’ve had to be really honest with myself and delete whole sections. And I’ve added sections too, when I thought I was skipping over something that WAS important.
This is a little book that has helped me greatly:
If you’re dealing with time in your writing, I suggest it. It’s a quick read, a skimmer.
What I underlined:
“I’m interested in how fates roll out over many years and am drawn to write fiction that takes on the task of compressing whole lifetimes into short stories or chapters.”
“All fiction has to contend with the experience of time passing.”
“A story can arrange events in any order it finds useful, but it does have to move between then and now and later.”
“We read anything looking for a pattern of events, and through it a meaning–the reason someone is bothering to tell us this. Plot is how the writer indicates the ways she or he thinks the world works.”
“A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means.”
“Much fiction depends on people who never forget. This clinging, this refusal to ‘get over it,’ is very useful in fiction, however inadvisable it may be in real life.”
“Time passes in order to reach the point of crisis. The beauty of selective concreteness–dialogue, gesture, sensory detail–is that it allows us to believe we have experienced the time completely. ‘We were there’ for the good parts.”
“Writers are always trying to contain an unruly mass, to get time trimmed to fit within borders.”
“Art is [in knowing] where to linger, where to speed up.”
“Surprisingly little is needed between scenes to keep time running along…Readers can keep up just fine with a pace of shorter scenes, and lots of such scenes, and can accept the illusion of whole lifetimes passing.”
“A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence. All the emotions that attach to the passage of time–regret, impatience, anticipation, mourning, the longing for what’s past, the desire for recurrence, the dread of recurrence–are the fuel of plots.”
***
A few months ago, Poets & Writers featured an essay on time in writing–“I Wasn’t Born Yesterday” by Eleanor Henderson. The author says:
“Yes, a story can capture time, moment by moment, but it can also compress it or extend it; it can flash back or zoom forward; it can walk; it can skip; it can circle the block until it finds a parking space; it can haunt; it can expect; it can forget.
To assume that all narratives must flow forward, then–and that backstory is a sandbag to narrative velocity–is to limit a story’s potential for interpreting the experience of time passing. And writers have been taking important advantage of anachrony–a disruption of a purely chronological narrative–since the Illiad.”
My sister is a great photographer and I think a major similarity between writing and photography is the idea of composition, what gets included and what doesn’t. What’s just outside the frame of a photo may be as important as what’s in the frame. The shaping of the story is what makes the story. It’s overwhelming, as an artist, because the options are truly endless. There are a million ways to take a photo. There are a million different angles. The same is true with writing fiction. I’ve stutter-stepped through this editing process, constantly questioning whether or not I’m telling the story in the “right” way. Should this part come before this one? Should I include this element of backstory here or there? Is it even necessary? This is what makes editing so difficult. The first draft is easy–you don’t question things, you just let it flow. Editing is about deliberate choices. Those choices take time. A long, long time.