Time Is of the Essence

By Victoria Fortune

Since time immemorial, mankind has been preoccupied with time. Just consider the plethora of idioms that refer to it: in the nick of time, time running out, high time, down time, hell of a time, the time of your life, borrowed time, wasted time, crunch time, hardly time to breathe, to name a few. It is the primary factor that constrains and connects all of humanity, creating the structure of our lives. No wonder writers have focused their attention on time since the dawn of literature. As the website exactlywhatistime.com points out, time has been a central theme in works from Homer to the Bible, Shakespeare to Walt Whitman to Thomas Pynchon. Even when time is not an overt theme, it is a necessary element in any narrative. All stories must begin and end at some point in time.

Considering its importance in storytelling, it is curious that time seems to have gotten short shrift in the literature on the craft of writing. As I was struggling to work out the time frame of my novel, I turned to my collection of books on craft in search of guidance. The big three—E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, James Wood’s How Fiction Works, and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction—offer extensive discussion of key elements such as character, dialogue, narrative point of view and plot, but none address the element of time in detail.

So, I was thrilled when I came across Joan Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction, one of the many gems in The Art of Series, edited by Charles Baxter. Silber divides her book into chapters according to some basic categories for time spans in fiction, which she gleaned from her favorite works: “classic time (a brief natural span—a month, a season a year—handled in scene-and-summary), long time (decades, lifetimes), switchback time (moving back and forth among points in past and present), slowed time (brief instants in detail), and fabulous time (a way to think about non-realistic fiction.)” (pgs. 8-9) Each chapter discusses examples and examines techniques necessary for executing that approach to time.

As Silber notes in her introduction “Time draws the shapes of stories.” (pg, 3) When composing a story, a writer must decide on the time frame: will the events take place over an afternoon, a day, a week, a month, a lifetime? Conventional wisdom suggests that the shorter the story, the shorter the time frame—e.g. if you’re writing a 500-word piece of flash fiction, focus on a very brief span of time—but conventional wisdom was made to be flouted. Consider Anthony Doerr’s short story “The Caretaker,” which spans 36 years, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is around 700 pages long, but recounts just a single day in the life of the protagonist, Leopold Bloom. You can span decades in a brief paragraph, or examine a single significant moment for pages, depending on the story you want to tell.

A writer must also decide whether to proceed linearly, with events unfolding in chronological order, or to include flashbacks, or even to write the story from end to beginning, as F. Scott Fitzgerald did in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” The time span of the story, and how to arrange events in time, are critical decisions that will affect the structure and meaning of your story.

For example, I am writing a multigenerational novel and was struggling to figure out how to incorporate events in the lives of three generations of a family—should I begin in the present and work backwards, in the past and work forward, divide the book into parts correlating to different eras?—when I read Silber’s chapter on switchback time.  She distinguishes switchback time from classic or long time that contains flashbacks: “This design . . . doesn’t give dominance to a particular time. Then and now and further back are all partners with an investment in the outcome.” (pg.45)

I realized that switching back and forth between eras throughout my book was essential to its meaning. Chang Rae Lee captured the idea in an interview in The Rumpus about his novel The Surrendered, which employs switchback time: “The past… is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past…”  Of course, as Silber points out, pulling this off requires skill and different techniques than other approaches to time. I will need to constantly ground readers in whatever time period they are currently in. Silber discusses some Alice Munro stories as models, and I have been reading them, trying to learn from a master. Whether I am successful at pulling off the technique, only time will tell.

While Silber’s categories offer a good start, there are endless possibilities for how to handle time, and you have to determine what works best for your story. As Silber says, “Tradition, resistance to tradition, private experience, and innate belief go into any author’s choice of how many imagined minutes or years a story needs to make itself clear and felt. How much time it covers has everything to do with what it means.” (pg. 7)