Time Passages
By Kimberley Allen McNamara
When our daughter was born we received flowers with a note that read: “Congratulations! Now Just Don’t Blink!”
Time as a new mother swirled around feedings, diaper changes, and other details necessary to survival (grocery shopping, laundry, snow shoveling ). I didn’t have time to blink - I barely had time to sleep. And then all of a sudden she was six months old. She had rolled over, she was reaching for things she wanted, making sounds, her eyes had lightened … When had all this happened? When had she become six months old? And then three years later, our second child, a new house, new jobs (feedings, diaper changes, more snow shoveling- both our girls were winter babies). Then suddenly we had a three year old and six month old. Again, how? The obvious answer: time had passed, the girls had grown, milestones were hit, new foods were tried, more sleep went undisrupted. I had blinked; they had grown.
But how does the writer do this in a novel without boring the reader with minutia of the day to day, hour to hour, passage of Time? How does an author speed up time without making the reader feel as if they are missing something or they have been cheated?
In a movie there would be a montage of time elapsed bits of film with the seasons changing or a baby maturing to a toddler to an elementary student to a teenage daughter slamming a door to a college graduate to the young woman standing before the camera picking up the story where not just 80 seconds ago she had been crawling on the floor cooing while her parents slammed doors and suitcases were packed. And just like that we’d be deposited in this young woman’s story. But how to do this on the page?
We can move our reader through large swaths of time by giving them a lot of specificity and structure and by being precise in the details (those personal, unique beyond specific details) that actually show.
In a previous article for this blog, I examined backstory, fast forward, and slow motion when writing and moving through time in the novel. However, it was not until recent Grub Street class with Courtney Sender (Honing the Heart of Your Story) that the need for the specificity and precision was so aptly explored. With Courtney our class considered the beginning pages of Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy. Look how Meloy does this (moves us through time) by being specific and precise.
“They were married during the war, in Santa Barbara, after Mass one morning in the old Mission church. Teddy was solemn; he took the Mass very seriously. Yvette, in a veiled hat and an ivory dress that wasn’t a gown, was distracted by the idea that she was in California, without her father there to give her away, and she was about to change her life and her name. “I, Yvette Grenier, take you, Theodore Santerre…” It all sounded formal and strange as if someone else were saying the words, until she realized with surprise that it was she.”
Up until “Teddy was solemn;” it is all pretty much a telling of the facts. “he took the Mass very seriously” borders towards showing a feeling. But then consider: “an ivory dress that wasn’t a gown” here Meloy purposely uses ‘not a gown’ to imply that it should have been a gown but it wasn’t and then states: it was a dress. She defines what Yvette wore by what it is not and in so doing shows us (that all important show) of something that is specific becoming more precise and more fully-formed.
Meloy dishes out the passage of days and years in digestible amounts keeping similar items present: the dresses, the dancing, the entertaining - but letting us see how these instances evolve as time passes. Until the music stops and Yvette is no longer entertaining or making dresses because she’s no longer going out, she is a woman whose husband is at war while her friends husbands are not; a woman who is alone. Years have passed but we haven’t felt cheated. We feel as if we know right where Yvette is and what she is missing and where and why she suddenly finds herself at a loss.
Meloy has been giving us information steadily, promising us “something”, the conflict that is coming. She is establishing a trust between herself (the storyteller/author) and the reader, the audience. She does this not JUST by giving us specifics - the particularities: the “old Mission church”, “Teddy was solemn”, “she was about to change her life and her name” but by ALSO giving us the precise - those details that are ONLY for THIS character, for Yvette. Look at the precision in the name “I, Yvette Grenier take you, Theodore Santerre”. In one sentence Meloy moves from telling to showing. First Meloy offers the specifics and then the precision.
By paragraph two it is two days later and Yvette is at a dance and meeting Teddy’s commanding officer. The next paragraph (number 3):
“She was wearing the ivory dress she was married in, because it had taken her a long time to make it, and she wasn’t going wear it just once. It suited her, she knew-”
this reveals Yvette’s personality: she’s crafty, she’s aware of herself, and she is frugal. By the next page she is pregnant with Margot. By the third page: they have a second child, have moved to a new house, and she is making new dresses to dance in their own home with their new friends. Teddy is in the reserves which is great because she can’t make the girls clothes fast enough they are growing so fast. By the fourth page, Teddy is in the Korean war, she can’t entertain alone, she isn’t invited out because she is a woman alone and her one single girlfriend gets married. Yvette’s losses have mounted up and the One Day happens.
Meloy is able to swiftly move us from the wedding day to the One Day by never forsaking the specifics simply because time has passed. The specifics are the dresses: the wedding dress that should have been a gown, the new dresses she made in the new house where:
“[c]ocktails started at five and the dancing went on unt till two or three in the morning, when Yvette would find herself singing “ those Wedding Bells are Breaking Up that Old Gang of Mine.”
To the “extra money was useful, with the girls growing out of their clothes as fast as Yvette could sew them.”
Because of the precise details that are unique from the song Yvette sings to the girls growing out of their clothes, we are always with Yvette as she is moving through Time. We are partaking in her world as Time passes.
With the paragraph beginning “One day...” we know the story is going to truly begin because this is the “One day”, the one we’ve been thinking of, the one we’ve been expecting, and now it actually happens. Then the whole scenery we’ve been watching from the window, as the story has raced along on its track takes a sharper focus and slows down because we are pulling to the station. The One Day actually happens and we know nothing will ever be the same.
Meloy takes us from the war (WWII) to the Korean war in less than four pages and during these four pages there is a wedding, the birth of two daughters, a new house, and the Korean war begins. With the beginning of the Korean war, the husband is called up for active duty and Then the infamous “One day” happens.
Meloy deftly handles the material - the set up of the marriage, the birth of the daughters, the passage of time up until this precipice of One Day without ever making us feel we’ve been deprived of anything. We have been caught in the flotsam and jetsam of this couple and now the current has shifted.
Of course this is just one example of how an author uses specifics and then precision to secure the passage of time. Another way can be by having an inanimate object like the house in
Virginia Woolf's To The LightHouse deteriorate under neglect by the owners who stay away followed by nature’s birth, decay, death, rebirth which occur around it.
Or as in Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic where the first paragraph starts wide with a view of the Owens women “have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town…” to the third paragraph where we’ve narrowed our focus to the two girls who “would stay on windy March nights or humid August evenings….” and then the One day happens.
Marilynne Robinson begins similarly in Housekeeping by taking us through the family history and enlists the help of objects to show us how the grandfather used to look at brochures and atlas’ at mountains and taking the train in search of mountains landed him in this particular town and with a particular job as a conductor. And how being a conductor cost him his life as the particular train he was one plummeted into the river landing on its side. In almost every paragraph, almost every sentence, Robinson is recalling a specific, precise object that is special and unique and so time moves steadily along until we have specific home and specific way of keeping house.
In all of the aforementioned Time Passages, the key has been to be specific to the particularities of this story and then to be precise about the details that are unique with respect to This/These Character(s) and these specifics. Always remembering and never forgetting: why this detail and why now.
Specifics should never be left behind simply because time has passed nor should the writer collapse into generalities. The segue between time passages doesn’t have to be grand, it just needs to be specific and precise. Often the way to such preciseness is by defining what it is NOT and thus convince the reader what it indeed is. And that is makes all the difference.
***This article has been cultivated by author after studying with writing instructors Courtney Sender and Annie Hartnett of GrubStreet. Additionally, readings by the author of such notables as: The New York Times and the Atlantic, participation in writing workshops (GrubStreet’s Muse & Market Place), and attending an author reading by Alice McDermott followed by her question and answer session for her book Someone.
*** photo by Heidi Stock https://pixabay.com/photos/clock-station-train-station-time-2777178/
