by Lisa Hiton
The greatest hurdle facing any protagonist, character, or person in the grand scheme of a life is time. It causes pressure, passes quickly, slugs along slowly, and in the end, humbles us. For there is no other singularly shared part of the human experience than our eventual ending. And as writers are always searching for central truths to the human experience, it’s no wonder that this one comes up so often.
And yet, when we read a great story, our sense of time seems to go away entirely. By magic, the writer’s ability to engage the reader erases our sense of being in time, as well as the way time passes for the characters on the page. I have spent countless days into the wee hours of the night lost to great books. About 23 pages into Atonement by Ian McEwan, I could sense that I wouldn’t be able to do anything else but read until I finished the novel. I was living in London at the time. I called my boss and said I was feeling under the weather. He replied “You haven’t played hooky yet in this new city. Go follow the day.” I took my book a few blocks up Queen’s Gate to Kensington Gardens. It was an unusually sunny, almost hot spring day for those parts. Though it wasn’t as pastoral as the Tallis estate in the novel, I was able to find a tree I could lean on. While I read, time passed around me unannounced, until the sun was gone. I carried myself and the tome home and finished with my nightlight.
In the time we consume great art, the mind and heart are so enthralled that time goes away and our experience of the present doesn’t feel like labor at all. In the case of Atonement, I was so bound up in the inner life of Briony Tallis and the adults around her that, yes, a day of my life went by. Additionally, the role of time in the novel was grand. The story spans decades—from 1935 England, to WWII France, to present-day (2001) England. The characters in the novel go from coming of age, to old age. Time is grand in this novel, especially as the role of war weaves into the lives of this family, changing each of them beyond reproach.
Unlike our own clocks, the hours within a book can be brief and long simultaneously. A vortex happens. And within each genre, there are unique markers of time passing. That old friend, suspension of disbelief, is so potent because the reader knows nothing of time—perceives the story as being so present that time is not a thought—and yet, the writer must obsess about time in order to create that experience for the reader. To that end, let’s take a look at different uses of time in writing together.
Examples of Time Used in Fiction
Fiction writers have many techniques available to show how time passes. Simple dialogue between characters, for example, shows time passing in a way that mimics our true experience of time. On the other hand, fiction writers can make time laborious, swift, or gone altogether with the use of other techniques.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: The plot of the novel spans one, single day. During that day, the characters’ memories are triggered, offering the reader insights to the past, but the novel’s active plot is just one day. Let’s take a closer look at how Woolf creates time for Clarissa Dalloway, just in the opening page of the novel:
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning-fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”-was that it?-“I prefer men to cauliflowers”-was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace-Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was!-a few sayings like this about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.
The opening sentence gives us a sense of urgency. Because she does not say these words aloud, we know that this confidence is, for now at least, only in the mind of Mrs. Dalloway. Immediately, the reader is put inside Clarissa Dalloway’s mind. It is in her mind where time will pass or stand still.
In the second paragraph, the reader gets an understanding of why Clarissa Dalloway will have to buy the flowers herself, ending with that divergent thought, that the morning will be “fresh as if issued to children on a beach.”
Woolf uses this to vault us deeper into the mind of Clarissa Dalloway. Where other writers might have begun getting through the plot by having her leave the house and arrive at the flower shop, instead, Woolf uses the mind to recreate how time passes in Clarissa’s consciousness. Woolf wants the reader to experience a simple walk to the flower shop with all of the nuances of a person’s inner life. The idea of a “morning-fresh” leads to Clarissa having thoughts about the wind being like the waves on the beach. These thoughts and images build upon each other as they would in our own minds.
By the fourth paragraph, Clarissa is waiting for a van to pass on the curb—which tells us that she has in fact left the house to head to the flower shop! These transitions are hard to get used to as a reader, especially if this is your first encounter with Woolf. It is precisely the use of these techniques—of focusing on how one’s consciousness or inner life occupies time that Woolf is a singular genius in the writing of literature.
While Clarissa’s mind moves quickly and fills with so many thoughts, images, and feelings, the sentences themselves get longer. This can be a very laborious reading process. The opening paragraph is one simple sentence, but the inner life that follows is much more taxing. These juxtapositions create suspension of disbelief and a sense of gravitas throughout the novel.
In your own works, how can you make these small everyday moments, like walking to a store, vivid? What might your characters be seeing and feeling as they perform the most mundane of tasks? Don’t we all see the world in our own distinct and beloved ways?
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: Dickens’ masterpiece spans 18 years—1775-1792. Unlike Woolf’s works in which the time of the plot is short, but the expanse of consciousness is vast, Dickens novel occupies a great deal of years, and further, the whole of the French Revolution as marked by a French doctor’s imprisonment.
The lost art of time in this particular novel is that it was originally a serial. We have the luxury of experiencing the work as a novel, but in 1859, it was published one chapter at a time and the world had to wait with bated breath for each chapter to be printed.
Examples of Time Used in Poetry
Unlike a novel or a TV show, a poem is not meant to be given pause. More like a film, there is to be no intermission, no pause. You wouldn’t put a sonnet down two lines before it’s finished. You wouldn’t leave a movie theater five minutes before the last frame. These genres of writing obsess about time and use it within the medium itself.
Time in poetry can be meteoric, illuminating tectonic shifts in a few mere words or lines. Take, for example, this famous short poem by Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”:
Nature’s first green is gold.
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
In the opening line—a mere five words—nature’s once-green leaves are gold, taking on spring through autumn in the reader’s mind. In the second line, the speaker remarks that this gold is “her hardest hue to hold”, as these leaves will fall to the ground before winter comes. The poem bemoans this beautiful, sad change. And in the last two lines, like a heroic couplet, the speaker is reminded again of time. Dawn becomes day. And gold—which we think of as an untouchable metal—in nature’s hands, falls and ends, as does the poem.
No matter how long or short, lyric poems happen in lines. They have a first line and a last line, like a perfect set of dominoes, knocking each other down in an exact order.
In your own poems, how might you apply these loud tactics? In a narrative poem, how might you use lines to make the action happen quickly? In a more descriptive poem, how might you use rhyme or meter to keep track of the time that passes?
Out of Time in Science Fiction
There is also a larger genre that deals with time: science fiction. In these works of fiction or film, the writer can mess with the rules of time. For one thing, the period in which events occur can be set during no era that we know of—the future, the past, the never. Even more bewildering than that, fantasy and science fiction writers often adjust the notion of time to change the rules of physics entirely.
Of all the books in the Harry Potter series, none has quite the level of genius to me as The Prisoner of Azkaban. This book addresses time as a subject at every turn (or rather, time-turn…)
As first year divination students, Harry, Ron, and Hermione learn the art of seeing the future in tea leaves. We also learn of an old object passed down from Harry’s father to the Weasely twins: the Maurader’s Map, which presents the whereabouts of certain friends, no matter what time it is. And then there is the show stopper: the time-turner Dumbledore entrusts to Hermione.
While the magic that occurs in other Harry Potter novels is enigmatic, desirable, and thrilling, none is as outside the realm of human control as the use of the time-turner in this book. At first, it seems a simple object—and an obvious one for a wizard to have. Professor McGonagall secretly bestows this object that allows the wearer to time-travel upon Hermione Granger so the deft over-achiever can attend more courses than other students. This trivial task seems like quite a mundane way to use such a special object. Of course, in the end, Hermione and Harry use it to go back in time and save two lives. The ability to re-live certain moments in our lives haunts all of us at one point or another. Harry and Hermione have a rare opportunity in this art of fiction to do just that.
What objects might exist in your own science fiction and fantasy stories that could help your protagonists face the rush of time? The important thing to consider here is that you don’t want to make something that simply takes all of the conflict away. In Azkaban, going back in time doesn’t simply reset the action, but rather, adds to the conflict as Harry and Hermione have a strict amount of time to correct what happened before. They also have to do this completely unseen, especially by themselves. Be sure that your inventions help provide new ways to get through conflict instead of solving it outright.
Tips for Writing About Time
There are many ways to incorporate time in your own writing, no matter the genre. The first way is to manage time as a writer in and of itself. This can be difficult with the increasing demands on young people, as well as technology’s ferocious efforts to steal all of our attention. Writing, like reading or going to see a great piece of theater, demands full attention and allotted time.
Writers of all stripes have their ways of carving out time for writing. Toni Morrison famously “writes into the light”, meaning that she is awake early enough in the morning that it is still dark outside, and she writes into the daylight. Colm Tóibín tells his students to write “first thing, before they check their emails, wash, or even have coffee.” Writing in the morning is a popular ritual, indeed.
These ideals are true of reading as well. As you continue to pursue a writer’s life, you’ll need to turn off the noise of the modern world. Dedicating time to writing might mean carving out your Saturday mornings for reading and writing. More than just allotting the time, you’ll need to get yourself in a state of flow. To be alone in your thoughts, you’ll need to turn off potential interruptions to that sacred time. Leave your phone in another room. Choose a room to read and write where there is no TV. Perhaps you need a little bit of quiet company—libraries, cafes, or finding another pal dedicated to the same craft as you can be useful for reading and writing time.
I find that procrastination is a huge part of the time you’ll need to account for as a writer. The more time I have to write, the more things I seem to get done around the house. Unlike those focused, routinized fiction writers I envy, I am a night owl. Once the house and everyone in it has gone to sleep, I suddenly wake up. With nothing to miss out on, and no other tasks to busy myself with, my mind can be quiet enough to let the music of language sing to me.
To that end, I increasingly choose to go to the library or somewhere outside for my reading and writing endeavors. There are no things to clean and pass the time, which allows me to use my procrastination time thinking, observing, or reading until the words come.
This all sounds very poetic. Mostly, it’s quite a bit of stress. A mentor once finished a huge research paper and was excited to tell me that she, like me, loved writing. After all of the worrying required before actually writing her paper, she’d forgotten that fact. I replied that I envied her that feeling. She looked at me, puzzled. I said: “I love the feeling of having written.” The distinction gave us both smirks—only writers understand that the thing we love requires a lot of resistance and procrastination, or serious amounts of ritual and caffeine—or all of the above! It takes a lot for the words to arrive. It takes a lot to live deliberately enough to trust that they’ll come in their own time.