VanderMeer's Wonderbook, Chapter Four: Narrative Design (Continued)
Yesterday's post concerned itself with how a writer can change the meaning of a work through playing with the progression of events through time. This is, really, the more superficial aspect of manipulating time within a text, though that does not make it insignificant. Rather, it is merely that the sequencing of events does not concern itself with how time actually functions in the scenes of a story. Even in the most extreme examples, as with Robbe-Grillet, the changes do not impact time on the most fundamental intrinsic levels, relying on chronology to do the work.
Yet, time can alter in ways that are far more interesting and valuable. The order of events is not a quality of time itself, at least not in same sense that the pace of time is, or the direction of it. In a story, events can be warped and twisted in ways that have nothing to do with the sequencing, but are entirely related to time.
For me, the first book I think of in this capacity is Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, in which the length of the sections contrasts with the amount of time they depict. The novel begins and ends with long sections that each focus on a single afternoon, while the middle and shortest section of the book covers years. Indeed, that middle sections actual title is "Time Passes". The choice to compress time in the middle of the book is essential for the novel. The choice gives shape and meaning to the events of the story and allows the reader to gain a deeper sense of why this story is being told. It allows Woolf to turn the major events of the characters lives into the minor background of the novel, while focusing on what might otherwise seem trivial. She is able to shift the meaning and value of the events in the book by dilating time to reflect the import of what is occuring.
Of course, in a more conventional novel, it is also natural that time will expand and contract around events. If a writer takes a few sentences to describe a momentary vision, that might be merely a second in time, but another passage of similar lengthmight describe a character walking for ten minutes. Description can slow down time easily, focusing on a small detail and expanding it. For example, suppose that I described a drop of water falling from a leaf. I can spend an entire paragraph describing that action in painstaking detail, I could focus in, providing the intimate details and making that small action last for a long period on the page.
Now, suppose that the same character who offered such a description of this moment, later in the story describes an important event with no detail, letting, say, an hour long conversation become only one or two short and direct statements. The lushness is gonem and the longer period is shifted into that smaller space on the page. This can easily inform the reader's understanding of the character. The question of what matters, of what they notice, is highlighted, and the reader can recognize the priorities at play.
Of course, it is also inportant to recognize that a moment can slow down for internal reasons as well. It may not be that the overall meaning if the story will be communicated through such changes, but that one particular point in the story is meant to stand out in a certain way. It might be a death, for example, or it may be the moment when the character has a major revelation. Slowing down a moment inside of a more fast paced story can create an emphasis and make certain the reader recognizes that this is an important event, and can be done subtly enough to evade conscious scrutiny.
The point is that time has texture in fiction, just as it can in real life. We have all had the experience of a moment stretching or shrinking. Our sense of the passage of time is not fixed, so why would it be in fiction?
To me, though, there are still deeper questions that can be asked. Time in a fictional work can do much more. A story can play with causality, suggesting that time isn't truly linear and unidirectional, or even depict an event going backwards in time. I tend to think of time, in fiction at least, as an illusion at best, and one that is fully constructed, an attitude that liberated me to play with temporal aspects of a story in new ways. How could a story be written to allow for even past events to be unfixed? How can the present events be shown to have caused what already happened? How can a story be written in a world that has no time? What about the idea of time as having multiple dimensions, instead of only one linear flow?
Time does not have to be depicted as realistic, even in stories that are grounded. The warping of the normal fabric of cause and effect, for example, could be used to show how a character feels about an event. If they described the events of the story as being a result of the thing they caused to happen, that description could be more about the character's relationship to the event. Suppose a character's child dies in a car accident, and that character says something that implies the idea that buying the car was a result of it being what would kill the child. This may sound strange, but it makes sense in the mind of a person in that situation. They see everything in their life in relationship to that event, and so it is not unreasonable that they might feel as if the reason they chose that car was connected to the fact that it would play a role in the child's death.
Of course, one can also do things that are not intended to be purely psychological in that way. Robert Heinlein wrote a story in which one character, through a strange looping in time, is both their own mother and father. It is a time travel story, of course, so that may seem a bit too obvious for this discussion, but the point I am making is about how one can think of time. In a story that wasn't about a character moving through time, it could be established that the story takes place in a world with a particular type of time. In might be that time is a loop, or that the world will randomly slide backwards in time. Suppose that the story were one in which a certain character finds that time has changed around her, that she will sometimes experience days twice, exactly the same, or skip a day and have it happen again later. She, in her mind, can see these things as odd, but is unable to express it, because her actions are set already. She cannot change the outcome of those moments, but can experience them happening to her repeatedly. Or, consider a story where a character experiences multiple times at once. Such ideas are strange, yes, and it may not be that they ultimately work in your story, but creating such constructions is a method of expanding the potential of story, and can open up new ways of thinking for a writer.
Yet, time can alter in ways that are far more interesting and valuable. The order of events is not a quality of time itself, at least not in same sense that the pace of time is, or the direction of it. In a story, events can be warped and twisted in ways that have nothing to do with the sequencing, but are entirely related to time.
For me, the first book I think of in this capacity is Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, in which the length of the sections contrasts with the amount of time they depict. The novel begins and ends with long sections that each focus on a single afternoon, while the middle and shortest section of the book covers years. Indeed, that middle sections actual title is "Time Passes". The choice to compress time in the middle of the book is essential for the novel. The choice gives shape and meaning to the events of the story and allows the reader to gain a deeper sense of why this story is being told. It allows Woolf to turn the major events of the characters lives into the minor background of the novel, while focusing on what might otherwise seem trivial. She is able to shift the meaning and value of the events in the book by dilating time to reflect the import of what is occuring.
Of course, in a more conventional novel, it is also natural that time will expand and contract around events. If a writer takes a few sentences to describe a momentary vision, that might be merely a second in time, but another passage of similar lengthmight describe a character walking for ten minutes. Description can slow down time easily, focusing on a small detail and expanding it. For example, suppose that I described a drop of water falling from a leaf. I can spend an entire paragraph describing that action in painstaking detail, I could focus in, providing the intimate details and making that small action last for a long period on the page.
Now, suppose that the same character who offered such a description of this moment, later in the story describes an important event with no detail, letting, say, an hour long conversation become only one or two short and direct statements. The lushness is gonem and the longer period is shifted into that smaller space on the page. This can easily inform the reader's understanding of the character. The question of what matters, of what they notice, is highlighted, and the reader can recognize the priorities at play.
Of course, it is also inportant to recognize that a moment can slow down for internal reasons as well. It may not be that the overall meaning if the story will be communicated through such changes, but that one particular point in the story is meant to stand out in a certain way. It might be a death, for example, or it may be the moment when the character has a major revelation. Slowing down a moment inside of a more fast paced story can create an emphasis and make certain the reader recognizes that this is an important event, and can be done subtly enough to evade conscious scrutiny.
The point is that time has texture in fiction, just as it can in real life. We have all had the experience of a moment stretching or shrinking. Our sense of the passage of time is not fixed, so why would it be in fiction?
To me, though, there are still deeper questions that can be asked. Time in a fictional work can do much more. A story can play with causality, suggesting that time isn't truly linear and unidirectional, or even depict an event going backwards in time. I tend to think of time, in fiction at least, as an illusion at best, and one that is fully constructed, an attitude that liberated me to play with temporal aspects of a story in new ways. How could a story be written to allow for even past events to be unfixed? How can the present events be shown to have caused what already happened? How can a story be written in a world that has no time? What about the idea of time as having multiple dimensions, instead of only one linear flow?
Time does not have to be depicted as realistic, even in stories that are grounded. The warping of the normal fabric of cause and effect, for example, could be used to show how a character feels about an event. If they described the events of the story as being a result of the thing they caused to happen, that description could be more about the character's relationship to the event. Suppose a character's child dies in a car accident, and that character says something that implies the idea that buying the car was a result of it being what would kill the child. This may sound strange, but it makes sense in the mind of a person in that situation. They see everything in their life in relationship to that event, and so it is not unreasonable that they might feel as if the reason they chose that car was connected to the fact that it would play a role in the child's death.
Of course, one can also do things that are not intended to be purely psychological in that way. Robert Heinlein wrote a story in which one character, through a strange looping in time, is both their own mother and father. It is a time travel story, of course, so that may seem a bit too obvious for this discussion, but the point I am making is about how one can think of time. In a story that wasn't about a character moving through time, it could be established that the story takes place in a world with a particular type of time. In might be that time is a loop, or that the world will randomly slide backwards in time. Suppose that the story were one in which a certain character finds that time has changed around her, that she will sometimes experience days twice, exactly the same, or skip a day and have it happen again later. She, in her mind, can see these things as odd, but is unable to express it, because her actions are set already. She cannot change the outcome of those moments, but can experience them happening to her repeatedly. Or, consider a story where a character experiences multiple times at once. Such ideas are strange, yes, and it may not be that they ultimately work in your story, but creating such constructions is a method of expanding the potential of story, and can open up new ways of thinking for a writer.
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