“Time and the Writer”

by Waverly Fitzgerald
October 9, 2003

I decided to talk about the many ways writers use time in writing* to honor the name of this reading series, It’s About Time, to celebrate Take Back Your Time Day, October 24th — a holiday dedicated to examining time poverty and overwork in America and because time is one of my passions (I have a website devoted to seasonal holidays).

Most of these ideas were developed while teaching a class for Richard Hugo House called Time and Tempo. My philosophy of teaching is simple: to encourage my students to write as much as possible. So as I present these concepts, consider ways you might explore them in your own writing. Since I usually write novels, not poems, I'm not sure these thoughts will be as applicable to poets as they are to novelists.

Duration
First of all, there's duration. A story or poem can span centuries, or it can take place in a moment. The novel I just wrote took place in about two weeks. That might seem ridiculously short but it's pretty common for a detective novel which often has a compressed time span.

At the time I gave this talk, I didn't have any good examples of poems that spanned centuries but fortunately one of the featured poets, Ken Shiovitz, has written an epic poem about his ancestors which takes place over 200 years.

Haiku is a good example of a poem that takes place in a moment. Recently I've been studying haibun, a Japanese form which can be described succinctly as a prose poem usually followed by a haiku. In the anthology of American haibun compiled by Bruce Ross, I found a haibun called Zazen, by D.S. Lliteras which is all about time: This passage follows a paragraph in which the narrator is sitting in meditation:

My presence stopped. And with it the abstraction of time. Time. The passage of time. I shook my head and stood up.

After a few more paragraphs of questions in which the narrator attempts to orient himself in time, this haiku appears:

between space
and time…
infinity arises

I love the way that paragraph from the middle represents time. All those short sentence fragments suggest the timeless moment. The haiku illustrates this in a different way.

Poems are often about that timeless moment which seems to have no duration. I've been doing research for a historical novel set in 1644, so I chose an example from the 17th century .This is Henry King upbraiding the men who executed Charles I:

For as to work his peace you raised this strife,
And often shot at Him to save His life;
As you took from Him to increase His wealth,
And kept him prisoner to secure His health;
So in revenge of your dissembled spite
In this last wrong you did Him greatest right,
And (cross to all You meant) by plucking down,
Lifted him up to His Eternal Crown.

This poem doesn't take place over a week or over a day. It's meant to suggest an eternal state of affairs: the wrong done the King will linger forever and so will the glory of his martyrdom.

On a more contemporary note, I thought of this prose poem by Joan Fiset from Now the Day is Over:

Interior Design

When you come in close the door. Be careful not to disturb the furniture. The color scheme took years to create. Notice the unusual combinations of soft gray and blue, the lack of any particular definition or bright accent. Everything blends in seamlessly. It is a perfect construct. You cannot tell where it begins or if it will end. Birds fly above and always what catches their eye is the silence of this misty country.

The simplicity of the prose, the present tense, all suggest this interior will always the timeless quality of the subject.

Tempo
Tempo is another way that writers work with time. Tempo arises from the rhythm of the language. Often very long, languid sentences create a slower tempo while short, choppy sentences create a sensation of time moving swiftly (although this is not always true and it's fun to play around and see if you can create the same effect in other ways).

I recommend an exercise in rhythm from Ursula LeGuin's book Steering the Craft (which is, incidentally, the best book on craft in writing that I've ever read). Write a page that is all one sentence (LeGuin suggests writing about something with a lot of characters and a gathering of emotion like a family memory, a key moment at a dinner table or a hospital bed). Then try writing a paragraph in sentences of seven or fewer words (no sentence fragments). For this, LeGuin suggests a scene of tense, intense action, like a thief entering a room where someone's sleeping.

I want to give you examples of how each of these might work. This is a passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain which LeGuin gives as an example of a beautiful long sentence:

…then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound, anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t'other side—you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black any more, but gray' you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such things' and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled-up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze spring up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

I love that passage. You can just hear the river rolling along, the slow, languid pace of it, and the imperceptible arrival of the dawn. The rhythm perfectly complements the subject matter.

LeGuin said she couldn't find any examples of beautiful short sentences, but I found several that I like. There's the short sentence used to convey a brisk movement through time, like the rapid whirling of the calendar pages in old movies, like this passage from Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff:

I was born in Hollywood. Was a baby in Redondo Beach and a little squirt in Palos Verdes. Drove east at four in a twelve-cylinder Packard convertible to New York. Father went to England. I heard the radio tell about Pearl Harbor, my second or third memory, at the Elm Tee Inn, Farmington, Connecticut. Mother drove us to Colorado Springs, to see her brother. The mountains bored her, we returned to California, Hermosa Beach. Father came home. He bought a tract house in Chula Vista, where we lived a few weeks. Cross-country to Birmingham, Alabama, a huge, four-columned Greek Revival manse. I began school. Mother took me away, north to Oak Bluffs, south to Dallas.

Wolff goes on like this for almost a page, occasionally inserting longer sentences with more detail, but then returning to the sentence fragments. The passage works so well because the choppy sentences represent the way it must feel to be jerked around so much as a child.

Detective fiction is another place that often features short, choppy sentences. James Ellroy, although prone to excess, makes this a part of his style. Here's a passage from his memoir, My Dark Places, (which I think is his best book):

The San Gabriel Valley was the rat's ass of Los Angeles County — a 30-mile stretch of contiguous hick towns due east of L.A. proper.

The San Gabriel Mountains formed the northern border. The Puente-Montebello Hills closed the valley in on the south. Muddy riverbeds and railroad tracks cut through the middle.

The eastern edge was ambiguously defined. When the view improved, you were out of the valley.

The San Gabriel Valley was flat and box-shaped. The mountain flank trapped in smog. The individual towns — Alhambra, Industry, Bassett, Puente, Covina, West Covina, Baldwin Park, El Monte, Temple City, Rosemead, San Gabriel, South San Gabriel, Irwindale, Duarte — bled together with nothing but Kiwanis Club signs to distinguish them.

The San Gabiel Valley was hot and humid. Wicked winds kicked dust off the northern foothills. Packed-dirt sidewalks and gravel-pit debris made your eyes sting.

You've got all those short sentences strung together, rapid fire, matter of fact statements, "just the facts, Ma'am," and suddenly in the middle of it, Ellroy gives you a wonderful list of city names — although the list also has an abrupt, staccato rhythm.

Tense
Of course writers can play with time by changing tense. The two most common tenses are past and present. Present "I stand here. I address you. I read from my books." and past: "I stood at the podium. I spoke to the assembled poets. I read passages from books." You can see that just changing tenses changed my choice of words slightly.

Most writers think that present is more immediate because present is about what's happening right now. But actually all time is an illusion in writing, except the time it takes the reader to read the piece.

Present tense is just a construct: the author pretends the action is happening right now. Present tense is about the present moment only in what LeGuin calls concurrent reporting, for instance, a sports announcer: "He's going back to pass. He's got an open receiver. Oh, no! There's a flag on the field."

And again I'd refer you to Ursula LeGuin for a marvelous discussion of this. Although she admits that the present tense is often useful for conveying the choppy, discontinuous nature of reality, she recommends the past tense as it is easier to use and allows the writer to move about in time more easily.

She's got a great exercise for writers who want to explore the possibilities of different tenses. You write a scene happening in the present about someone remembering a scene in the past (for instance a woman doing the dishes while remembering something that happened when she was a child) while changing the tense for each scene, for example:

present in the present past tense for the present past tense for the past present tense for the present

past in the past present tense for the past past tense for the past present tense for the past

If you try this, switch between past and present several times. Allow the writing to change to accommodate the change in tenses and observe how changing the tense affects your writing, how it influences the mood of the piece.

Tenses are slippery things and it's possible to do quite a lot with them. The best way to master them is to do an exercise like the one above where you explore the possibilities.

Transitions
Transitions are another way writers work within time. They are really fairly simple. I always ask writers in my novel classes to examine the scene changes in the novels they're reading. Usually a writer signals a change of scene by writing one sentence that tells us where we are and what time it is.

But beginning writers often worry about these transitions. When I get first novels for evaluation, I often find sentences like this: "She headed out the door, down the steps and out onto the sidewalk. It was beginning to rain as she got into her car. She turned it on and started the windshield wipers, then drove towards downtown." All the writer really needs to say is something like: "It started raining while she was driving downtown." Or, even more magical: "She decided to confront Tim at work." White space. "Tim looked startled when she stormed into his office."

With words you are able to transport your reader over huge stretches of time and space. . Just consider a line that begins, "Two years later…." With just three words, in the second it takes to read it, you've created the illusion that two years have passed.

Time Travel
I think the true magic of writing is that it can transport us to different times. I'm sure you've all had the experience of writing about something that happened in your personal past. Your poem or story captures the moment, like a photo or a souvenir in an album, distilling the essence of the moment, preserving it, and sometimes subtly altering it.

You can also carry out radical experiments with time as Alan Lightman did in Einstein's Dreams where he showed the same scene as if it were happening in different kinds of time, for instance, if time moved backwards or if everything was happening simultaneously.

In speculative fiction, writers create an imagined future. And in the subgenre of alternate history, writers imagine what the world would have been like if things had changed in the past. For instance, Orson Scott Card has a series (the Alvin Maker series) in which he imagines that instead of the Puritans coming to America, they sent all the folks they disapproved of: the witches, the folk healers, the people with the second sight.

And then there's historical fiction. When I was a kid, my favorite books were always about children who went through a doorway and found themselves in another time. I think if I had been granted a single wish, I would have wished for a time travel machine. But then I began writing historical fiction. I hope you've had the experience of reading a novel and when you put down the novel, you feel like you've just come back from a trip to some other world. Writing a historical novel is just like that, only more so. It's as close as I can get to time travel. All through the magic of writing.

I'll close with one of my favorite passages about time, from The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle (and if you only know that book from the saccharine animated movie, you owe yourself the pleasure of reading the original—it's full of lyrical prose and witty literate characters):

When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said "one o'clock" as though I could see it, and "Monday" as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.

*Of course, I didn't really talk this long. I just added in all the pieces I wished I had time to read during my presentation.

References:
Beagle, Peter S., The Last Unicorn, New American Library 1994
Card, Orson Scott, Seventh Son: Vol. 1 of the Alvin Maker series, Tor 1987
Ellroy, James, My Dark Places, Knopf 1996
Fiset, Joan, Now the Day is Over, Blue Begonia Press 1997
Fitzgerald, Waverly, School of the Seasons, www.schooloftheseasons.com
LeGuin, Ursula, Steering the Craft, Eighth Mountain Press, 1998
Lightman, Alan, Einstein's Dreams, Warner 1994
Richard Hugo House, www.hugohouse.org
Ross, Bruce, Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun, Charles E. Tuttle Company 1998
Take Back Your Time Day, www.timeday.org
Wolff, Geoffrey, The Duke of Deception, Berkley Books 1979

Waverly Fitzgerald
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