Thursday, June 07, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 49
Time and continuity
are essential ingredients in books and films unless the author or director is
setting out deliberately to play with our daily conceptions of the its passage.
So the film Memento travels backwards in its plot and Pincher Martin by William
Golding envisages the entire action in the novel being the last few seconds’
thought of a dying man. Watching one of the new Nordic Noir series this last
week (The Bridge), there were discontinuities which irritated so that, despite
the production’s overall value, they detracted and undercut the viewer’s
suspension of disbelief. The serial killer simply could not have done what he
did in the time available. Novels are much the same. Time is one of those
ingredients that a writer must get right, not only in murder mysteries where it
can be almost an ‘extra character’. I believe that it works at an unconscious
level and even if the reader never investigates your plot (some do, of course
and write to tell you, gleefully) it adds to a pervasive, if slight
disenchantment with your tale’s integrity. Events in general fiction (by which
I mean that fiction which represent life as lived) must adhere to certain
principles. In Azimuth the Magus
hunts and prepares and eats meals. Whether using shorthand or detail the time
taken must be conveyed to the reader. In Through
a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story it is ‘time the character’ which
becomes an explanatory force, drawing together apparently unrelated hemispheres
in the globe of the story. As mentioned in another blog, Azimuth covers sixty
of more years of a man’s life. The central character has children with two
different women, he ages, as does his mother and all the other character and so
I ended making up a post-hoc time chart for myself which led me to make many
small modifications. I didn’t want even an unconscious frisson of doubt to
impair the story’s progress in the reader’s imagination.
The backcloth of time
can help you in unusual ways, too but you must be explicit with the reader
about what you are doing. As in film where we now expect flashbacks, slow
motion and parallel imaging, a novel needs to signal exactly how the story’s
time-line works, even if it is a post-script denouement or twist in the plot.
In Azimuth a sage demonstrates how
time is almost infinitely extendable and I conveyed this by setting up the different
time scales being lived by three characters in a scene by using different
punctuation and an explanatory preface within the account.
For verisimilitude,
get your time scale right for the reader and aid his or her total immersion in
your story.
Through a Mirror Clear
and other works at www.chronometerpublications.me
Labels: Writing: time you were aware
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