by Rebecca Johns

Very few writers begin a novel or memoir thinking primarily about narrative time, the days and weeks and months that are going to comprise a story.  Plot and character, the meat and potatoes of storytelling, are usually what get writers motivated to sit behind the keyboard or hover over the notepad.  But in my experience as a writer and editor and teacher, I’ve noticed that when narratives struggle or fail, often the culprit is narrative time.  If readers tell you your story moves too fast, or too slow, or express confusion over the order of events, then it might be time to take a look at how time is working in your story.  Luckily, manipulating narrative time is also one of the easiest ways to control the pacing and direction of your stories.  All it requires is a little attention to the details.

Narrative relies on time in ways that other art forms do not.  Although a photograph or a painting or a sculpture represents a single moment frozen in time, stories take place over a period that can be as little as a single moment, such as the nanosecond a bullet takes to traverse a human brain in Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain,” or a single day, such as in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, or the entire Napoleonic wars, as in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  Time is the “container” a writer uses to hold the action of a story.  The container can be as small or as big as you like, but it has to have definite sides if it’s going to hold water.

The first thing you should do when looking at narrative time is to determine the size of this container.  Will the story zoom in on a few days, or will it be roomier, baggier, covering many years, decades, even lifetimes?  There are advantages and disadvantages to each.  Short time spans will move quickly, focusing a story to focus very tightly on current events, and stories that rely on this tight focus will need many detailed scenes of action and dialogue and little summarizing, though they may also need flashbacks to fill the reader in on events that occurred before the story opens.  Stories that use longer time periods have more “breathing room” to move through time toward the story’s climax.  When your actions take place over months or years, you will have to rely less on flashbacks to fill in the blanks but may need a good deal of summarizing to get through lulls in the action.  In other words, you can speed up a story’s pacing by starting closer to the climax or slow down a story’s pacing by starting further away from the climax.

A story’s pacing will also be determined by the type of story you’re trying to write.  A dense psychological drama like James Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes place on a single day, is naturally going to have a slower, more internal kind of pacing than a thriller like The Da Vinci Code, which takes place over several days, even though the first is more time-compressed.  The trick is always to place the reader’s attention exactly where you want it for as long as you want it there.

To direct the reader’s attention, then, you need to think about how readers read.  There are two kinds of time occurring in any story: the time within the story itself, the hours and days and weeks in which the events are occurring, as well as the time it takes the reader to read it.  The second kind of time—let’s call it “reader time”—is just as important as “story time.”  Once you’ve determined the size of the container to hold your story, whether big or small, there are several techniques you can use to increase or decrease the reader’s sense of how quickly time is passing, depending on the effect you’re going for.

Summary vs. scene.  Summary and scene both have an impact on the reader’s sense of time within a story.  Summary takes an event or a group of events and relates the action very quickly, in the broadest strokes, giving the reader the sense that time is passing very rapidly, mostly because it takes the reader very little time to read it.  For instance, here is a summary a character might give of her childhood: “I grew up in a small town and went to Catholic school, where the nuns disliked me and made my life a living hell.”  This summary is over quickly, with little detail, and covers the first eighteen years of the character’s life in the blink of an eye: the passage of time seems, to the reader, to speed up.  It also keeps the reader at a distance, like a train passing a town in a couple of heartbeats. 

So why would a writer choose to use summary, to speed up the reader’s sense of time passing?  To catch the reader up to the present as quickly as possible.  To cover weeks, months, or even years in a few sentences.  To convey necessary but not necessarily interesting information to the reader.  The above example, for instance, would only be useful in a story in which the character’s past is mostly unimportant, something to be summed up as quickly as possible before the writer moves on to the real business of storytelling.

Scene, on the other hand, is just like a scene in a movie.  It slows down the action to a single moment or series of moments, includes action, setting, and dialogue.  The writer Jerome Stern, in his book Making Shapely Fiction, says the need to draw a reader’s attention requires “making a scene,” not unlike a child throwing a tantrum, interrupting normal patterns of behavior, pushing emotions to their apex, drawing everyone’s eyes to the action on display.  In the above example, the character describes her entire childhood in the blink of an eye.  A single scene of great detail showing the ways in which the nuns made this character’s life a living hell, however, will seem to the reader to occur very gradually, and the passage of time will seem to slow down or even stop: “As Sister John Marie took me to task in front of the entire classroom, I saw a spider crawling up the curtains toward the ceiling, where, unnoticed by the custodians, she had built a web and laid an egg, out of which a hundred baby spiders were just beginning to burst, crawling down the curtain toward Sister’s sensible black shoes.”  Notice how much more slowly the events occur here, and yet much of the same information is gleaned in the second version as in the first.  The reader is close to the action and to the characters and feels invested in what’s happening.

And why would a writer choose to slow down the reader’s sense of time?  To develop character, to invest the reader emotionally in the story, to increase tension, to introduce important characters and situations.  All the things, in other words, that make a good story.  There’s a reason why a story’s climax never occurs in summary: If it’s important or interesting enough to be the crux of the whole story, then it deserves a detailed, well-developed scene.

There will still be times when you will need to summarize information for the reader in order to “fill in the blanks,” so to speak.  The trick is in choosing the right times.  The most emotional, the most conflicted, the most humorous, the most crucial moments will need to go in scenes.  Linking those important scenes will be brief moments of summary, moving the reader from one important moment to the next, from the past to the present, the present to the future.  Janet Burroway, in Writing Fiction, says that “summary can be called the mortar of the story, but scenes are the building blocks.”  Both will be necessary to building a good story.

Here, for example, is a passage that demonstrates both scene and summary from the beginning of Frank Conroy’s 1967 memoir Stop-Time, in which he first catches the reader up with his relationship with his father in summary and then describes a particularly important moment between the two of them in more detail:

At one point in his life [my father] was analyzed by or took therapy with A.A. Brill, the famous disciple of Freud, with no apparent effect.  For ten or fifteen years he worked as a magazine editor, and built up a good business as a literary agent.  He died of cancer in his forties.

           I visited him near the end.  Half his face was paralyzed from the brain-tumor operation and jaundice had stained him a deep yellow.  We were alone, as usual, in the hospital room.  The bed was high to my child’s eye.  With great effort he asked me if I believed in universal military training.  Too young even to know what it was, I took a gamble and said yes.  He seemed satisfied.  (Even now I have no idea if that was the answer he wanted.  I think of it as some kind of test.  Did I pass?)  He showed me some books he had gotten to teach himself to draw.  A few weeks later he died.  He was six feet tall and at the end he weighed eighty-five pounds.

 
Notice how easily Conroy moves from summary, a quick compression of time, to scene, a slowing down to a particularly important moment.  The first paragraph starts with a summation of description about the father but still uses specifics (his work as a magazine editor and literary agent, his therapy with the famous psychologist) to give the reader a sense of who the father is before they interact, in scene, in the next paragraph.  The physical description of the father (the jaundice, paralysis, the sense of perspective change because this memory is that of a child) comes first, and then he speaks (indirectly) to ask his son a very odd, very specific question, one that the narrator, looking back from his older, more mature perspective, still wonders about.  At the end, the author gives us a sense of moving away from this flashback toward a future moment, catching the reader up with the father’s eventual fate.

This selection is merely one example of hundreds, even thousands, that can help you see how to use summary and scene together to develop a sense of narrative time.  Try looking at the ways some of your favorite writers use summary and scene and emulate them.  Your favorite writers will have much to teach you about using time to its greatest effect.

Flashbacks are scenes or chapters that occur in the past.  Very often novels will start with the main action, then include a “Chapter Two” that is almost entirely flashback, catching the reader up to the events that happened before the present action.  Burroway says that flashbacks are used most effectively to reveal background information “at the right point.  It does not so much distract us from, as contribute to, the central action of the story, deepening our understanding of character and theme.”  In other words, a flashback must illuminate a character’s decision-making process in the present time.  How does the past influence the present?

Here are a few helpful hints for writing better flashbacks:

• Usually a flashback will begin with a time signature, something to alert the reader to the fact that the time period has changed.  Something as simple as “when I was a child,” or “that spring, before we moved to the new house” will often suffice. Think of these time signatures as road signs on the highway of your story: They signal to the reader that the story is taking a little change of direction.  However, do not rely too heavily on “clock time” or “calendar time” to explain the passage of time within your narrative.  Using phrases like “last Saturday,” or “early that May” don’t really do enough to alleviate the problem of narrative time.  Readers want to know how events relate to each other (before, after) more than they want to map out your story on the calendar (June, Sunday, 2001).
  

• Don’t overexplain the transition to the flashback.  Phrases like “I thought back to the time” or “memories flooded over him” are awkward—they draw more attention to themselves than to the memory itself.  A smooth transition, on the other hand, will work as seamlessly as memory itself, following the internal leaps of image and logic that only the human mind can follow.  

For example, in Alice Munro’s novella “Carried Away,” which centers around a terrible factory accident, the factory owner, drenched in the victim’s blood, remembers the librarian who wore red blouses and reddened her lips to match.  The moment is important, because he must visit her soon to return the victim’s books, and afterward she will become his second wife.  It’s the color, however, that provides the transition between present and past—no explanation is necessary to the reader, whose mind works as subtly and swiftly as the character’s.

• If you’re writing in the past tense, use the past perfect verb tense for the first two or three sentences at the beginning of a flashback: “I had studied” or “I had walked” instead of “I studied” or “I walked.”  The change of tense is another signal to the reader that the time period has taken a change.  If you’re writing in the present tense for most of your story, use the past tense for the duration of the flashback.

• When the flashback is over, be sure to make it clear you’re catching up with the present.  Here’s an example from Ethan Canin’s short story, “Pitch Memory”:

In our family the violence has always been glancing and reflected.  One Thanksgiving when my father was alive he dropped the platter he was carrying and the turkey, which my mother had been basting all afternoon, rolled onto the rug and under the table.  “You might as well have dropped me,” said my mother, and the next day she backed out too close to the garage and tore the sideview mirror off my father’s Cutlass.

Now it is Thanksgiving Day and my mother knows of an open store…

The flashback ends, and the beginning of the next paragraph brings us back around to the present: “Now it is Thanksgiving Day…”  It returns the story firmly to the present time and action, so the reader can follow the movement of the story more clearly.

• Try to avoid flashbacks within flashbacks.  They get confusing for the reader and usually indicate you’re trying to make flashbacks do too much of the heavy lifting in a story. 

• If you have multiple flashbacks in a narrative, try, as much as possible, to keep your flashbacks in chronological order.  It’s easier for the reader to follow your time progression between the past and the present if the past is in some kind of clear, easy-to-follow order.

Flash-forwards are akin to flashbacks, though usually shorter and less detailed.  They give the reader the sense, just for a moment, of a future distant from the time period contained within the narrative.  For example, here is the opening of the brilliant novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which throws the reader forward, into an exciting and frightening future, before beginning at the beginning: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”  Flash-forwards like this one are useful to hint to the reader that some terrible or interesting fate is in store for your characters, even if you decide to begin your story away from that action.  They’re also much more useful than a prologue, which often drags on too long and bores readers just as you want to entice them.

Slow motion is exactly what it sounds like: just as in a movie or television show, where the director can slow down the motion capture to reveal important moments in greater detail, slow motion in narrative involves the writer’s decision to display the scene being described in minute, almost excruciating detail in order to reveal more at the heart of the moment.  Accidents often seem to happen this way: broken bones, car crashes, moments of terror, moments of joy.  Often slow motion will occur at or near the climax of a story or scene, when emotional truths are being revealed in detail.  Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” provides a particularly vivid example, after the main character, Anders, is shot in a bank robbery:

…the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebellum set off a crackling chain of iron transports and neurotransmissions.  Because of their peculiar origin, these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory.  After striking the cranium the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lightning that flashed around it.  Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.”

The shot itself takes only a nanosecond, but in “brain time,” it can go as slowly as Wolff would like, creating the sensation of time moving slowly enough to see the bullet itself, the nerve pathways it tears, the one memory that Anders takes with him as he exits his life.  Slow motion gives the writer the time to contemplate anything he likes, even if the actual time within the story is moving at the speed of light.

All these techniques—summary and scene, flashback, flash-forward, and slow motion—are tools at your disposal to control a story’s sense of order and pacing.  Once you’ve chosen a suitable container for your story, try each of these techniques to see what is gained through each of them, speeding up or slowing down your story to suit your reader and your own sense of the passage of time.

Rebecca Johns is an associate editor at The Editorial Department , specializing in mainstream, literary, and young adult fiction. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught workshops in both fiction and nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa and Northern Michigan University, as well as the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Her first novel, Icebergs, (Mainstream/Historical), was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in April of 2006.

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