James Friel Some Notes on Time in Fiction

Henry James observed that ‘the eternal time question is… really a business to terrify all but stout hearts.’
         Every writer of fiction must confront ‘the eternal time question.’ In a short story a writer might have to make time pause, accelerate, fall back, leap forward or go in circles.
         A sentence might distill a decade or even an entire life (In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him: Chekhov’s The Darling, and a story might devote itself to the pivotal events of an hour, as in Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants - or an entire history of the world as in Italo Calvino’s The Soft Moon.
         Alice Munro’s stories often probe the past and its slowly surfacing truths, as in Friend of My Youth, or plait the past and the present and suggest the certain future as Hemingway does in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, its feverous hero recalling his past as he dies in the African heat.
         A story might concern the passage of time very directly as in , Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with its visits from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Tobias Wolf’s Bullet in the Brain manages to tell the story of man’s whole life – often by detailing what he failed to do – in the seconds it takes for a bullet to enter his head during a bank robbery. In The Wave, Liam O’Flaherty describes the impact of one wave on a cliff face: the work of a moment, but also several millennia.
         All these stories deal with time, and whatever their individual qualities and intentions, each might be considered a conventional narratives with a beginning, middle and end. In each one, an experience is followed as it occurs. If a writer obeys chronology. why should a stout heart quake at the eternal time question? Because chronology does not answer does not answer or evade the eternal time question? It directly confronts us with it.
         For example, where – exactly - should one begin?

Take Humpty Dumpty.
         Round fellow? Sat on a wall, fell off, and was irremediably broken? Him.
         What if your story was about Humpty?
         What if you wanted to know why he climbed that wall? What desires provoked him to it? You might wish to probe the mind of such a reckless character. You might have to go back to the very beginning: his childhood and the overly ambitious mother who had egged him on? Or you might just step back to the very start of the crucial action - the night before and the drunken bet that leads to Humpty climbing the wall? Such a beginning is called ab ovo. – literally ‘from the egg.’ The writer starts from the beginning and provides all the necessary background information concerning the characters, their circumstances and conflicts.
         The nursery rhyme, however, cuts straight to the decisive act: Humpty sat on a wall. We don’t even get told that he climbs the wall – or why. The story begins in the middle of things – or in media res. No time is wasted. Elmore Leonard would approve. Humpty is now an action thriller.
         Or one might begin the story at the very end of things - in ultima res – with one of the King’s men (or one of his horses) pondering Humpty’s fragments and wondering how such an event had occurred. Humpty’s tale has become a detective story.
         A story can begin at any point in time, and, in consequence, its mood and intentions change.

Ab ovo
At the age of five, when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Isaac said he wanted to be German.

Benedict Kiely

Just a Little More

In ultima res

There was something strange, abnormal, about my bringing up; only now that my grandmother is dead am I prepared to face it.

Mary McCarthy

     Now, take a familiar story like Humpty Dumpty, Hamlet, or, at random, a story in your local newspaper.
     Ponder how you might begin to tell the story ab ovo, in media res or in ultima res.
     For each one. write an opening sentence or even a paragraph.
     You don’t need to write the whole story. Just think – as storywriters do – how, if this was your story, in what ways might you begin to tell it.

Much of the drafting and redrafting of a story concerns a balance between telling and showing, between a summary account of an event:

The ring’s fake diamond glittered in the evening sun, but she was not dazzled. She turned to him, saying, ‘Yes, of course, I will.’’

Often refereed to as ‘showing and telling’, any story is really a negotiation between these two approaches to narrative.
The same is true of dialogue:

         Generally, summary (or telling) accelerates a narrative – events are being compresed. Making a scene or dramatising an event (showing) decelerates a narrative, - gives it weight, increases that’s importance, and so suggests to the reader that this moment or exchange is important.
         In fiction, although we often prize showing over telling, neither summary or scene is an inherently better method than the other. Both concern selection: choosing what to add or leave out. What matters, always, is making the writing count.
         This excerpt from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried not only dramatises a crucial event in the story, but also summarises each of the main characters:

Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Pat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. When Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.

         Except for the last sentence, this is summary. What these characters carry indicates their character and background. It is summary, but it is also a very condensed form of showing? For example, is Ted Lavender’s dope for consumption or dealing? And look at those names - Lavender, Norman Bowker, Kiowa (a native American name) – and how the names deepen and complicate what we might guess about the characters.
         But look, too, at the diction O’Brien chooses. What if O’Brien had written that Bowker had not a diary, but a journal? Bowker’s character would subtly change, would it not? Kiowa has a New Testament, not the Bible – an Illustrated one. Every word matters here.
         Notice the syntax, too. That fifth sentence? Doesn’t it imply that Kiowa is also likely to be rather longwinded and pedantic, repititous even? And is Michell Sanders as curt in all his dealings as the sentence he inhabits?
         These are choices O’Brien has made. There is a concentrated thought behind each one. These vivid summaries might be O’Brien’s answer to the eternal time question

Try something similar. Choose either a group of five children going to school, young people out clubbing, or a family setting out on a long journey or commuters in a traffic jam. Suggest their character and history – even their future - by the things they carried, names, and in the syntax and diction you employ.

The use of flashbacks (or analepsis) in fiction are common - so many stories begin with a variant of I remembered - but flashbacks as a device within a story can seem clumsy if all a character is doing is remembering information that the writer can’t fit in any other way. ‘Plot,’ observed Eudora Welty, ‘is not repetition – it is direction.’ If you are dealing in flashbacks, ask yourself if you are delaying your story or propelling it forward. Consider whether you need that flashback at all.
The flashforward (or prolepsis) in which the plot or its outcome is given away, is less common but can be effective. In the excerpt from The Things They Carried we are told right away that Ted Lavender will be shot. In Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of the Forking Paths the narrator is about to be executed . Knowing this, as he narrates his past he must describe a self who has yet to learn what he now knows.
An omnisicient narrator can be even more wide-ranging and see a wider history his characters will not live to see as in William Faulkner’s story, Barn Burning:

His father mounted to the seat where the older brother already sat and struck the gaunt mules two savage blows with the peeled willow, but without heat. It was not even sadistic; it was exactly that same quality which in later years would cause his descendants to overrun the engine before putting a motor car into motion, striking and reigning back in the same movement.

Prolepsis does not destroy suspense; it can creates a different and more sophisticated suspense. Rather than wondering how the story will end, the reader is encouraged to wonder how it reaches this point – and why.

Foreshadowing is a form of showing rather than telling. Eudora Welty praised this detail in a Ross Macdonald novel:

         Write a series of paragraphs in which a character, a suited man in his thirties, sits on a park bench and eats a sandwich. In each of these paragraphs suggest, without telling, that this character will become
         A murderer
         A saint
         An adulterous husband
         A vampire.

TENSES

Tenses indicate time in a sentence. The present tense, for example, suggests that the events in a story are happening simultaneously with our reading it, but not if your writing is stiff and uninterested in pace It is language, diction, syntax that makes for pace and immediacy, not tense.
Sometimes, notes Gerry Visco, the mechanics of the flashback technique can cause you to use cumbersome verb constructions.

If you are writing the story in the past tense, you can begin the flashback in past perfect. You can use 'had' plus the verb a couple of times. Then you can switch to the simple past. I gleaned this nugget from Janet Burroway in her helpful book on writing fiction. As she says, '’the reader will be with you.

But tense shifts can be very effective. Timothy J Mason has noted how in Angela Carter’s Company of Wolves, a young man’s actions are reported in the past tense, but his metamorphosis into a wolf and when he kills and eats the grandmother is told largely in the present:

         He strips off his shirt. His skin is the colour and texture of vellum.
         A crisp stripe of hair runs down his belly, his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit, but he's so thin you could count the ribs under his skin if only he gave you the time.
         He strips off his trousers and she can see how hairy his legs are. His genitals, huge. Ah! huge.
         The last thing the old lady saw in all this world was a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching her bed.
         The wolf is carnivore incarnate.

         In the penultimate sentence we change point of view and tense - the grandmother is dead. – and in the last sentence we return to the triumphant wolf and the present tense. Carter does this frequently in her stories. The effect is almost musical. It shapes and modulates her writing voice. The tense changes are deliberate, worked out, chosen. They may at some point have been lucky accidents in the drafting, but they are not errors.

Pace - Get There Smoothly

Chronology matters in fiction because it is about control, a writer shaping the material. Take this piece of prose, for example:

In a tightish tweed coat, un-tanned, ideally bald, and clean shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his,an apish upper lip, thick neck, tortoiseshell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), and a strong-man torso, but he ended, somewhat disappointingly, in frail-looking, almost feminine feet and a pair of spindly legs.

It is cumbersome but syntactically correct. It has some pleasing phrases, but it reads lumpily. It fails to impact. There is a reason. It does not occur chronologically. The reader’s eye must first take in a coat and then a bald untanned head – or is it the coat that is bald and untanned? A domed skull is described next and then a neck. We zip back up to the lips and up again for the glasses only to plummet to the feet and finish with a flick back to the legs. Dizzying, yes?
If this were written chronologically, if we followed as the eye would take in this sight or as a camera might – that is, as it occurs in time - then we have this magisterial panning shot:

Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoiseshell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows, an apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tightish tweed coat, but he ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs and frail-looking, almost feminine feet.

         A great deal of writing commits the sins of the former passage. There is so much to do in writing that one gets flustered. In redrafting and shaping sentences, one can make one lose sight of common sense. Events occur in time. A description of a place or person is an event. Follow time.
     This also applies to action. Graham Green wrote that he learned never to interrupt an action; a man walks through a door with a gun and fires it. This is not a moment to describe the clouds.
         Although a seemingly correct (yet actually deeply subversive) writer like Muriel Spark would ignore this advice, as when in The Girls of Slender Means she tells us a character about to plunge to a fiery death is wearing a green jersey and a a grey skirt. As with Carter, this is not error or indulgence, but a writerly tactic.
         And pace is greatly helped if the prose is not leaden, prone to vagueness, imprecision and redundancies. Increase the pace and fluency of your writing by quizzing the necessity for these words wherever they occur in your writing
         about, all, almost, always, anxiously, eagerly, every, finally, frequently, got, just, merely, nearly, need, never, not, often, only, so, that, then, very

       It is not wrong to use these words, only to abuse them.

Some stories reach a full stop, say with marriages or murders. Such endings are called closed. Others are called open. The story need not have reached its end in time but arrives at a point where what follows can either be intuited – for example, the ending of James Joyce’s The Dead - or where it would spoil the effect to spell it out.
In Chekhov’s Sleepy the climactic act is delivered as a devastating summary.

Laughing and winking and shaking her fingers at the green patch, Varka steals up to the cradle and bends over the baby. When she has strangled him, she quickly lies down on the floor, laughs with delight that she can sleep, and in a minute is sleeping as sound as the dead.

An even more brutal summary that literally brings Raymond Carver’s Popular Mechanics to a dead halt:

         She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby's other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.
         But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.
         In this manner, the issue was decided.

In Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover a woman returns to a neglected and boarded up house. The story builds up an eerie and threatening atmosphere. The house is chillingly evoked. We wait for the demon lover to appear before her, but, at the very close of the story, she leaves the house and climbs into a waiting taxi. There is almost relief, and then the driver turns and she recognizes her dead lover:

They remained for an eternity eye to eye…she continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on the glass.

These stories work by creating scenes, but their real coup is then to cut away to summary or a muffled silence - those gloved hands.
In Sleepy Chekhov conveys the poor maid’s miserable life in such detail that we understand why she kills the child. – it is one more dull and deadening task. The story pays the child’s death no m ore mind than she does and so we notice it all the more. In The Demon Lover the wallpaper looks ‘bruised.’ A piano has left ‘claw marks’ on a carpet. These details threaten. Something terrible will happen. It does – a woman is dragged off to a hell all the worse for it not being presented to us.

Try very hard not to announce this terrible conclusion. Show how it grows out of the event you describes or cuts across it in a way only you as writer could anticipate.

The Eye of the Story, Eudora Welty, Random House, 1978.

Selected Short Stories, William Faulkner, Modern Library 1993

http://www.writersstore.com/article.php?articles_id=7

http://www.timothyjpmason.com

Burning Your Boats, Angela Carter, Penguin 1997

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov, Vinatge 1989

For a fuller account as to how and why, visit http://www.tameri.com/edit/words2kill.html

Forty Stories Anton Chekhov (trans. by Robert Payne)Vintage 1991

What We Talk about When We Talk about Love Raymond carver Vintage1989

Collected Stories, Elizabeth Bowen, Cape 1980

Preface to Roderick Hudson, Henry James, Volume One, New York Edition, 1907: also at http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/text01.htm

A Prologue

Benedict Kiely

Just a Little More

In ultima res

Mary McCarthy