Writing Barn friends, you are in for a major treat today as Meredith Davis joins us for an in-depth discussion of how to handle “time”in our novels. She covers everything from timelines,crowding, lingering, and everything in between. Get those pencils ready or bookmark this post. We promise it is one you will want to read, time and time again.
It’s About Time
Understanding and Manipulating Time
To Strengthen Your Novel
As the writer, the creator, the master of your universe, you are the keeper of time. You decide when you’ll give the reader specific time markers. You decide when to stop in a scene and when to keep going, perhaps noting points of interest out the window as you continue along the storyline. You can even defy chronological time using back-story and reveals. And finally, you keep time in your story like a musician. You listen for your story’s particular beat, its heartbeat, making sure it’s consistent with the story you’re trying to tell. Whether you’ve got a broken-down manuscript, or you’re building a new one from scratch, you’ve got time in your tool chest, and you need to know how to use it effectively. So get out your pencil and paper and let’s get to work.
As you begin to analyze time in your story, it’s helpful to create timelines. The type of markers you use on this line can vary, depending on what aspect of time you are examining. One way to track time is by making a mark each time a specific time is referenced. These references can be specific or vague. The most specific is the mention of a date and/or a time within the text. December 25th is obviously more specific than saying “Wednesday,” or even less specific, “March.” Any of them can count as a time marker. What’s important is having them, grounding your reader firmly in the narrative. Until time is mentioned, the reader is floating above the timeline, unable to settle into a scene.
Once you orient your reader, you don’t have to tell them every time a day, or even a week passes. There are chapters when you may have no idea exactly where you are on the timeline. You just know the scenes fall between certain markers. Time is relative. Also important to note is that when you give time markers, they don’t have to be a day, date, or time. The marker could be a holiday, a season, a school year, or some other specified event. What’s important is that it is intrinsically tied to your storyline.
In Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, most of the story takes place on the farm, so many of the time references are given in the form of seasons or events that happen on or around the farm. “It was apple-blossom time” is the perfect way to describe the time of year on a farm, whereas noting the size of her mother’s pregnant belly is a better way to describe time in Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik. Once you chart all your time references, you should be able to easily see large gaps and recognize if there is a need for a brief time reminder.
A different way to chart time in your story is to mark scenes, paying attention to the way they group or space out along the line. Make a tick mark each time you choose to touch down on the line and spend time in a scene. Spaces between scenes indicate time passing. If your entire story is a big cluster of scenes with no time passing, your reader may grow weary. Letting time pass gives the reader a chance to read differently, to relax their hold on specific detail, look out the window and briefly observe what passes by. Ask yourself where you need to allow the space between the marks on the time line to stretch, letting days or weeks fly by without settling in, determining what matters, and what doesn’t.
You need to decide when to crowd and when to leap along your timeline. Ursala LeGuin describes this beautifully in her book Steering the Craft. “By crowding I mean keeping the story full, always full of what’s happening in it; keeping it moving, not slacking and wandering into irrelevancies . . . Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings, and implications.” To explain leaping, she says, “What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice.” The space in between the tick marks is the white space.
Once you decide where you want to stop, how do you linger? Robert Olen Butler, in his book From Where You Dream, calls this real time, the moment-to-moment time that is our normal speed as fiction writers. One way to linger is with dialogue. Repetition and description are also effective in slowing your reader down on the timeline. Sometimes you may want to do more than tell your story in 
real time. Maybe for dramatic effect you need to slow it down, slower than real time. Butler talks about how to slow down from real time to slow motion by splitting up dialogue with passages of description. Here’s an example from Charlotte’s Web in which Fern’s brother, Avery, decides he’s going to try and capture Charlotte.
“I’m going to knock that ‘ol spider into this box,” he said.
Wilbur’s heart almost stopped when he saw what was going on. This might be the end of Charlotte if the boy succeeded in catching her.
“You stop it Avery!” cried Fern.
Fern obviously speaks out immediately when hearing Avery’s comment, she’s angry and wants to stop her brother before he harms Charlotte. But we don’t hear Fern’s response right away. First, we change camera angles to notice what’s going on in Wilbur’s head, taking a break in the dialogue. We pause to consider the consequences of Avery’s actions. Butler likens this effect to the feeling we might have if our car skids on wet pavement. We notice every detail, the beat of our heart and the telephone pole, even though it’s happening very fast. Creating slow motion can be powerful but could lose its power if used too often. Save it for those important moments that need added emphasis.
The opposite effect, fast motion, can be used to speed up movement along the timeline. When talking about fast motion, Butler says, “Sensual, carefully and judiciously used summary can be effective and, indeed, is how you mostly achieve fast motion-fast action-in fiction.” After the writer chooses which scenes to linger in, the remaining challenge is how to get the reader from one scene to another. This is the territory of transition, and within transition, time speeds up. The space between scene markers lengthens. This is what LeGuin called “leaping.” Words like “every day” or “each month” or “days passed” are helpful clues to the reader that time is passing.
Once you have your timeline marked with all the time markers or scenes, you can start jumping around. Stories don’t have to be linear. You can pick up the point of your pencil and hop forward or backward on the timeline, from one marker to another. Back-story gives clues, explanations, or history that is important for understanding the present. It can explain the motivations of characters, just as understanding our own backgrounds explains why we make the choices we do.
It’s important to pay attention to where the best place will be to take your reader backwards on the timeline. When carefully placed, back-story enhances suspense. It does this by leaving the narrative at a moment of climax. By inserting back-story at an intense moment in real time, the reader must wait to find out what happens next. It can also arm your reader with valuable information to create irony. Or instead of leaving the reader hanging, it can give a sense of fulfillment or mastery as the reader receives an important piece of information, just when it’s needed.
It’s important to consider how long the jump back on the timeline lasts. Back-story needs to give the right amount of information at the right time so that the reader doesn’t become overwhelmed. In Steering the Craft, Ursula LeGuin calls a large hunk of unnecessary exposition an “expository lump.” She suggests, when writing a scene, to:
“’compost the information, break it up, spread it out, slip it into conversation
or action-narration, or anywhere you can make it go so it doesn’t feel Lumpy.
Tell it by implication, by passing reference, by hint, by any means you like.
Tell it so that the reader doesn’t realize they are learning anything.” (135)
The momentum of a scene can stall if it keeps the reader in the past too long, giving too much information. The reader is taken out of the present, but the present is still there, held in freeze-frame. It’s hard for the reader to reinvest in the present if he remains in the past too long.
Back-story’s main purpose is to communicate information to the reader, information the character might already know. While one of the functions of back-story is to help the reader understand what’s going on in the present, reveals work differently, leap-frogging forward through time. A reveal is a snapshot of a future scene, given without the knowledge of characters and story that will be gained by the reader when he reads the pages between the reveal and the present. Because of this, instead of answering questions, reveals often cause questions to be asked. This may seem counter-untuitive. After all, a reveal is answering the question that is on most reader’s minds: “what will happen?” When a reveal answers this question, the reader just changes what he asks from “what” to “why” or “how.” When readers are asking questions, they’ll keep reading to find the answers.
A reveal can also increase narrative tension. Once a reader knows what’s going to happen, they’re on point, waiting to see it play out in a real time and find out how the character gets to where he’s ultimately headed. Reveals can also be used to shock the reader, getting their attention. They borrow energy from an exciting, nail-biting scene later in the narrative and give it to readers out of context. It could be a car chase, a boy falling off a cliff, or maybe the scene of a crime.
In addition to getting the reader’s attention, a reveal can give the reader advance information about a character, enabling them to make judgments on present actions in light of future information. It’s a filter your reader will feed the rest of the story through, like a sound track, laid on top of the story.
Speaking of sounds tracks, as I studied time and created timelines for various books, I began to notice patterns and rhythms to the tick marks along the line. I noticed how often time passed between each scene, writing the word “short’ when very little time passed and “long” when more time passed. Charlotte’s Web looks something like this:
Short-long-
short-short-short-long-
short-short-short-long-
short-short-short-
short-short-short-long.
It sounds kind of like Morse Code, and it is the heartbeat of Charlotte’s Web. A heartbeat that seems as regular as the coming and going of the seasons. Looking at the pattern, I noticed that it opens with a prologue. A short and a long. It then moves into two repeating movements with the “short-short-short-long, short-short-short-long.” In the last two lines, the “long” is dropped from the first line, and it becomes a series of six shorts, and then ends with a long. The action speeds up at the end of the book with the fair, and then slows down at the end. The reader is left with the feeling that life continues for Wilbur, far into the future, as he raises generations of Charlotte’s descendants.
Anastasia Krupnik had its own original rhythm:
short-short
long-long
short-short-short
long
short-short-short
Two shorts at the beginning are followed by two longs. When we feel the short-short-short-long pattern, we might expect another short-short-short-long, but get only the short-short-short. It seems unfinished, as if we’re waiting for one more long, and that’s the way I think we’re supposed to feel. We’re supposed to feel like this story continues, that the next chapter is a long one, but it’s missing. We’re supposed to want more. This is, in fact, the first in a series of books about Anastasia.
I’m not saying a reader is aware of the rhythm at a cognitive level, or that the writer does this on purpose, but I can’t help but wonder if this background beat is part of what makes Charlotte’s Web and Anastasia Krupnik such appealing and satisfying stories. I’m also not saying that we can study patterns, and come up with a recipe for how to create rhythm in our own books. I like what Susanne K. Langer says in her book Feeling and Form:
“A work of art is a unit originally, not by synthesis of independent factors. Analysis reveals elements in it, and can go on indefinitely, yielding more and more understanding; but it will never yield a recipe.”
What I suggest is that after we’ve written our story, and teased out the time structure, we can go back and determine the rhythm. If we feel there is something wrong with the structure, perhaps part of the problem lies in a lack of rhythm in the way time passes. The time that passes within each story is the breath. Sometimes the breathing comes quick and labored as the reader takes in details, minute by minute. Other times days pass and not as much detail is given, allowing the reader to rest.
My question to you is, what does your story look like? How does it sound? How does it feel if you map it out on a timeline, or tap it out on a table? How quickly are you flying down the timeline, and are there times when you need to leave the line entirely, to jump forward or backward? I encourage you to take the time to pull the camera back and look at the line that is your story, plotting time to strengthen your novel.
Meredith Davis has found time to sell, read, and write children’s books in Austin, Texas, when she isn’t busy raising her three kids or spending time with her husband. She had the time of her life studying children’s books in Vermont, where she earned her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. She recently partnered with agent Alyssa Eisner Henkin at Trident Media and can’t wait until it’s time to announce her first sale.