Here is one way to learn about story: listen to the people who are good at telling them. What do they linger on and what do they skip over? Where do they draw things out and where do they speed up? How do you know when they’re getting to the really good part? How do they shape time?
We all have these people in our lives: the family members who hold forth at meals, the friends who magnetize other people to them at parties, the teachers, the co-workers, the coaches that make us lean in a little closer. This one time… Even a story we’ve heard many times before can still be compelling to listen to; there remains the thrill of the performance.
My dad wasn’t a writer, but he loved to tell stories and he had an innate understanding of how to shape narrative. Here’s one of my favorites: when he was a kid my dad found an abandoned baby buzzard, fallen from its nest, and raised it into adulthood. My dad was a military kid. During this period of his childhood, the rest of his family was overseas and he had been sent to live with an elderly aunt in the D.C. suburbs. After the baby buzzard grew up it left one day to rejoin nature—but not completely. Sometimes my dad would get off at his bus stop and find the buzzard waiting for him. The buzzard would then follow him home—”walk him home,” as my dad put it—and then it would take off again. But my dad always knew that the buzzard was out there, keeping an eye on him. This remains one of the most memorable stories I’ve ever heard about loneliness.
Lately I’ve been talking about time so much in my fiction workshops. I’ve been talking about the relationship between time and meaning, how a story that covers two years means something fundamentally different than a story that covers a single day. Whenever we change the time we change the story; in this sense time is every bit as much a philosophical concern as it is a technical one.
Then there’s the question of how the story’s timeline is represented. Time is elastic. We can compress time (see Nabokov’s “picnic, lightning” for a radical compression of time: a death and an aftermath all distilled into two words and a comma!) and we can stretch it out, which is one way to create emphasis. To spend time on something in a story is to say this matters. Again, all you have to do is listen to people who are good at telling stories to internalize these principles.
Then there’s the question of how the character experiences time. Do the hours pass in a blur, or does every day feel like a year? Do they wish time would slow down or speed up? Do they find themselves lost in the wilds of imagined time? Do they find themselves dislocated from clock time? Is time stable, or does it become distorted, with timelines that fracture and multiply? I always got the feeling that, for my dad, those months in D.C. passed very slowly, with a lot of time spent wandering around in his own imagination. And then, when that abandoned baby buzzard appeared, time started moving at a different pace. Something changed.
A favorite passage to look at when I’m talking about time is the opening from The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck:
“The Lord gave, and the Lord took away, her grandmother said to her at the edge of the grave, but that wasn’t right because the Lord had taken away much more than had been there to start with, and everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom of the pit, waiting to be covered up. Three handfuls of dirt, and the little girl running off to school with her satchel on her back now lay there in the ground, her satchel bouncing up and down as she runs ever farther; three handfuls of dirt, and the ten-year-old playing the piano with pale fingers lay there; three handfuls, and the adolescent girl whose bright coppery hair men turn to stare at as she passes was interred; three handfuls tossed down into the grave, and now even the grown woman who would come to her aid when she herself had begun to move slowly, taking some task out of her hands with the words: oh, Mother— she too was slowly being suffocated by the dirt falling into her mouth. Beneath three handfuls of dirt, an old woman lay there in the grave: a woman who herself had begun to move slowly, one to whom another young woman, or a son, at times might have said: oh, Mother—now she too was waiting to have dirt thrown on top of her until eventually the grave would be full again, in fact even a bit fuller than full, since after all the mound of earth on a grave is always round on top because of the body underneath, even if the body lies far below the surface where no one can see. The body of an infant who has died unexpectedly produces hardly any roundness at all. But really the mound ought to be as huge as the Alps, she thinks, even though she’s never seen the Alps with her own eyes.”
There is careful attention paid to both clock time and time as it exists in the imagination, in the body. The repetition of “three handfuls of dirt” keeps linear time moving forward; each time more handfuls of dirt are put down we know the burial is progressing. Meanwhile, in the mother’s imagination, the dead child is resurrected. She gets to run off to school, to grow up. Also alive in the imagination: the version of the mother who grows old in the company of her daughter, the version of herself who can turn to a “grown woman who would come to her aid when she herself had begun to move slowly, taking some task out of her hands with the words: oh, Mother.” The passage unravels a literal death and burial, and also the dual deaths of the futures the mother had imagined for her daughter and for her own self.
The clock, it can seem so fixed, like it can only go in one direction: forward. How can the imagination have the power to pause the clock, to warp it, to reverse it, to shape it? And yet the imagination does.
The clock is everything in boxing. In sparring and in fights rounds are timed to two or three minutes. A bell or buzzer sounds when the round begins and again when there’s thirty seconds left and again when the round ends (In an actual fight, an official marks the last ten seconds vs. the last thirty). At a fight, there’s a bout sheet and we spend so much time tracking the clock. You’re twelve bouts out and then seven and then three and then one. In the fight, if you get an eight count the ref stands in front of you and counts to eight. Which may or may not take exactly eight seconds, depending on how slowly or quickly they’re counting.
In my last fight, the ref paused us in the first round because my opponent’s shoelace had come untied. The clock (literally!) stopped. I went to a neutral corner, so my opponent could go to her corner and have her coach tie her laces. I had not been expecting the break and it was like a little oasis of time opened up. Probably the pause wasn’t more than twenty seconds but it felt so much longer. I think I could write an entire short story set during that unexpected wedge of time during which my opponent was getting her shoelaces time.
Time as it exists in the imagination is, for me, just as forceful. I have to make a point to not get lost in the imagined future, the anxious what ifs. Or to make sure the future I am putting into motion through the imagination is grounding, a source of strength (i.e. visualization). Equally alluring is past imagined, tracking back through all those sparring rounds and picturing what would have changed if I hadn’t slowed down in the last thirty seconds. If I had moved my feet a little faster. Or if I hadn’t narrowly missed that punch.
My coach has officially put my name in for a fight in May, which means I have around nine weeks to prepare. I don’t ever really take lots of time off from training, but there’s definitely a gear-shift when you’re a few months out from a fight. Soon I’ll start sparring a lot more, traveling to other gyms. I’ve already gone back to interval runs and sprinting, which really helped me get ready in October. The gear-shift is also emotional, imaginative. The feel of time changes. The days get longer and the weeks get faster. Practice feels a little more high-stakes. The shadow of a hard sparring day looms a little larger. I know I don’t have an infinite amount of rounds before practice ends and I’m in there for real-real. I feel the pressure of the clock.
That’s the question I always come back to in stories, when thinking about time of character. What is time doing to this person? What has it already done? What kind of temporal pressure are they under and how has this pressure been shaping body and mind?
The closer a fight gets the more and more space it takes up in my imagination. It’s like a gradual possession. It reminds me of being so deep in a project that the clock melts and it’s just me and the story I’m trying to make.
-
Speaking of fiction workshops! I’m excited to be teaching two classes on character, starting later this month, with beloved local indie Kinderhook Books. March 29th & April 5th, 1-3 PM. If you are looking for some new ways to think about writing character this could be for you!
I’m excited to have a new short story, “Ghost Horses,” in The Sewanee Review (you can read the whole thing online). And it was an honor to review Agustina Bazterrica’s new novel, The Unworthy, for the NYTRB. This book is a wild ride and I loved it.
So you're the female Hemingway??