Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-22-the-lens-of-time

 

Key Points: Time! Setting? Day versus night? The when of the character? Anticipation and flashbacks, expectations and disappointments. Magnified moments. What is the character noticing? Order or sequence of time. Time as an extension of setting. Associations with time of day. Personal physical cycles! Conveying passage of time. Children, other changes. Sensory details, obligations. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 22]

 

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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Season 20, Episode 22]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] The Lens of Time.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And this is Dr. Who.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we've been talking about these different lenses that you can look at a story through. We're looking at the idea of where and when, and time is one of the big lenses. You don't have to be working on a historical piece of fiction to be thinking about time. All stories move through time, even if it's only for a moment. So we're going to be talking about time as your setting. The differences between a story that's set during the day versus at night, or even a scene or a moment. We're going to be talking about how you can use time to your advantage. Not so much in a structural way, but more in that sense of controlling the reader's experience of the story and the character and the setting.

[Erin] We are going to be doing that.

[Dan] Love it.

[Erin] And we're starting now.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When you are sitting down to think about a story, I know, Erin, that you often start with a voice and that you are very much thinking about the character. How much is the character... At that stage, are you thinking about the when of the character?

[Erin] I think a lot... So. I saw a very interesting tweet a long time ago that said that one of the ways you can upgrade your craft is to move time in the story. To actually use anticipation and flashbacks… Not necessarily, like, an entire flashback, but just what is your character coming from? What are they looking back to? What are they looking forward to? And, like, playing with that in the story. That in truth, and in our own lives, we rarely just move forward in time. We're often thinking about, like, our expectations, which is our vision of the future, and our disappointments, which is our reckoning with the past. And so, a lot of times, I really think about how my characters are reckoning with the time they are in in their own times. And, like, also the time that the world around them is in. Are they in sync? Like, are they moving forward in a world that's moving forward with them? Do they want to hold back in a world that they're like they love tradition, but the world wants progress? And then, looking at that as a source of tension in the story, between the way that they're dealing with time and the way the story and the world is.

[Mary Robinette] I love this idea of looking at where they are in time and using that anticipation as a source of tension. That… You're making me think of something that I just did a brief reread of which is in Dune, which is the fight between Paul Atriedes and Jamis, when he has to, like, "Hello! No, here I am! The Chosen One." And what's interesting in that scene is the way Frank Herbert plays with time. It's happening at a particular point in Paul's life and… Where he's a young man, he's approaching a point where he is going to kill for the first time. That is a threshold, that is a time threshold. That's going to be a marker. Before he killed, and after he killed. That's how his world is going to divide. But the other thing that he does in that is that he does these very small flashbacks to before he is in this thing, where he's thinking about my training taught me this. And all of that is setting up this anticipation of the ways the scene can go wrong, the ways that it can potentially go right, but mostly the ways it can go wrong. It's looking at the… That he's been trained in this one particular way, to go very slow against the shield, and that he keeps making the same mistake over and over again because of his training. And so you've got this contrast of this… His knowledge… His history compared with the future that he's aiming for and this anticipation of all the possible paths for which it can go wrong, which is, I think, one of the great things that you can play with with time, is the… Is letting the reader know, oh, there's more than one path for this. There's more than one path, there's more than one way that this can go wrong. You don't know which of those possible futures you're going to land in.

 

[Dan] Yeah. One of the other things going on in that scene is… That also plays with time is what my seventh grade English teacher always used to call a magnified moment. Where it's really an exchange of blows that takes probably ultimately maybe 30 seconds. I think in the movie, it was drawn out to 40 or 45 seconds. But it's still very short. Whereas the actual excerpt is two or three pages worth of material. Because every single second, every single step, every single move of the blade is given this momentous weight. And so it is expanding things out and magnifying every little moment that takes place into this huge, kind of glorious, thing.

[Erin] I love that… I was thinking about, like, fight scenes and love scenes are two of the ones in which the time in which it's taking on the page and the time it was probably taking in the life of the characters are so different. I'm curious, like, how like… Like, how do you make that moment… Like, how do you make it slow down and not fade as it feels momentous? But not slow down so much that people are, like, wow, I've been on three chapters of the same, like, sword cut, and, like, I wish they would do it already…

[Laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] is it just, like, let… Like, how do you, like, actually make time slow and speed within something?

[Mary Robinette] I think that there's two pieces that you're playing with. One is the character's awareness of time, and the other is the actual amount of time that it takes the reader to experience it. So, one of the things that happens in the example that we were just using is 2 to 3 pages takes several minutes to read. And… Unless they are listening to some [garbled] to speed.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is that reader experience of it will slow it down. Sometimes when something is slow down in ways you don't want it to be… Fight scenes that are slow in ways that are not helping the story… It is because you're taking too long to get us through it. Likewise, you can speed things up by compressing it so that the reader's actual experience of reading it is shorter. Like, physically shorter. But then there's also what the character is noticing. Sometimes you can create a sense of, oh, this took forever, by lingering on the character's experience, feeling all of the things that they feel. The kinds of things that I've been thinking about lately are what they're noticing, where they feel it in their body. It's not that you have to hit all of these beats, but that each time, you hit one of those, you are having the character live that moment again. So if I have my character picking up a sword, and the first thing that happens is that we describe what the sword looks like, and then the next thing is the character experiences the physicality of picking it up. The weight of it, the heft, the balance. We've now experienced that sword twice. If we think about, this was the sword my father gave me, that's a third time that we're experiencing it. If we think… If we cut through the air, if we try some simple bl… Strikes with it, that's a fourth time that we're experiencing it. But all of those are things that probably happen almost immediately for the character. So, those are ways to slow it down, but also to be conscious that sometimes you don't want to slow it down, and you want to just pick one of those, the one that is most distinct to the character, the one that is most demonstrative of this specific moment in time.

 

[Erin] I think that's interesting, because that's making me think about ordering a lot. Which, like, ordering is a function of time… Or whatever. Sure, I'm going to say it is. Ordering is a function of time because I said so.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I think it is.

[Erin] Yeah. But I'm thinking, like, let's say that the character ends by slicing somebody in half. I don't know if this is what happens, but… This is what happens. Then I'm wondering, that, if it's like, if you pick up the sword, sliced the person in half, then notice the weight of it, then think about that it's the fact that it's the sword that your father gave you, it's a completely different emotional experience…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Than if you do all of that before you hit. So, thinking about, like, what order things happen in is really interesting. I also just really love that there are certain things you can do in prose that are difficult to do in other forms. Which is that… Like, I always think people in the world of my character probably find them very annoying because every time they say a line of dialogue, they then think for, like, a long period.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Half a paragraph of deep thought. Return line. Which is, like, an interesting… And we can talk at some other time about dialogue and how not to lose the reader when you, like, have long periods of, like, epic thought in between dialogue. But in real life, that would be quite irritating, unless you think very quickly. But in a story, the reader does want to know what's going on in the character's mind. And so they're willing to, like, pause with you for a moment. Because what they're gaining in that moment of time as a reader is worth the pause in the reality timeline of the story itself.

[Mary Robinette] I think, on that, why don't we pause for a moment?

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I am really enjoying about this conversation is that we're talking about using time in so many different ways. We're talking about the sequencing of a story and how that can change… Just when a character has a reaction. We're talking about using time as a way of… As an extension of setting. And I'd love to actually dig into that part of it just a little more, the idea of time as an extension of setting. I think I've talked about this more on a previous episode, but one of my favorite scenes that taught me so much was from Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey where we get a character going into a room and describing it… First, her experience of it, her interactions with it, when she arrives in the middle of the night and it is fulfilling all of her Gothic fantasy dreams. And then, the next morning, when she gets up, and discovers that the terrifying scratching sound is actually a rosebush that's beautiful outside the window. And that the secret locked cabinet that had a role of enciphered paper in it is actually not actually locked. It was open, she had accidentally locked it, and the enciphered paper is actually a literal laundry list. She just couldn't read it because it was dark. But the… How the literal time can cause the character to experience a place and the reader to experience a place in a different way, which gives you essentially two settings for the price of one.

[Erin] Absolutely. Because we associate certain times of day, I think, with certain things. Like, night and danger often go together. Which is interesting, too, because if you with… If there's a character who's like, not feeling steady in their bones, until the sun goes down, then that's an interesting… That's something different, and what does that mean about the character? What does that say about them? But I often think about, like, I experience my own body differently walking around based a little bit on time of day.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? It's like I am more… Because it feels like you don't have the 360 view in the same way at night. And so I am more conscious of who's around me in the distance. And those are all thoughts that I'm having, and that a character can be having as a way… So then what do they notice? Because we all… The dangers that we view are reflections of our own mentality. And so, the dangers that you view in the night are going to be different than the dangers I view in the night. And so thinking about that, then, that's a great opportunity to maybe get to what are your character's fears? Or what is your character's fearlessness? Where do they feel comfortable? When do they not? When do they feel ill-at-ease? And I think all of those are, like, great moments, I think especially… I think that's especially great when you're trying to get something done clockwise. Like, I need to have the character go to the grocery store…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because it's like, really important later on that they've been there. But it's not interesting at all, so, like… But, if it's all of a sudden, they're going and, it's, like, they've got to go in the middle of the night… Or they need to go out in the day, but they hate their appearance. Then, how does that time actually make something mundane more interesting so that you can hide the plot work that you're doing that will then become more interesting later.

 

[Dan] Yeah. And I think a lot of kind of personal physical cycles can go into this as well. Healthwise is what I'm thinking of, since developing depression and on the particular meds that I'm on right now, I am so much better in the mornings and in the afternoons than I am in the evening. And by the time we get to dinner time, there's just not much of me left. And so I will experience the world and people will experience me in very different ways based on what time of day it is as well.

 

[Mary Robinette] It is interesting how much we are shaped by time. And yet it is also one of those things that I think is hard to convey to readers. Like, the passage of time. The way in which someone is different in the morning then in the evening. One of the questions that I'll hear people ask is, like, how do I let people know that time has passed? If…

[Dan] Yeah. I asked Fonda Lee this question a while ago, because I think she does such a brilliant job of it in the Greenbones saga. With the first book takes about a year, the second about five years, and the third book covers 20, 25 years of time. And how do you convey that so well? One of the little tricks she pointed out was that she made sure to always talk about the children as soon as possible after a time jump, because if the kid that was toddling around and barely verbal last time is suddenly doing his school homework, well, then you know that a certain amount of time has passed. And it became a really interesting shorthand for me to go back and look through the books and go, oh, yeah. She does do that every time there's a time jump.

[Laughter]

[Dan] She starts talking about the kids early on. Because they will change more than the adults will, and so it makes it more obvious that time has gone by.

[Mary Robinette] I think that actually interestingly ties back into what we were talking about for where… How much can you change a place and still have it be recognizable. And, like, how much can you change a time… When you're changing time, what are the pieces? If you don't have the option to have children, if it is just moving day to night, what are the pieces that change, and those are the things that you flag. Like, kids change a lot, but buildings don't change that much. If you're going day to night, the light through the window changes a lot even if nothing else in the room does.

[Dan] Yeah. The temperature could change, the sounds that your hearing outside, whether there's suddenly crickets or something else, that you could… There's a lot of sensory details that you can mention that will immediately clue you in to the passage of time.

[Erin] I also think obligations change over time. Like, from day to night, if you're in a sort of traditional, like, work during the day is the, like… One of the reasons a lot of times writers write late at night and early in the morning is because those are times that people feel that the obligations of life had yet to like come tug on them. And so it's, like, is it quiet in some ways, not just the quiet of the actual room, but the quiet of, like, no one demanding things from you and nobody is needing things from you in this moment.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but… Interestingly, that has been one of the things that has been disruptive for me at this… And I've recognized the symptoms before I say it… That's one of the things that's been disruptive for me about teaching my cat to talk…

[Laughter]

[Erin] There are many, but that's…

[Mary Robinette] Is that her diurnal cycle is not the same as a human's. So she sleeps during the middle of the day, and then, at night, when I am starting to wind down, when, normally, before this, I would have been able to have quiet, because the rest of the world has quieted, that's when she's like, let's play! Let's have zoomies together! Let's use this button board thing and let me mash on it and talk to you. So I have… Like, I'm finding that now I'm starting to write during the middle of the day, which has never been a writing time for me. Because then those obligations, which is this, are quiet.

[Dan] I need to write when my cat shuts up.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God. I love her so much, but choices were made.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] What I love about that is, like, you're not going to get your cat to not be dire… Like, you can have some stern talks, but I don't think it's going to work. And so, also thinking about, like, what are the things… Like, children's growth, like a school day, like, what are the things that keep… That are unchangeable by your character, no matter what they do in the world?

[Mary Robinette] The inevitabilities.

[Erin] These are the inevitabilities of time. At the beginning of the day, they'll have to do this. At the end of the day, they'll have to do that. I was reading Babel…

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Erin] By R. F. Kuang and it's all about school. Like, it's a schoolbook, for at least the portion then I'm in. And so there's a lot about the school year, and, like, the passage of time in a school year, which the characters are going through so much internally, but there's still, like, they have to hit the external, go to this class, be in this place, do this thing by this time. And, I think, we sometimes forget or ignore or get used to the strictures of time in our lives. But maybe we should not do that for our character's lives, and think about how we can use that as an opportunity for tension or fun.

[Mary Robinette] That is a fantastic example of great time passage and using time as setting and time to manipulate character. Speaking of time, it is time for us to give you some homework.

 

[Mary Robinette] And it's a really simple one this time. It's similar to the one that we gave you at the beginning of this, looking at the lens of when and where. And this is just I want you to change the time at which a scene takes place. If you've got a scene that's set during the day, what happens when you move it to the night? What changes? If it's set in the spring, what happens if you move it to the fall? You don't have to make all of the changes, but, what happens if you change the time in which that scene takes place?

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.