Make Retreat Impossible
How does time assist the storyteller?
Pisticci, Italy 2016
Yesterday afternoon, in an attempt to jumpstart myself from a midday lull, I decided to head out for a short walk. New scenery or a brisk stroll usually gives a little spark, especially after a morning of writing. When I’ve been lost in scribbles and sketches, a happy prisoner inside my head, it’s easy to neglect what’s beyond the desk.
For the most part, the walk was salubrious, but I was shocked to be introduced to a rather impolite breeze. It seems that August has somehow given way to November without my awareness or consent.
It’s become a well-worn observation that time is almost imperceptible this year. The days merge. Hours pass. Little changes are hardly noticed. November makes its abrupt entrance. For those in quarantine, can you delineate a clear difference between the first and second week of May? Regardless of where you find yourself, for most people, there’s a sense of ambiguity to the calendar this year, with only a slight mist separating Mondays from Tuesdays, Tuesdays from Wednesdays, weekday and weekend.
Although there’s nothing remotely novel about that observation, the receding of days into a common blur does provide a lesson for writers. There’s a hint about how time is captured inside the mind, about how storytelling orders and delineates events.
Consider how the passage of time is remembered. Rather than an accurate, chronological record, memories arrive in chunks. If you work on a project for one hour, or if you work on the same project for three hours, when you look back at those periods next week, you won’t have three times the memory in the latter example.
Time passes in fragments, in little scraps, by snippets. Without milestones to mark those chunks, the entire stream coalesces, until what’s recalled is obscured. April becomes May; May becomes June. How does this assist the storyteller? To avoid mushy, indistinct writing, each page needs a hurdle—a clear threshold, a new trajectory.
What’s flat, uninspired, and riskless quickly slips into a haze, but if time is revealed in fragments, milestone to milestone, then writers avoid sleepy readers. That remark seems trite and almost superfluous in its obviousness, but too many storytellers dismiss its importance.
Many writers begin from a comfortable position, attempt to tact gracefully around that spot, and conclude by simply restating their agreeable beginning. Nothing new has been covered. Nothing new has been stretched toward or driven against. Time hasn’t passed. The page feels static. Paragraph upon paragraph reflects that fog. Similar to the blurred days of this pandemic year, all the paragraphs converge, and all the readers hibernate.
An alternative is the writer who drives toward the unknown—purposely writing themselves into a corner, targeting a new position, ensuring that another milestone is reached. On every page, these writers cross a river, hobble onto the sand, and burn the boats. Regardless of what’s written, fiction or essays or postcards, the rule remains constant: they make retreat impossible. As a crisp breeze reveals the threshold between summer and fall, writing reveals time with hurdles, doorways, and boundaries.