STORYCRAFT: ON BLOCKING TIME
Or How To Build Your Own Time Machine
Let us speak briefly of time.
The apt writer marks time like a good director blocks actors on the stage.
Good time-blocking clarifies the goings-on and helps enhance the emotional power of the tale. An essential practice even if the audience / reader is unaware of what is happening.
ONE
There are many ways to notate time in fiction.
For some stories the tag approach is sufficient: at a few appropriate places in the narrative the writer drops a temporal tag: “At the start of that summer our hero…” or “The week before the robbery…”
With this technique the writer marks time at an informational level, which is perhaps the easiest and, at a level of art energy, the cheapest way to keep the story’s chronology sensible. Alas, these types of tags, unless done well, also tend to be the least persuasive and easiest for a reader to lose track of.
If you’re going this route I usually recommend 3 temporal tags (minimum). One of anything in fiction, after all, might be an accident — two of anything might be a coincidence — but three of anything becomes almost automatically a pattern, and for most of us who are not writing way-out-shit, patterns are the humble builders of structure.
TWO
Then there’s the externalized or time-space approach when the passage of time is mapped onto the setting or another character. For example: a tale that unfolds across four seasons; or a story that begins at first snowfall and ends at the first buds of spring; or a story that is set in the last year of a secondary character’s life.
THREE
A subtler form of time notation works at the characterological level.