By Cara Chamberlain
Writers play with time, moving forward from word to sentence to paragraph. Pages fill, and, hopefully, the end puts a stamp of closure on your effort. This linear motion turns ten pages into twenty years of a character’s life. One hundred pages speed from birth to death. Five hundred whip you along an inconceivable span—Nahguib Mahfouz wrote twelve generations into his tour de force The Harafish.
Opposing the horizontal flow is a vertical axis. Hundreds of pages meander back and forth as a complex flashback “actually” occupies one fictional minute. In poetry, rhyme arrests us. Or repetition stalls us. Sometimes, symbolism lets an image, like a magnet, spin in place, accreting meaning and weight. Even grammar swirls us into eddies (think of the recursive sentence, “This is the cat that ate the mouse that lives in the house that Jack built”). A sonnet is a fourteen-line jewelry box of unchanging rhythms, rhymes, and glittering imagery. A novel is a larger sort of box, a container truck.
Any word you write—“ghost,” say, or “father”—comes loaded with sediments from Old English, the King James Bible, horror films. You become historian, magician, archivist as you push your load of connotations into the future. Between stasis and linear motion, you may, if you’re lucky, find language pushing you into something language no longer contains. Standing free on the shore, you stop the flow of time and send it careening again.
If all is going well, you write in an eternal present. When the inspiration peters out, you look up and four hours have flown. This temporal magic happens when you’re lucky, of course, but it can never happen if you don’t practice. It’s worth every ache and every setback.
Cara Chamberlain is a writer
and instructor for Big Sky Writing Workshops