In a post on Lit Hub, Jessica Anthony identifies ways to get a grip on fictional time. “Structure is a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter,” Anthony says. “You don’t touch structure; you work it.”
Rather than a scaffold, Anthony views structure as a contradiction of time. “We know how much we can get done in a day according to our clocks. So it can go in story,” she says. “What if we only met Emma Bovary for two days, and not a lifetime?”
While scenes read quickly, the time within your story is suspended as the reader imagines the events and dialogue of your narrative. “Time stops as the reader is imagining, say, thirty minutes of conversation at a wake,” Anthony writes. A writer may take many pages to depict a short courtroom scene or the same number of pages to show an entire life.
As a exercise, Anthony asked her writing students to write a complete short story in one single present moment scene, and then a complete short story over time. “Gesture becomes enormously important this way, as we don’t have the freedom for characters to change in those invisible hours that pass with a narrative signal like ‘Weeks later…’,” Anthony notes. “Choosing how much time will pass in the present moment of a fiction is choosing a structure, but the door stays open. The hand is on the car handle.”
