Exercise #5: Story Time vs. Discourse Time
Blake Butler, John Keene, Allegra Hyde, Jesse Ball, Charles Yu, Anthony Doerr, Anna Keesey, Nicholas Baker
Hi all,
Hello and welcome! I hope this letter finds you and yours healthy and safe, in these increasingly challenging times. Because this is first and foremost a newsletter about writing—although a writer described it to me recently as my “pandemic journal,” which I suppose is also true, given the accidental timing of my starting it—I want to say that I hope you’re finding comfort and solace and inspiration in your creative work, and in whatever you’re reading or watching or listening to this month. I wrote last time about the way it seems beauty always creates a want for more beauty; I’ve been thinking since about how so much of my own writing practice stems from an attempt to generate fresh wonder on the page and therefore in myself (and hopefully in readers). The feeling might feel in short supply in the world these days, but no matter what else is happening in my life, my writing and reading have often been reliable sources of wonder for me, sometimes when I’ve needed it most. Hopefully they are for you too.
Since I last wrote, my editor’s notes for my next novel arrived, so for the past few weeks I’ve been revising the manuscript with help from her insightful comments and suggestions (and, of course, her equally insightful criticisms). As I was revising, I remembered that one of the biggest craft challenges I faced while drafting the book was figuring out how I wanted to depict long passages of time: the novel’s story spans a thousand years or so, and it took my trying a number of different approaches to make that much time felt in a satisfying way. This month’s exercise is about one such tactic for making time visible and palpable in fiction, whether you’re narrating an event that lasts a decade or a millennium or a minute. I think it’s a fun problem to play with on the page, and I hope you enjoy giving this exercise a go.
As always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to say so on Twitter! You’re also welcome to pass this prompt on to others, if you’d like, either by forwarding it or sharing it on social media. If do, know that I appreciate it!
Be safe this week, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
Alice Knott by Blake Butler, out July 7 from Riverhead. I’ve been a fan of Blake Butler’s for a long time, and while I’m not quite done reading Alice Knott yet, it’s already probably my favorite novel of his, both in its plot and its prose. Its surprises are best experienced firsthand, but it starts off with a mysterious viral video of an expensive and famous piece of art being destroyed, a set piece opening that’s one of the best first chapters I’ve read in a long time. Butler thanks Brian Evenson as one of his inspirations for this in his acknowledgments, and fans of Evenson will definitely feel right at home with the slippery identities and psychologies on offer here.
“Afterglow” by Allegra Hyde, published in Guernica. I loved this new story by Allegra Hyde, about a woman who begins living on nothing but Gatorade in the aftermath of her husband’s abandonment: “To look at oneself in the mirror, though, blue-tongued as a lizard, eyeballs gone orange, was to see a woman who knew things she didn’t. A woman who was not her. A woman whose husband had not left—or better yet, a woman who had never had a husband at all.” The writing is impeccable, and the story gets ever more surprising and moving as it goes.
"An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" by John Keene, from his collection Counternarratives. (Available online at AGNI.) I started rereading Keen’s collection this week, and when I posted a link to this story online, I noticed a notable revision to it: the 2015 version of Keene's story, in Counternarratives, leaves off the alternate history ending of the 1999 AGNI version: the cut section was titled, simply, "Revolution." (The preceding section, "Theory," was also moved and now sits before the new last section, "Eclipse.") The whole book is memorable and powerful, and I can’t recommend it enough.
“Diary of a Country Mouse” by Jesse Ball, published in The Paris Review. This excellent new Jesse Ball story reads in part like a gentle remake of The Lobster, proceeding in brief diary entries written by a protagonist choosing to undergo a procedure to be turned into a country mouse rather than continue living as a man: "I have always thought of myself as a bit of a stowaway. I have always felt that I was on the brink of discovery, that is, of being discovered, & that when that discovery happened, I would be either killed or put ashore. How lucky that now a third course has appeared."
Exercise #5: Story Time vs. Discourse Time
Communicating the passage of time to the reader is a feat all fiction writers eventually have to accomplish, regardless of genre: events in fiction most commonly occur in linear time, and the cause and effect relationship between past, present, and future is part of what makes character choices meaningful and gives weight to the consequences that follow. Despite this, time is only rarely foregrounded in fiction, most often communicated passingly in transitions, where we take in the crucial information without otherwise pausing.
For instance, in Anthony Doerr’s “The Caretaker” (from The Shell Collector), the first pages moves us quickly through time without much fuss, using nothing more showy than clear introductory clauses. Doerr writes: "For his first thirty-five years… [Joseph lives] in a small, collapsing house in the hills outside Monrovia in Liberia, West Africa”; "In 1989 Liberia descends into a civil war that will last seven years”; "In October of 1994…."; "The next night…"; "In the days to come…"; "After a month…"; "After several minutes…" And so on.
There’s obviously nothing wrong with this approach: it’s the most common way of doing things, which gives it the benefits of invisibility and clarity. (Many a story draft could be improved by imitating Doerr’s tactics.) But what if you wanted to draw attention to time instead, to keep passing time both visible and felt?
Consider Charles Yu’s story “Florence” (published online at Eclectica, and collected in his book Third Class Superhero), set in 1,002,006 A.D. and narrated by one of the last forty-seven human men left in the universe. The narrator lives alone on a small planet, where his job to observe and report on the titular Florence, an aquatic alien lifeform who seems wholly uninterested in our narrator. As the story progresses, the narrator communicates by lightspeed messaging with his boss, his girlfriend Tina, and his Aunt Betty, with every exchange of dialogue in the story taking four years, as the messages move back and forth through time. Here’s the opening of the story, so you can see how this is conveyed to the reader:
A message comes through from the boss.
How is she?
I look over at Florence's vital readings. The machine blips.
I type: Normal. The blips are blipping.
Four years go by.
A message comes through from the boss.
How about radius? Stable? Or getting bigger?
Florence swims in a circular path around the lake.
I check the display.
I type: Radius is stable. 41.08 kilometers.
I hit send. Four years go by.
A message comes through from the boss.
Velocity?
I check the velocimeter. 8.2 km/h, I type.
Four years go by.
Good, says the boss. Good.
Thanks, I say. Four years go by.
Four years go by. This sentence or a variant of it appears 40+ times in Yu’s story, as well as a couple of dramatic variants (more on those later). As such, every single line of dialogue in this story has a cost in elapsed time, something that’s technically always true but rarely noticed. Here, that cost is always present: a character speaks or acts and regardless of whether they say something profound or banal a four-year beat of time unfolds that can never be taken back.
In her essay “Making a Scene” (from The Writer’s Notebook, by Tin House), Anna Keesey discusses the difference between story time and discourse time: story time is the amount of time that passes during the unfolding of the events in the story, while discourse time is the amount of time it takes to relate those events in prose. The two times are mostly unequal, with one notable exception: direct dialogue, which usually takes exactly as much time to read as it would to say aloud. (This is why plays take just as long to read as they do to watch.)
In “Florence,” the repeated sentence “Four years go by” contains (obviously!) four years of story time, but very little discourse time: in Keesey’s essay, this might be denoted as the equation st > dt. If we apply this same formula to the story as a whole, we come up with a similar outcome: it will probably take you about fifteen minutes to read “Florence,” but it covers an immense amount of time, well over 40,000 years.
As I mentioned, variants of Yu’s repetition also appear in “Florence.” For instance, late in the story, Yu writes “Four years, forty years, four hundred years go by,” offering a single sentence where each clause costs the same amount of discourse time but depicts another multiple of story time. Shortly after, he writes: “Four years go by. Florence is circling. It's day. It's night. It's summer. It's winter. It's summer. It's day. It's a storm that lasts eight hundred years. Four thousand years go by.” Again, every sentence here contains a vastly different amount of story time, while continuing to cost more or less the same discourse time, always still st > dt.
Near the end of the story, there’s a moment where Yu decelerates the formulation, writing: “Four minutes go by. Four minutes, four minutes, four moments. Four milliseconds go by.” In the first two sentences here, story time is still greater than discourse time, but less so than above; in the last sentence, the formula finally flips: st < dt. (For an additional well-known example where st < dt, see Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, which is 140 or so pages long, but only covers the amount of time of a single escalator ride.) As is so often the case, much of the power of the repetition in “Florence” culminates not in the repetition itself—Four years go by, four years go by, four years go by—but in the places where Yu breaks or varies the established pattern.
Your exercise this month is to explore these options for communicating the passage of time by artificially constraining them, writing a short piece of fiction in which every sentence covers the exact same amount of story time, regardless of how much discourse time you devote to it. In other words, if you choose one minute as your unit of time, then every sentence in the story should cover a one minute story beat, regardless of whether the sentence is a single word or a thousand: story time remains constant; discourse time changes.
After you’ve written a draft, try revising it by changing these variables. Some options:
Change the unit of time each sentence contains, but still keep it constant across the whole piece. How would your story change if each sentence covered double the time it did in the first draft? What about if it covered only half?
Revise the story, writing the same actions again but this time constraining discourse time instead. Now each sentence can cover as much time as it needs to, but the sentence length becomes fixed: all ten-word sentences or fifty-word sentences or three-clause sentences or page-long sentences.
Use steadily increasing or decreasing story time and/or discourse time to create progressions inside the story: for instance, you might accelerate the amount of time each sentence covers as the story progresses, with the first sentence covering a minute, the second sentence covering two, and on and on. Or you might start with a ten-word sentence, followed by a twelve-worder, followed by fifteen-worder, and so on.
Because the power of repetition is often in difference, do a revision where you once or twice break whatever pattern you’ve established, aiming to find the most dramatic places to put those breaks.
All these choices are being used as constraints here, but thinking explicitly about them in this one story might pay off later in subtler ways as you revise your other fictions. Many a drafted scene might need to be sped up or slowed down in revision, and certainly changing the st ≠ dt equation is one of the most common rewrites we do: we just usually think of it as changing scenes into summary, or vice versa. Hopefully, practicing making these kinds of decisions here in this exercise and its rewrites will help you more easily solve similar problems in the future.
Good luck! See you in July!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in 2021. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.