People often talk about the setting of a story as a character. Daphne du Maurier’s gothic ‘Rebecca’ is a classic example of a place—in this case a house called Manderley—at the center of the story. The famous opening line sets the novel in motion…
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
I think that TIME can also be a narrative driver. There’s the obvious ticking timer on a bomb or the gambit of rescuers racing to arrive before a cave fills with water or the oxygen in a tank runs out. But there are many, more subtle, ways that time can power a story by framing it between two big incidents. In a mystery this is often the crime and the solution. It can take hours, days, weeks, or years, but TIME structures the story that takes the reader from mystery to resolution.
All sorts of stories rest on the bed of a particular amount of time from the length of a journey and the duration of a season to the moments that transition a character from child to adult, and the first day of school to graduation.
I’ve been exploring compressed periods of time. One of my short mysteries about ART & LOVE, starts with a jury summons and the story ends with the conclusion of the trial. It’s a relatively short time frame. My most recent completed draft also takes place during an intense and limited number of calendar days. When I hit page 220 in the first draft, I realized that the protagonist’s story began eight days before. It takes a good deal longer than eight days to write 220 pages—even at my fastest writing pace. The story was completed with nine more days for the characters and more than 100 more pages for me. I typed THE END on page 342.
Time, as a character, knits the dramatis personae to each other in a shared journey. Unless it’s a time-traveling science fiction story and then … anything goes!
