The Art of Time in Your Book: Working More Consciously with Flashbacks, Backstory, and Pacing

I read The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silbers many years ago, when I briefly stalled out with the then novel-in-progress. Normally, I consider time and its shape in a story at the revision stage, but I've learned it doesn't hurt to have it in mind as the chapters are initially drafted. I found this book very useful for memoir as well--anything, actually, that attempts to tell a story along a certain timeline, moving backwards and even forwards, trying to keep the reader oriented.

Some writers find that better shape and smoother flow via plot work. Raising the stakes. Finding character motive. I use these tricks too. But there's also a real use to getting concrete about your timeline--especially if you feel you are drowning in pages.

My first timeline was inspired by Silbers' book because she talks a lot about the kinds of time a writer uses and the effects of each kind. Is it a section using classic time, chronological? Or a more fluid time, where flashbacks (or backstory) play a big role? And how are the narrative transitions between these kinds of time? Are they smooth and easy for a reader to follow?

I went through the draft and listed each scene (I call a scene or "island" any time there is a change from one place to another or one time period to a new time). Next to the scene I wrote its location. Then I wrote the approximate date it happened.

If a section was summary instead of scene (it happened over a week or a month or a day), I wrote the span of time and span of locations. Immediately this reminded me of why summary is less concrete for the reader than scene!

Once I had the chart roughed out, I looked at the list of locations first. They varied from "airport office" to "farmhouse kitchen" to upstairs studio" to "truck." I took a few minutes to refine these locations, make them as specific as possible.

Then I looked at the time. I goggled a calendar for the year of my story and chose a starting date. October 26 that year fell on a Saturday. I added specific dates and days to each scene, noting how much time elapsed between them.

If a chapter included flashbacks into the past, I noted those dates and locations too.

As I learned in Silbers' book, readers track time but also want to know where we are in space (location) because the image granted by the place fuels emotional resonance.

The whole chart took me about two focused hours. I ended up with three handwritten pages.

It's not that a writer has to be rigid with this. You don't need to begin each chapter with date and hour. Impressionist writers like Virginia Woolf play with time, making it less relevant, and you can too--as long as your reader can follow your story. Somewhere, there has to be a time marker, even if it's just a mention of how the morning sky is overcast and pearlescent, Your job is still to keep your reader reading, right?

Once the chart is done, I can study the sequencing. On my first attempt, I easily saw how askew this was in my draft. Yes, I had time markers but they were not "tracking" well. A scene might start in the morning, then suddenly it would be late evening for no reason except my inattention.

I saw that time of day and year could be much more consciously used in each scene. If I chose to have something happen in the dark, it had a certain emotional meaning for the reader, compared to broad daylight. So I began playing with this--something a fiction writer can do!--and adjusted it to make more impact. Some scenes I put at a different time of day, but mostly I just began to sequence them better, so a reader could track the days without any effort.

The Pros and Cons of Summarized Time
As said above, summarized time is distant for a reader, emotionally. Summarized time is when you write something like "Over the next ten months, he grew to be the size of an alligator." We don't see this growth day to day, so the process is less real to us than the end product.

If you need to skate through some uneventful spots, summarized time is fine. But if you use it a lot, your book will begin to read like a list of events and changes rather than an experience of those changes.

I found myself cheating--I would be writing along and get tired of the endless details of scene. So I would slip into summary. Skip an afternoon, a couple of days, even several months. My chart revealed this all too plainly. And I saw where my boredom as a writer had deprived my story of emotion. So, thanks to the chart, I could find the spots where I needed to go back in and expand. Stop taking the shortcut of summarized time.

It also made me aware of how much total time my story covered. When did it begin, when did it end? Was that much time essential? Could I use flashbacks instead, to weave in what happened before, rather than having such an endless stretch of time?

Total Time--What's Most Effective for Your Story?
Memoirists run into this question all the time. When does my story begin? I'm writing about my life, or part of it. Do I need to put in that much about childhood? When is the story really over--since I'm still living it?

Memoir is not autobiography, so memoirists need to choose a snapshot from their lives to include in their books, then flash back to the past to bring in small bits that are needed for context. Why a grown man trembles in church? Flash back to his abuse as a choir boy. Why a family lives far away from relatives? Flash back to a huge falling out ten years before. You don't need to start with the abuse scene or the fight--the passage of time between then and now is not part of your snapshot. Using flashbacks is a great way to handle total time, so it's more manageable for the reader.

In fiction, same rule applies. The characters have a past too. But choose the start of your book's total time in the current dilemma, not in the history that caused it.

Depth versus Breadth
I looked at my total time and saw I'd added on too much. I needed to figure out where I could employ flashbacks instead of including past events as scenes.

As a reader, I am happiest with books that do not span centuries. Occasionally, I enjoy an epic. But mostly I like depth rather than breadth in a timeline, personally. I like to go deeper into specific meaningful events rather than have lots of them without meaning.

In my own books, I strive for short total timelines, if possible. My chart allowed me to see where I could condense each of the three acts in my draft. My end result:

Act 1--October 26 through November 8
Act 2--December 15 through February 15
Act 3--February 28 through March 3

Acts 1 and 3 are very condensed. This is where the big crises happen. Act 2 is longer, slower, and goes deeper in meaning. I may end up condensing Act 2 even more, but that's where it stands now, since my chart-making.

I also have some gaps to deal with: November 8 through December 15, and February 15 through February 28. These are where I can use summarized time. Not much happens in the story there. These gaps aren't long; they just need to be justified.

Looking at Location and Emotional Meaning
My timeline spanned about four months, which is a good period for a novel in my genre.

But my locations were all over the place! There were way more locations than I could give meaning to. I needed to also condense my location choices and make them each have meaning.

I began a new column on my chart: meaning of locations. The farmhouse kitchen was first. I scanned the scenes there and saw that most of them contained revelation of some sort--a big fight, a meal where some secret was told, a reconciliation. I began looking for scenes that weren't in the farmhouse kitchen, but could be, if I wanted to tie this meaning to this location. I found a few and easily moved them there.

Then I went to the next location--the artist's studio. Again, looking at the scenes there, a pattern emerged. Searching the other scenes allowed me to move a couple and condense and focus the location's meaning.

This was quite fun, and easy to do.

Memoirists and nonfiction writers can use this same technique, but just imagine instead of location, they are using a camera lens. Within a real-life location, there are a thousand views. Choose the view that has the most meaning.

For instance, in a bedroom, what object, view, or setting detail evokes the meaning you're after for that scene? Same with a classroom or corporate boardroom. You are not able to change the location of a true event, but you can change the camera angle or view of that location. Use this.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise
1. Get out several sheets of graph paper or open a spreadsheet on your computer, like Excel.
2. Create three columns.
3. In the first column, list the dates of each "island" or scene in your book so far. List them in the order they appear in the chapters. If a section is summarized, write the span of time.
4. In the second column, list all the locations used, for each scene, also in the order they appear. Be as specific as possible.
5. In the third column, write the emotional meaning of the location and time/day.
6. Consider the results. Where can you trim? Where must you expand, so that the reader can easily track time and location in your story?