⚡Day 11. Rewind and fast-forward.
Speeding through time.
This week, we’re focusing on exercises that will help us represent the passage of time in ways that give our stories maximum impact. Previous prompts focused on tight chronology and lingering in an era.
Today, we’re going to zoom through time. Every story has a primary time stamp, but meaning often emerges over time. An event causes us to remember and suddenly make sense of an earlier event; living in one moment, we find ourselves catapulted back to another by a word, a phrase, a sight, a smell—or we might fast-forward, imagining how the present moment, in the future, will become the past. Time traveling in this way can heighten the emotional impact of a piece, as in “Connective Tissue” by Julie Lambert and “When You Measured the World,” by Robert Erle Barham.
PROMPT #11
Map your story.
Today’s prompt uses an existing piece of writing—ideally, a draft of your own, maybe even something you started in response to an earlier prompt. You’re looking for a story that involves more than one specific moment in time.1
On a piece of paper, make a timeline, plotting the movement of time in your current draft.
Here are our maps of “Connective Tissue” and “When You Measured the World”:
How many points can you identify? How does the story move between them? Notice the kinds of words or phrases or transitions you (or another writer) are using to help readers follow your time travel.
Make another pass through the story and notice any elements that feel difficult to place on the timeline. What makes them difficult? Is there something you could do in the writing to make these parts of the story easier to plot on the timeline? Or, do they belong in the story at all?2
Next, look for points on the timeline you might subtract by compressing time or making bigger leaps. How would this change the pacing or impact of the story as a whole?
Finally, think about other points you might add to the timeline. What are they? What would they add to the story? How would you connect them to the rest of the story? How big could your timeline grow, even if the length of your story remained about the same?
Keep drawing and revising. You might end up with several timelines! Then, you might switch to writing/revising your draft. Enjoy time traveling.
Share: Two paragraphs from your draft, one on either side of a jump or transition in time.3
For funsies, you could follow this prompt using a favorite piece of flash nonfiction written by someone else. Again, you’re looking for work that involves more than one specific moment in time.
If you’re using someone else’s story, you might stop at this point.
Unfortunately, comments don’t allow photos, but feel free to share your timeline in our chat.
I don't know what became of you, although I did hear years ago you were somewhere in the Southwest, on your own, child grown, maybe writing, maybe struggling too. But when we met, I was the broken one. Newly divorced, heartbroken, with a daughter to raise, a degree to get, my 20's in the rear-view mirror, my 30's fueled by fear. But that afternoon, moving into my student apartment, I was mostly appalled. The lawn was littered with bodies. Packs of people sprawled in the grass, lounged on a mattress under a tree, walked randomly around holding cups and bottles in a blast of rock n' roll that broke the sound barrier. All I wanted was to slip unnoticed up the stairs and lock the door. I had nothing, was nothing, never made friends anyway. But you intercepted me. You drew me into your star wars diva dream party and asked for my nothing in return. Thank you old friend wherever you are, and may the joy be with you.
(Note to our hard-working editors: maybe it's [impending] old age with its bright past and fading future, but I can't see life as a time line. For me, I think it's always been more like a lake you dive into, go to the bottom, swim around, break through to the top, float around, close your eyes, dive back down and then open your eyes underwater again until you can't stand it anymore and have to surface and breathe.)
Labor Day morning and the New York City streets are almost eerily quiet. I’m on my way to work with cats, and a bit in a rush, so my surroundings seem to blur as I rush down into the subway. The platform is deserted except for an older African American guy playing his heart out on the saxophone – the Beatles song, “And I love her”.
It's so beautiful. And I am suspended in time and space.
And in a millisecond, I feel like I am whooshed through a tunnel of memory so many years long. I’m holding my cat Garbanzo like a baby, and shifting my weight from one foot to another singing this same song as though it was a lullaby for him. “A love like ours, could never die”.
He was a complicated soul, who was so loving with me, but also could bite hard! Yet together in that calm space we were one peaceful being. I loved him so much, and he taught me so many lessons about unconditional love, about being in the moment, about quieting my whole being down so we could meet in that calm space. I’m thanking him and telling him I will always love and remember him.
The sound of the approaching train grabs me to pull me back to the present. Tears blur my vision, but inside I feel a clarity too, feeling the love, and connectedness, and power of that love and connection that will always be there.