Writing Process 8: Time and the Novelist

Writing Process 8 Thursday April 9th 2015

Hello again! Thank you for returning to my Newsletter. If this is your first time, welcome.

 My newsletter is an outcome of  focusing on my process to support writers in their own process and to give readers the inside track on how a complex novel may emerge from a single consciousness. 

In my last Newsletter I set out my stall about the galaxeian forward movement of decisions you may make about characters – for instance my decisions that Francine - as she insisted - should move to the centre of my novel Writing at the Maison Bleue.

Alongside your constant and forward movement of inspired and intuitive writing of your novels, whether you think it or not, you are making decisions based on time.

First there is the time you must spend on writing this novel

See my earlier reference in the Newsletter to Dorothea Brande's advice that you should about make time to write creatively.  This regular writing - as little as twenty minutes a day - ensures that the story is in your head even when you are not writing. One thing that might pop occur to you is the nature of time as it as it impacts on all parts of  your novel. 

For instance there  is the year or three you spend on writing it.

All writers have their own creative rhythms. Mine has normally been a yearly cycle. For many years my rhythm involved a self-imposed 30^th November deadline for my completed manuscript.

I remember one of my editors saying, ‘When we get to November I always look forward to your manuscript coming on the mail trolley.’

This sense of annual time has  allowed me to feel some sense of order in the slightly chaotic creative routine I had developed in writing my novels.

I had to build in times of reflection to make decisions about the interior cultural and historical issues in my novels. This is especially important to me as a novelist who often has historical settings in my novels. In this sense time in the abstract becomes even more important.

    That down to earth twentieth century novelist JB Priestley – influenced by contemporary theories of of JMW Dunne  - was fascinated by the fluidity of time and the variable way in which all people experience it. His play Time and the Conways switches backwards and forwards in time, exploring alternative time-futures experienced by a single family. This play has been performed through time and across cultures since he first wrote it.

cnit.

As an aside here:

reading plays is a good way for the novelist to explore notions of structure, pace and character within a tight story arc there in thirty or so pages. Look also at Tennessese Williams' plays for sexual tension, characterisation, and strong forward movement. 

So as you write your daily prose and get on with your daily life and more decisions come to play.

This great soup of prose is building and growing the story space in your brain is now occupied by the creative bulk of the organic part of your novel. Other things seep into this growing creative space as you go to and fro in your day job, in your taking the children to school, in your mowing of the garden, in your organising the linen cupboard, or reading the paper or the latest prizewinning novel.

This is useful time. It may land you with a further decision about the need for further research for an element of the action in your novel: the need to read or experience more sources.

And all the time you are writing: inspiring yourself by checking out and adding to the balloons in your Balloon Game and checking the decisions you are making about your Galaxy of Characters.

And writing on.

You are becoming an imagineer  

- building the muscles of your imagination in that story-space in your brain so that the next time you embark on a new novel-adventure you are swifter, more competent, and more savvy about how to write that next novel.

And now here are some questions to ask yourself to inform your creative and practical decisions about time as you plough on with your novel:

When has your drafting finally set the time-direction of the story?

For me, with Maison Bleue this happened half way through when I went back and added the days of the week to the chapter titles. I thought this would make the movement through the week clearer to my readers.

Over what fictional time does your story take place? A week? A year? A generation?

With Maison Bleue the time-frame for Ruthie and Aurelie acquire and run the retreat was three months in all, with most action distilled into the seven days where the retreaters were at the Maison Bleue.

Also there is a larger time-frame for Francine’s individual narrative which is the spine of the novel which stretches sixty years from 1942 to 2002. These leaping sequences in time are – sometimes called a time-slip. I like time-slip because I think this is how our minds work. (See JB Priestly) It was not always popular with editors although readers always seemed to like it.

How does age, and the aging of your characters your influence decisions about the narrative, their language, their interaction and their world-view? 

The ages of my characters in the Maison Bleue range from Joe (19), Abby and Felix (21 & 23), Tom (47), Kit (49) Mariella (41) Ruthie (42) Aurelie (54) Serge (57) and the delicious Francine who is in her eighties.

I knew at the start that I didn’t want my characters to be of similar ages. But the only one whose age I knew when I started drafting was Ruthie (whom I originally thought would be at the centre of the novel). The rest grew out of some inner logic in the writing – walking on stage when it seemed inevitable.

Your answers to these questions, as you refer them to your own creative process, will be unique to you and your novel.  You might feel you want to create further questions. 

The point is that by asking yourself such structural questions during appropriated stages in your writing process you will underpin the logic of your narrative, sustain the creative energy in your process and enhance your novel's dynamic appeal to your readers..

Links

JB Priestley

JMW Dunne

Writing at the Maison Bleue