Revising, I need to go back to some fundamentals, like a theory of time and story. Thousands of small decisions about the placement of information may produce coherency and emotional involvement or lose them. I may have to rework with a blowtorch the deeper structure of the plot. I may even add a narrator. How I handle time through backstory, memory, and foreshadowing will make or break the story. The path is of the reader’s attention. Is that path linear? I think not. For me the great challenge is to provide information, not as I discover it, but as it serves to bond the reader to the character and by proxy, to me. There are practical reasons, theoretical background, and some useful metaphors.
Practical considerations come first. I am learning how to handle backstory. James Scott Bell in the article Exposition and Background (Writer’s Digest 2018) says that…
“[backstory] can slow the pace, sort of like a Mastadon trying to escape a caveman by way of the tar pits.”
Backstory, says Hallie Ephron, should be layered into dialogue, action, fictional documents, and flashbacks. The effect is to keep it moving. Finding the link between pace and relevance is quite a puzzle. And the writer won’t know what backstory is relevant, says Steven James, until the first draft is finished. Maybe a theory of relevance in fiction is a theory of mind. Or is it a theory of culture? Finding the link between pace and relevance is quite a puzzle.
Pace is about time. How does one know if a pace helps or hinders the emotional bond or if the bond established through other means sets the pace? Reading, there must be linkages among the neurolinguistic speed of processing language and emotion and the cultural conventions for pacing a story associated with genre and the literary canon. This suggests that the readers are similar enough to one another to have responses that we can anticipate and address through craft.
The Sense of an Ending was about time in fiction and a theory of relevance. I read Frank Kermode in the 1970s and his writings must have absorbed me for some time. I remember seeing my marked-up textbook. The margins had visual symbols, notes, and underlines throughout. Kermode had important answers for the why and wherefore of fiction. It needs to humanize time and Kermode suggests the work is done by clocks without which time and life itself would be maddeningly disorganized. But more than that, narrative time speaks to our deeply held beliefs about meaning.
The clock’s ‘tick-tock’ I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organisation which humanises time by giving it a form; and the interval between ‘tock’ and ‘tick’ represents purely successive, disorganised time of the sort we need to humanise. (The Sense of an Ending, 1967, p. 45).
The sense of an ending is beautifully presented by Andrew Stanton,
Pixar's WALL-E, in his TED Talk in The Clues to a Great Story (2012).
Stanton quotes William Archer: "Drama is anticipation mingled with
uncertainty."
Clocks have entered the grid and clocks need to be humanized. Time without story would be mechanistically repressive, deterministic, event following event like a physical chain to the gallows, the scientific method without quantum mechanics. The laws of story, with some degree of likeness to the laws of nature, let us travel from beginning to end like a laser through nested shells of electrons. Organizing experience between the tick and the tock might be as nonlinear as a network.
Music is also about tempo, and maybe time in story is about more conventional relationships. The first notes of the symphony set so many aspects of the music: the mode of major or minor, the time signature, the tempo, the degree of discord. Conventions are reinforced and adapted. The art is believing we will know the final coda because it already exists and we are dancing towards it. The tonic will sound right. We decide to listen because we hear music in the distance and all the signs are there. These are bells of empathy ringing in the air.
Usually I am just a writer click-clicking through the text with more than the typical amount of deleting and mousing to revise at the micro level. My senses are strangely engaged as if I were in the dark, feeling my way through an unfamiliar space. I experience the text almost too slowly and microscopically to feel layers and sequences, light and shadows, or notes and harmonics. Now and then I enter a gallery, a space with an open vent to the sky. The air changes and there is a space ahead of me, not a wall, not a stumbling block, not a drop-off, not yet. The affect is discovery even though the phrases are reclaimed from found things, already as plentiful as plastic. If my writing does not convince you that each word contains the whole, it will fail.
Can reading deeply build schema for new consciousness?
The BBC documentary Why Reading Matters (2009) explores reading and
the brain. It refers to Wuthering Heights.
Frank Kermode gave my young imagination the Medieval idea of the Aevum. He said that language resided in the liminal space between earth and heaven, in a place occupied by angels and saints. Science gives a similar analysis of reading. Language can manifest in our imaginations like a phantom limb, real in the mind but not there. Writers hear and see what is not there, to build a world in the Aevum, a suspended world where disbelief is polished off and the gem remains.