Quarantine Project Day 11
Day 11
Now there's a chronological issue that has popped up. I've located an event when the bluebells are thick and strong and pungent, and that decision has clearly anchored the story in time. If I don't conform exactly to my time-line now a copy-editor will pick up the inconsistency later and there will be swearing and wailing and gnashing of gums.
But there is also a pregnancy to reckon with. I'd dearly love to make this pregnancy last a full year, but that doesn't seem fair on the mother, nor likely to slip past your average reader either. Because time and its passage is a vital force in storytelling and in two different ways. Firstly there is this question of sensible chronology. Then there is time in a musical sense.
Often when people think about novel writing they imagine a kinship with the visual arts, because you can spend a lot of time visually describing a scene; similarly in screenwriting everything happens (unless you go in for voiceover) on the exterior. But whether it's film or story, the art is temporal far more than it is visual. Both in the selection of the mechanics of time and the fact that there is a drumbeat behind the story.
Narrative is a temporal art like dance. You can blow it by being out of step, or breaking the pace. There are many moments when you need to be light of foot; scenes where you have to slow down and make rather obvious, heavy-steps; expository bits where you need a sudden acceleration.
Oh shaddup, you don't know the first thing about dancing.
Let's just say that this day offers a quickstepping 2066.
(For previous blogs in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")
