Hitting the Timeshift Key

When I'm writing, I find structure one of the hardest things to tackle.  Stories, situations and characters, and the language with which to describe them, come to me reasonably easily -- but structure!  I think I'm with David Lodge, when he says in his excellent book The Art of Fiction that we should avoid, "presenting life is just one dam thing after another," a trap that it is easy to fall into if you are writing a linear narrative, but in my bid to avoid this trap I find myself turning what I have written inside out, upside down, back to front and often it still doesn't feel quite right.

Lodge's solution is to use time shifts because he says that this, "allows us to make connections of causality and irony between widely separated events." This makes sense to me, as a story that has a strong thematic resonance can be more engrossing because you have to work a little bit harder to make the necessary connections.

Sooo, if you want to open a new door, creatively speaking (and because I just can't resist another picture)

have a go at writing something that moves about in time.  This will give you the opportunity to experiment with devices such as who knows what information when and the effects that that might have, and to see what happens when  cause and effect are separated by several decades -- does that make events more potent or less so?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Ooh, I'm having another Tale of Two Cities moment.  I do read authors apart from Charles Dickens (at the moment I'm immersed in Tipping the Velvet.  It's the first time I've read anything by Sarah Waters and I'm absolutely wallowing in her lush and lecherous prose). The reason I'm quoting the great Mr D is that I have been thinking a little bit about how to set your work in time, how to conjure up a period without stating baldly September 1942, or whatever.

Dickens' beautifully cadenced phrases set up a rhythm that has proved to be unforgettable: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...." Although he quickly goes on to tell us that his story is set in pre-revolutionary France, this first introduction offers us a wider view (in fact, it offers a perfect lens through which to view the story, but perhaps that is for another day.)

If you want to avoid being too literal, there are various devices you can use to evoke a particular period. Mentioning clothing is an easy kind of shorthand -- if your heroine is wearing a crinoline, the reader can hazard a guess that the book is set in the Victorian age, if your hero has safety pins, piercings and a mohican it is likely to be the late 1970s.  People's behaviour and their manners can be indicative: think housewifely domesticity for the 1950s, ribaldry for the late 17th century, and so on.  Attitudes can play their part -- are we more snobbish now than we were fifty years ago, or are we snobbish in a different way? You can use slightly archaic speech patterns, if you use them sparingly, although they can easily become an irritant.  Sometimes a reference to a current event is enough to do the trick.  You get the picture...

If you want to try your hand at an exercise in order to get some practice, try writing a short scene which is vividly contemporary, then write the same situation in a different period, so that the reader will know when it set without you mentioning the date.

In the meantime, here's another door...