Writing prompt #54: MORE ON TIME
Hi Everyone,
I was recently re-rereading Nabokov’s notes on Russian literature. He greatly admired Tolstoy’s ability to get his readers to deeply care about his characters, so much so that many talk about Anna Karenin as if they knew her personally. Why?
To paraphrase Nabokov:
Tolstoy had the gift of endowing his fiction with time-values [that] correspond exactly to our sense of time …
Please ask yourself: How is the clock ticking in my story? Is time doing what I want? Is it variable and/or well-paced? In service of my tale’s ebbs and flows?
YOUR PROMPT: Track a passage—a page or two is good to start—and take note of every reference, explicit or implied, about the passage of time. What can you do to enhance the scene via a conscious manipulation of time?
Good luck!
Abrazos,
Cristina
Great advice. The one critique of my first book that stands out for me is reader after reader asked me what date it was because they missed the context clues. So they were shocked to read of a truck showing up in a scene. I had obviously lost them. The next book has specific dates and locations preceding each section. But your suggestion here is a much more nuanced way of doing it. Thanks for the great advice.