Time is a precious commodity in fiction, but it is also elastic.
Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum exists in a moment. She is forever just old enough to know better and by the end of each story everything is back as it was in the beginning.
Nevada Barr has placed Anna Pigeon in the indefinite now. She ages, her life goes on as it does in the real world, but readers have very few clues about when exactly “now” is. Only her most recent book, Burn, set in Post-Katrina New Orleans binds us tightly to historical events.
Dirk Pitt, who labors gloriously for Clive Cussler, ages next to the fount of eternal youth. He has an adult son, but he can still hold his breath for a hundred pages in an underground river. Superman could take lessons from him.
Let’s not waste time.
In my humble opinion (IMHO, NOT!), the worst time offense is what movie people call a “jump cut.” I’m reading along and suddenly the characters fall through a time warp ten years into the past, or even the future. No segue, just boom! from one paragraph to the next.
But that’s just me.
I have such a linear time-sense that my entire series occurs in sequence over fifty years. Book 1, Chapter 1, July 1967. Book 10, final chapter, 2011. Frank Healy sees his entire life flash before him, but he has to wait it out.
Does that sound boring? Since the stories are written from a strict first person point of view, neither Frank nor the reader can know anything unless he sees it or someone tells him. That can be very restricting, but then in real life, we never know what’s coming at us until it happens.
Placing the story in a definite period has benefits. I want to include the social, political and historical issues into the story, to influence the flow of events as they would have for people living through them.
Race was a very big deal in Detroit in 1967. Suspicion abounded. People reacted badly to insignificant encounters. My writer friends criticize me for using “colored,” “negro” and “nigger early in Red Crush, but part of the story is about Franks rising racial conscience. Only at the end, after he achieves a level of solidarity with his black friends, does he speak of them with politically correct, respectful speech. Before that, he simply doesn’t know better.
In the early seventies, when shattered Vietnam veterans were returning to insults, drugs were a big problem. In the car business, safety was a looming specter no one knew how to deal with. The Charismatics were a rising force in Christian circles. Those are the building blocks of a story I set in that time.
Later in that decade, feminism, energy conservation and the Iran hostage crisis dominated our collective thinking. In the auto industry, companies felt so uncertain about the future, they seriously considered reinventing their businesses, and radically revamped their product lines. Panic was the rule. In the law, rape began to lose its stigma. Rape victims weren’t always regarded as “loose women.” Sometimes they still are, but rapists no longer have an automatic “Get out of Jail Free” card. There’s a story there.
Each decade has its own share of problems and solutions. By mingling them together, I can evoke a time and place that readers can relive, perhaps for the first time.
Okay, I didn’t have enough thyme and the tide is against me, but I think I used all the other ingredients.
No comments:
Post a Comment