There are at least
two kinds of time involved in a book.
There is time as it passes for the characters
where there can be a gap of years
in the turning of a page.
And then there is time as it passes for the reader.
Now, by treating the first kind of time interestingly
we can actually make the second kind of time
and the reader's experience, a much more pleasant one.
Now, ways of working with time
would probably involve things that you can do
which we've already discussed to a certain degree
about the timeframe of the story.
There's no reason why you have to start
your story at the beginning
and move all the way through mechanically to the end.
You can start at the end
and then fill in the background in flashbacks.
You can start wherever you want.
We've also noted stories such as Rashomon
or The Conversation
where by repeating a certain scene
or a certain incident from different perspectives
giving yourself more information with each retelling
how this can be an effective way of doing it.
On the basic subject of timing
one way to give pace to your narratives
to make them feel that they've got a kind of momentum
and a speed that will carry the reader along with them
is to make judicious use
of cutting and editing
which you can learn a lot from
in just looking at movies
and how they can condense time
with an abrupt cut.
An example from my own work of this would be
in my proposed television series
that I was working on last year
where we had a scene where
a young woman, a previously established character
who has a violent personality disorder
which means, basically, that she carries out
horrific acts of physical brutality
usually involving a fruit of some kind.
In a previous episode, we've seen her
devastating a male opponent with the aid of a pineapple.
In the scene that I was writing
we have her confronted
by a very aggressive bouncer at a club.
And so I'd written the scene
so that we cut between her face
as she looks deadpan and impassive at the bouncer
and then looks at the display of fruit on a nearby table
including a gigantic watermelon
looks back at the bouncer
looks at the fruit
and then you can cut straight
to the ambulance arriving outside.
The entire audience will know exactly what has happened.
And, in fact, it will be funnier
to not have shown them
the crucial scene
where she devastates this poor fellow
with a huge watermelon.
It's funnier if you leave that out
and cut straight to the aftermath.
Let the readers fill in the blank space for themselves.
They'll probably find it much, much more enjoyable.
Now, on the subject of time
if you're dealing with a science fiction
or a fantasy narrative
you can do a lot of extraordinary things with time.
I'm thinking... Some excellent examples would include
the film Arrival
which was adapted
from a wonderful short story by the author Ted Chiang
called "The Story of Your Life."
Without wishing to give too much away
this basically details the arrival of
a number of alien spaceships upon Earth
that are huge, strange
black, rock-like things
that just hang there above the desert.
And they attempt to communicate
with the human beings in the story.
And, eventually, the main character
who is a human linguist
who is trying to decipher the aliens' language
she begins to understand that the aliens see time
completely differently to we do.
They see it as a solid
in which past, future and present
are all coterminous
they're all happening at once.
This leads to a very, very poignant
conclusion to the film
where we realise that
things that we had thought were flashbacks
by the central character
were actually very sad premonitions.
It's a wonderful
heart-stopping, heart-moving film.
That's not the only one.
There is also Kurt Vonnegut's excellent book
Slaughterhouse-Five
where you've got an American servicemen
who's a prisoner of war in Dresden
at the exact moment
when the Allies commence their comprehensive firebombing.
He also, perhaps disturbed by this experience
believes himself to have been abducted
by a race of aliens called the Tralfamadorians.
They have placed him in a zoo
with a Playboy centrefold called Montana Wildhack
for their amusement.
The Tralfamadorians also see time as a solid.
They believe that everything is happening at once
and that people in the past are still alive in the past.
This becomes... the serviceman Billy Pilgrim
this becomes his philosophy.
So, he ends up, in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five
he is simultaneously an old man dying in bed
he is simultaneously in an alien zoo
with Montana Wildhack
surrounded by Tralfamadorians
and he is simultaneously
in the abandoned slaughterhouse room number five
that gives the novel its title
where he was sheltering with the other prisoners of war
during the bombing of Dresden.
It's a remarkable book.
And that's just one of the things
that you can do with time
if you have the liberty
that science fiction and fantasy permits you to play with it.
As for timing itself
timing is something which it's almost impossible
to actually explain to people.
It's nothing that you could really describe verbally.
It's something... A sense of timing
is something that you learn
and a good place to learn it
would be by studying comedians.
Timing is crucial in telling a joke
or delivering a routine.
So, study some of the better comedians
and see how they time a gag.
Also, it's worth looking at physical comedians.
Look at some of the old silent-screen comedians.
Look at Buster Keaton
see how he times a joke.
And, eventually, you'll start to get a sense
of how you can bring
this element of timing to your stories
and make them absolutely crystalline and perfect
and a beautiful ride for the reader
an excursion for them
at a breakneck pace if you feel like it.