[Link] How to Portray Time and Memory in Stories

by Anita Felicelli

Time is a tremendously elastic concept, but if you think about it, almost all stories implicitly deal with time: They relate a temporal sequence of moments or events, rather than describing a single moment. But the relationship between time and stories is even more profound than that, I think. 

The author Joy Williams has observed, “What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time….”

The origins of my short story collection How We Know Our Time Travelers, which is about the oceanic “horror and incomprehensibility of time,” was my sense, after becoming a parent and learning to accept suffering serious illnesses, that time would not work the way I expected it would when I was younger, and instead would remain terrifyingly mysterious and slippery throughout the rest of my life. I could not quite grasp time when I thought about the concept too hard, and yet it was, perhaps, the hugest motivating force in my life. 

There was no linear progression, as many traditional children’s novels had taught—rather, there were layers of time, and within my single body were selves I was barely acquainted with any longer, and yet, given the right circumstances, I’d feel myself returned along the tides of memory to these points of time in which I’d existed as another self: The young storyteller who wrote about girls who couldn’t find their way home; the teenager who painted weird, surreal images on wood and casually gave them away to friends; a young college student drunk on newfound freedom and power; the baby lawyer who acted like a compassionate sixty year old while withering away; the newlywed who finally embraced the unpredictability of a life in books after years of trying on suits and predicting legal outcomes; the excited new mother, and, then, the older mother with illnesses coming to terms with decisions already made, moments that couldn’t be retrieved—and the heartache that followed.

Strangely, I became aware, in the course of thinking about my own ending, that my body also contained within in a range of futures—different places where the train might jump the track, distinct last stations. The body as a vehicle for past and future time travel. As I came to conceive of it in my book, time travel was an ordinary phenomenon that happened daily in the mind, even when least expected, triggered by sense memory and uncanny resemblances. While working on How We Know Our Time Travelers, I drew on the intuition that time allows every moment to coexist with other moments.

In the title story, for instance, a middle-aged artist holds an open studio at which she meets a young man who deeply, overwhelmingly reminds her of her now jaded and cynical gallerist husband, and who she comes to believe is her husband journeying forward in time to meet her. The story moves from her uncertainty about the empirical reality of who she’s seeing—to an alarming but slightly erotic certainty about the young man, whoever he is. With subtle shifts in sentence construction and word choice, I tried to frame the emotional reality of the story to create the feeling she has traveled back, or he has traveled into her present. But there is also the interpretation that she is insane. 

Read the full article: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/how-to-portray-time-and-memory-in-stories