Landscape with flowers (nirvana) (1930) by Zolo Palugyay.
Today’s creativity prompt explores how we perceive time and how we work with and render it on the page—or, more specifically, today’s prompt brings our conscious attention to time. What an incredibly appropriate post considering that today is my birthday—and yet, I promise that it was 100% coincidence!
The truth is, I love working with time in life and literature, because otherwise, we tend to be on autopilot in a number of ways that may not benefit our creative capacity. That’s in part why several of our prompts so far have emphasized paying attention—because that’s how we gather the invaluable true material of life from which to weave both awareness and words. As one of you wrote to me in the comments, “attention is a form of devotion.”
But it’s hard to pay close, devoted attention to what’s in front of us—to what actually is—because our minds are the most amazing tele-transport machines that can zip us far into the past and the future and back again without our even noticing. And as cool as that is (and it is pretty cool!), it’s dangerous if we’re unaware. Like so much else in life and in art, awareness and intention are everything.
Consider this tidbit from John Irving, who writes the last lines of his stories first:
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
Like Irving’s approach, today’s creativity building exercise takes a very on-purpose approach to time on the page in order to illuminate for you the many possibilities and insights hiding in plain sight within a simple chronology. But before we dive into the exercise, I want to acknowledge that most people, when they sit down to write or read a story, do have a default, autopilot expectation for a clear beginning, middle, and end, in that order. That’s actually not usually how I write (I love fragments!), but I can acknowledge that linearity is the dominant form in American writing. Here’s a passage on this idea from Jennifer Sinor’s incredible essay, “Brief But True,” from the November 2020 issue of Writer’s Chronicle:
We have wallowed in stories that move from “once upon a time” to “happily ever after” from the moment our parents read us our first board books, told us our first bedtime stories; linear structure, like macaroni and cheese, is the comfort food of form…
As human beings, we are timebound creatures. The first thing we think when we awake in the morning is “What day is it?” or “What time is it?” We orient ourselves in relation to time before we even open our eyes. Time is ingrained, even biological, to the point that if you put people in a room without clocks or windows within days they will wake when the sun rises on the equator and go to bed when it sets (no matter how far away from the waistline of the Earth they are).
Clearly, we love linear form! But what can we gain from shaking it up? A lot, I propose—at least, from the perspective of what we might discover, what we might open ourselves to in the process. And one way to shake up our expectations of linearity is to … tell a story backwards. Yes, backwards.
It’s been done successfully countless times. Here’s an essay in Lit Hub on the topic of reverse chronology, and below is just a quick sampling of reverse chronology examples from Wikipedia:
Julia Alvaraz’s novelHow the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents opens in 1989 with one of the characters returning to her native Dominican Republic. The story of why the family left and their attempts to succeed in New York are told in reverse chronological order, with the last events happening in 1956.
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters is written in three episodes moving backwards from 1947 to 1941, beginning in post-war London and moving back to the early days of the war. It was shortlisted for both the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize.
All the Birds Singing by the Australian authorEvie Wyld, relates two stories in parallel, both beginning from the same point in time, one running forwards and one backwards. The novel won the 2014 Miles Franklin Award and the 2014 Encore Award.
This week’s exercise takes you through the process of reversing chronology on the page, from the last line to the first. Have fun, and let me know what you come up with!
