"The Pooles, too, were very deliberately leaving the provinces, making themselves metropolitan. They had left almost everything behind - the three-piece suite, the Wilton carpets, the glass-fronted bookcases, the family silver. Elinor Poole said to Alexander that the exciting thing was that the flat was flat, the rooms, all in a row, just rooms. You could sleep or eat or work in any or all of them. They furnished it with fitted cord carpets in silver and greys, with white paint, geometrically patterned curtains. Carpenters fitted streamlined shelves and cupboards. The children had bright Finnish blankets, scarlet, blue, yellow. They put up a Ben Nicholson print, a Matisse poster ... Elinor grew her yoghurt in a white bowl with a beaded muslin cover: these where days when the English had not in general seen any yoghurt, let alone taken to having it delivered in sterile painted plastic pots." Still Life, AS Byatt
One of my favourite aspects of AS Byatt's quartet is her close attention to its period. Writing just a few decades after the time it's set, she is as meticulous about its period detail as if she were writing a historical novel.
The pleasure of a strong sense of time is partly in the rich texture it creates. A sense of time permeates everything and every detail can evoke the period. What food do they eat? (Remember those ubiquitous parsley garnishes of the 1980s? The sudden profusion of rocket and balamic in the 90s? Can you remember what year you learnt to pronounce "quinoa"?) What colours predominate? (Remember the duck-egg blue and soft brown everywhere in the late noughties?) What do they clean themselves and their houses with, what products do they buy? (Anyone remember the harsh green fairy soap?) What were their names? What about their slang, their jobs, their homes, their furniture, their music? What was completely new and what did they want to leave behind in the past?
But the sense of time goes beyond the textural, sensory world of objects, lovely as that is to revel in. It's ingrained in their views, their assumptions, their expectations. It's not just the texture of the story: it's the shape of it. In the Story Elements course, we explore how giving a premise a strong sense of time, and reshaping it to its era, can turn even a flimsy idea into a powerful story.A premise about a nurse who heals by non-medical means and gets engaged: so far, a bit nondescript. But what if it's a Victorian suffragette's battle to keep her job after marriage and insistence that "old wives' remedies" do work? Or a 1960s nurse's secret introduction of psychotherapy and talking cures into a hospital for traumatised Vietnam vets? Or a sangoma in the Boer War?
That's also why, when we're doing research in class, I get my students to do their initial research before I give them the story idea. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works better: they explore the time more open-mindedly, without zeroing in on the exact details around the story. The time comes first, with its own priorities and issues, and then the story gets nested within that.No story is without a sense of time. Even if you think it's simply set "now", our now is already so vividly distinct from even our recent past, so ingrained with textures, opinions, possibilities, and constraints. Its distinctive nowness is a constant source of vibrant narrative detail. Everything that makes the world come vividly alive, for the reader.
Douglas Admas famously came up with this theory on technology:
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
(from The Salmon of Doubt)
The same is true of how we see our own time, if we don't stop to think about it. But what if we do stop, if we do think about it, if we tunnel back through our memories just five or ten years? We start to notice the sharp differences from the past that help us observe the sharp distinctness of the now. For stories set in the past, the creative effort and discoveries come from research. For stories set now, that creative work is the art of noticing – through comparing with the past. And that in turn informs the stories we write into the future.
If you'd like to learn more about all the elements of storytelling, and enrich your storytelling in a dozen different ways, the Story Elements course explores the 12 key elements of stories through hands-on activities and real writing processes, in lively workshop-style classes.
