A review by gengelcox
The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes by Joan Silber

challenging informative slow-paced

4.0

As normal when I’m percolating on a new novel (i.e., that time of writing that doesn’t involve in collecting very many words on the screen but is indispensable for gathering your wits together before attempting to make a collection of 80k+ words in some coherent order), I find myself reading writing craft books. I chose this one in particular because the new book I’m contemplating takes place at least 300 years in the future, yet also needs to reflect events that happen some 50-100 years in the future, so time is going to be a big part of the writing process. I enjoyed Silber’s explication of the ways different authors and books have approached time. My most recent novel used what Silber terms “classic” time—basically, every scene in the book is portrayed in chronological order (with some overlap given there’s four different points-of-view). My first novel was written in what Silber calls “switchback” time—as a structuralist, I went about this in a very formal way, where there were three separate sections of the protagonist’s life, but it starts with the most recent, then flashes back to when she was a child, then her first years of college, then back to the present. But, after establishing that pattern, each section is presented classically, so, if you wanted, you could read the story of her life in chronological order by ignoring how the chapters are presented in the book and reading all of the child’s section first, then the college years section, then finally the present time.

Which is to say that, as a journeyman author, I appreciated being able to connect what I’ve already done to theory, and found some of what Silber presents to be interesting for my new project, although I have no idea right now how it might manifest. Such is how percolation works, at least for me.