The Speed of Time #1
flash forward, jump cut, or interleave story lines
If there’s a scene you're stuck on or have avoided finishing because it seems dull or boring, maybe you should skip it. Or compress it. Or go back a paragraph or two and find a way to end it early. Then cut directly to a different place, point of view or time. If that next moment is distant from the previous one, you might need white space to do this. Was any necessary information left out by the jump you made? You could try to slip it in as subtly as possible. Or maybe you can do without it after all, or save it and reveal it later?
I’ve been thinking about several different ways writers adjust the “playback speed” of narrative time and how that compares to techniques used by filmmakers. The phrase “jump cut,” in movie making, refers to the editing out of material in the middle of a shot, a temporal compression. I’ll link here to two very different examples: this elegant and straightforward moment in It’s a Wonderful Life and a much more jarring and (interesting) moment in Citizen Kane where two decades pass, but a parallel scene picks up, in the middle of the very same dialogue exchange, between the same characters. The first is deft, does good work in focussing in on the central character without geting hung up on inessential mundanities. It is not very noticeable to the viewer. The other is startling and insists that the viewer pay attention to a two-decade leap forward in time. A written equivalent of the Citizen Kane moment would not be as dramatic, however. What’s a somewhat intrusive, fictional-dream breaking device in film is often achieved remarkably simply in writing, so much so that the reader hardly notices the “cut.” Small or medium length jumps can be knocked out with a phrase — “after a bit” or “she paused,” but many decades can be spanned with ease, as in this micro-flash forward from Edward P. Jones’s The Known World: “When he was an old man and rheumatism chained up his body, he would look back and blame the chains on evenings such as these, and on nights when he lost himself completely and fell asleep and didn’t come to until morning, covered with dew.” In this instance, the flash forward doesn’t advance the main storyline, but tells us a lot, not least by removing a certain element of suspense, since we now know that the character will survive to old age.
PROMPT: Play around with time jumps. How much time can you skip without losing anything, narratively? Will you try to pull this off without drawing notice to it or impeding the forward flow of the present timeline? When (and why) might you want to do something fancier, more noticeable, intentionally referencing your narrative’s grander scale of time?