Time Warp
(Photo by Jada Brookins)
Time Warp
I did it. I wrote a full 405 page novel in 40 days. (I did not manage to make any blog posts during that time!) It took more discipline than I could have imagined, and less sleep than I thought was required for survival. Of course the manuscript needs to be cleaned up and edited, but the story has been told. Now I have a long list of things to do for ThrillerFest and the only thing I really want to do is take a nap and reintroduce myself to my friends and family.
Among other challenges during this task, I was constantly plagued by an odd sense of time bending. I would wake up convinced that I needed to cut a pile of material from a scene because it was far too long. But that night when I counted pages I would find it was only five or six pages long. The strange sense came from the fact that I’d been stuck on it for three days after maintaining a writing a pace of ten to fifteen pages a day. The opposite happened as well. I’d feel like I was clipping along too fast and that the reader wasn’t getting enough time in a location or scene, then when I counted pages they had been hanging out there longer than I thought, but the speed typing had me fooled.
You get the idea. Writers have to be careful of the time warp they experience while blazing through a scene or laboring for days. My solution is keeping a “real time” clock running in a separate document. It can be a table of contents type of document, though it may run from scene to scene more than chapter to chapter. I use bullet points instead of numbers because I may move things around. And I list the page number only every five scenes or so because it is merely a reference and will change as edits are applied in future drafts. The goal is to keep track of how long scenes are lasting for the reader, regardless of how long they take for me to set them straight on paper.
It is an informal process and goes something like this:
—Jim and Bridgett travel west (pgs 1-7)
—Bridgett receives call about her cousin’s death
—Bridgett drives sleepy, near miss
—Jim takes over in Colorado. Bear. Accident (pgs 16-20)
—Shelter for the night in the pines
To give myself further visual reference over this multi-page or column document, I highlight different types of important scenes in different colors. For example, emotionally charged scenes may be colored in blue, danger scenes in pink, etc. In this way, I can tell at a glance which way the charges of my scenes are swinging and how often. This highlighting often leads to scenes being moved around to keep the reader engaged in a consistent flow of information and emotion.
If you experience similar distortions of time and have other ways to keep things straight, I’d love to hear what works for you!
