The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes

by Joan Silber

Fiction imagines for us a stopping point from which life can be seen as intelligible," asserts Joan Silber in The Art of Time in Fiction . The end point of a story determines its meaning, and one of the main tasks a writer faces is to define the duration of a plot. Silber uses wide-ranging examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chinua Achebe, and Arundhati Roy, among others, to illustrate five key ways in which time unfolds in fiction. In clear-eyed prose, Silber elucidates a tricky but vital aspect of the art of fiction.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Crafts, Reference, Literary Criticism, Essays, School

120 pages, Paperback

First published June 23, 2009

About the author

Joan Silber is the author of nine books of fiction. Her book Improvement was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was listed as one of the year's best books by The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The Seattle Times, and Kirkus Reviews. She lives in New York and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Keep up with Joan at joansilber.net.

Reviews

[Justin Tate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Required reading for my MFA. Feels like a lost chapter from Reading Like a Writer, where we get 70% plot summaries (with spoilers) and then a few sentences of analysis. Some of the examples are good, others aren't. The referenced titles added many books to my to-read pile and the general discussion is deserving. How do writers handle time in fiction?

There's some great technique on various approaches. Some moments might benefit from a slower sense of time, for example, while others might benefit from non-chronological storytelling. At the very least, it got me thinking more about time and pacing which I've long-believed are some of the most crucial literary devices available. Overall, wish I'd picked it up from the library and not paid full price, but no regrets.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Art of ... in Fiction is now my favorite series on the craft of writing. Stop with the more generalized How To books written by bestselling or lauded authors like Stephen King or John Gardner and instead look to this series. There are about ten books in it, and each of them delves deeply into one particular element of writing. This installment was on the manipulation of time in fiction. 100+ pages on a critical aspect of writing.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its been a long time since I've liked a book so much that I actually sat down and took notes as I was reading. Joan Silber does an incredible job of discussing in just over 100 pages what an important role time and how it is handled in the context of the story plays a major role in every piece of fiction. I could go into all the details but they are simple and often so obvious I wondered how I come I'd never really thought and discovered them all on my own. Yes, a few I was aware of but in many instances her thoughts sent me down long corridors of thoughts and ideas. She uses many short stories and novels to illustrate the ideas presented. This was a very special part of the information. I did not find her too diagnostic or picky and she summarizes beautifully without getting too deep in the weeds (a problem I found with George Saunders A Swim in a Pond). Probably limiting the subject to time and its use helped in this respect.
I read the book to help with my writing but I found it helped me see everything I read in a new more focused light.
Highly recommend it for it thought provoking and insightful material. It is really, really excellent.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber is lovely little, succinct book quite simply studying the art of time in fiction. The main headings are:
Classic Time, Long Time, Switchback Time, Slowed Time (which is not the same as Long Time), Fabulous Time and Time as Subject.
What a stylish writer Joan Silber is. Here is her first line: Time draws the shape of stories. She then goes on to tell a story. A very familiar story. It is the story of Diana Spencer. Of course, after that, I was hooked. Her style of writing is so readable.
“Where the teller begins and ends a tale decides what its point is, how it gathers meaning. Yogi Berra’s famous bit of hope about a ball game – it ain’t over till it’s over – is the storyteller’s dilemma. When is it over? And of all the choices a writer makes, a story’s allotment of time can be the least conscious.”
In such a small book there a quite a few works cited. Here are the major players for each chapter which will give you an indication of how masterfully Silber approaches her subject:
Classic Time – The Great Gatsby by F S Fitzgerald
Long Time – The Darling by Chekhov and The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
Switchback Time – several of Alice Munro’s stories
Slowed Time – The Thirst by Nawal al-Saadawi
Fabulous Time – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Time as Subject – Old Mortality by Katherine Anne Porter and The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
This elegant and fascinating book is a must read for writers and would be writers alike.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silber delivers a concise analysis of the variety of ways storytellers employ time to create narrative shapes and effects. She explores stories to tease out how authors effectively dealt with classic (natural), long, switchback, slowed, and fabulous time. This slim volume should be in every writer's and every serious reader's collection.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I may be missing something, but this book wasn't what I had expected. I had anticipated a book of tricks, how to create particular effects regarding the passage of time, and techniques for achieving such effects. Some grounds on which to decide how to deal with time in a particular story, to achieve a particular effect.

Rather, Silber discusses many novels (and some stories) and how the authors traverse time structurally and deal with time thematically, its passage and effect on characters' internal lives.

There's more plot synopsis than discussion of craft, it seems. I often found myself wondering what whatever she was talking about had to do with constructing or manipulating time. I guess that's because her sense of what we talk about when we talk about time is different from mine.

The most useful part is her breakdown and definition of what the different types of time are, ways in which a story can be structured using particular ways of moving across time in the course of plotting a story: classic time (scene and summary); long time (across lifetimes); switchback time (incorporating flashback); slowed time (description as magnifier, for example); fabulous time (discussion is a bit obscure).

But I would have liked to see more discussion, again, of the effect of each on the reader.

[Lisa Eckstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exploration of different ways the passage of time is portrayed and used in stories and novels. Silber discusses examples (drawn from a variety of times and cultures) that illustrate several categories of fictional time she's identified and points out how the authors skillfully represent long spans, brief moments, multiple time periods, and so on.

This is a short book, a small paperback of only a bit more than 100 pages, and my main complaint is that it isn't longer. Silber writes clearly and with insight, and I would have happily read far more of her musings about time. In particular, I expected this to be a writing guide, with practical suggestions about choosing the time frame of a story and conveying the passage of time. There is certainly much to be learned from the examples Silber dissects, but I was hoping for a more instructional focus.

What is included is thought-provoking, and I would recommend it to readers and writers who enjoy analyzing specific aspects of writing craft. I'd love to hear if there are any other books covering this topic.

[Edan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm loving this "Art of" series--one a day keeps the brain aglow!

I wish I'd read more of the books and stories Silber mentions, but since she is as obsessed with time in fiction as I am, I found this so enjoyable and useful. As with Baxter's Art of Subtext, it was more useful as a teaching tool for me, for it articulated stuff about pacing, dramatizaion and compression that I've already considered and presented to students, but presents the material in such a smooth and easy-to-follow way. I will definitely be showing excerpts to future classes as a means to discuss scene and summary and the ways both can be examined, broken apart, exploited and turned on their heads.

And if you haven't read Joan Silber's own magical fiction--what are you waiting for?

And, also: God, I need to read more Chekhov!

[Terri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This whole series is worthwhile.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the most essential book in The Art Of series for any writer to read.

[L.K. Simonds · Rating 5 out of 5]

"All stories, if continued long enough, end in death, and he is no true storyteller who would keep that from you." Ms. Silber supplied this Hemingway quote near the end of the book, and made this comment of her own, "The sequence of any fiction is, by its nature, the path of time evaporating.

It took me a while to finish this book because of the time I devoted to each use of time Ms. Silber explored. And though this book clarifies what writers, and readers, should think about where a story begins, where it ends, and the path it follows between the two, it also raises the deeper issue raised by Hemingway. What was important when viewed from the hindsight of death?

[Domenica · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was ok! I enjoyed the subject matter and the way it was structured to examine different types of time in fiction. Two gripes:

1. A lot of the example texts seemed random or arbitrarily selected. I know what counts as a "definitive" or "prime" example is subjective—but some classics are exemplary, like Proust and García Márquez. Alongside those, which Silber does use, others seemed pretty forced. Silber says that, once you get down to it, time is the subject of all fiction. So under that premise, she can make any example work. And they do for the most part... but there seemed more obvious choices.

2. This is one of those books where it's mostly plot summary and 15-25% analysis. I wish it was more balanced, but I know this is common.

[Rachel Pollock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Required reading for a class. Decent. Not revelatory.

[Norman Birnbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting essay about the role that time plays in short stories and in novels. Worth reading whether you're a writer or a reader who wants to better understand. According to Silber, the role of time is often overlooked in fiction but it's almost always part of the plot.

[William Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book on the recommendation of a writing instructor when I was having trouble presenting backstory. The book was not very helpful.

Like the others in this series (The Art of X in Writing), it’s a short (120 smallish pages) essay, strictly an overview. The success of the format depends on the writing skill of the author and his or her degree of insight into the topic.

Silber spends most of her essay on “Classic Time,” where the story is told from beginning to end in a straightforward manner. This is the least interesting, most obvious, and least problematic time structure for writers, although I did appreciate the insight, taken from Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” that one nifty technique is to contrast the inexorable and mindless time of nature (tides, seasons, decay and rebirth, etc.) with the sharp intentionality of human time, which is outside of nature).

There is insight to be had from this book, but Silber spends most of her word count reviewing plot and characters of various example stories, usually not drawing out a clear lesson on fictional time. From a long consideration of Proust’s “Recherche,” we learn that “Time, in fiction, is infinitely flexible.” You would have to be an extremely naïve writer to not know that fiction can compress and elongate time.

The other “kinds” of fictional time covered are even less useful. My particular concern, how best to represent backstory, is covered in a short section called “Switchback Time.” There I discover that flashbacks and other time cuts are possible in fiction, something I was quite aware of. Examples given show that, but don’t make any particular point. Hemingway eschewed the past, preferring to stay in the present, “without dawdling in the lyrical.” Lots of examples are cited for each of these points, but the points themselves are superficial.

Fabulous, or non-realistic time, is not even defined. The main example is Marquez’s famous opening line from 100 years: “Many years later, facing a firing squad, A. would remember X from childhood.” (A crude paraphrase, I apologize). What is fabulous, or magical or nonrealistic about that? It’s a remarkable sentence, and a remarkable phenomenology, but what I want to know is how to tell a story in forward gear while providing context from the past. Recall simply jumps from the firing squad into the deep past. That's obvious. Are there better ways?

In the final section, “Time as Subject,” we learn that all stories (logically) end in death, that everyone is surprised to get old, and that death ends subjective time. Examples from The Death of Ivan Illyich are apposite, but, offer no insight.

Overall then, I extracted some crumbs of insight, but I didn’t get much out of this book that isn’t covered in great detail in any generic how-to-write book.

[Lou Britt]

The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Sibler
Is a very short read on the construction of time in fiction and how time alters meaning.

“Life... can be led only in small, manageable chunks of experience.” Scenes create these manageable chunks, and it’s up to the author to decide which chunks are important for the specific life-story they want to tell.

I would call this book more of an essay. Sibler has opinion on time and how best to construct, but the majority of the book is detailing examples to illuminate her point.

I found the book interesting on musing about how time can be used in writing, though I wouldn’t suggest it as a craft book to learn concrete steps to execute these inspirational ideas, more as a thought-provoking read to consider new ways of manipulating time.

I’ll leave you with this: “Length is weight in fiction... the longer something takes, the more emotionally important it is.”

[Featherbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takesis a craft book for authors, but Silber also has a stellar book list with descriptions of the use of time in fiction. Even without concern for how to use time in a novel or short story, you could read the titles in her bibliography and know what good writing is all about. What a list! From Chekhov's "The Darling" to Henry James ("The Beast in the Jungle"), some Proust and deMaupassant, all the way to Denis Johnson and Alice Munro and Arundhati Roy. Many short stories are included but novels as well. There are translations from Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, French and Italian. There are books I have never heard of (Ya Hua's To Live) and short stories I've missed, even a challenge or two such as The Diary Of Soren KierkegaardThe Diary of Soren Kierkegaard. I want to jump into a hammock with this list and forget my current fiction pickups at the library. Her clarity and love of literature underlies an informative and helpful discussion of time as it is handled in story, how it is slowed down or speeded up, or circular or fabulously upended but, quoting Kierkegaard, "life can only be understood backward but has to be lived forward." Any which way it moves in time, read Silber's succinct thoughts and explore her bibliography.

[Mely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novels and stories discussed:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Anton Chekhov, "The Darling"
Flaubert, "A Simple Heart"
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale
Guy de Maupassant, A Woman's Life
Yu Hua, To Live

Mentioned in passing:
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart"
Katherine Mansfield, "Bliss"
James Joyce, Ulysses
V.S. Naipul, A House for Mr. Biswas
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
Carol Shield, The Stone Diaries

[Sloane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty quick and easy craft book on the handling of... you guessed it... time in fiction. Makes a few wide-arching assumptions that I don't necessarily agree with, but also has different approaches a writer can take to their work and provides fleshed-out examples of those approaches being done right. Super quick read.

[Kita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Silber's analysis of the way time is treated in several works of fiction (from Fitzgerald to Achebe) was interesting, but not particularly helpful for writing. I read this for a writing workshop I'm taking so I'll be interested to hear what the professor expected us to get out of it.

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[R.C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main thing that caught me about this book was that a lot of it wasn't so much about time as it was about plot structure and not so much about plot structure as it was about focusing the reader's attention. Which it did well, discussing examples of how to deal with long stretches of time and also how you can focus attention by slowing time down. None of this was particularly new to me, but it was done well.

Also, spoiler alert, if you don't want to read a lot of synopses of tragedies befalling women, might want to skip this one. The examples given, remind me why I haven't read more "classic" literature: almost all the books mentioned were about tragedy (the author states that misspent, ruined, and unled lives are often more interesting, which ahahahahahahaahaha is not a comment that has aged well to this Plague Year, but then again, I have always found tragedy boring), and the overwhelming majority of examples are about tragedies that befall women: they drift through life powerless and miss out, they marry wrongly and are unhappy, they do not marry and are unhappy, they marry and are happy but then their husbands die and they are unhappy, they never marry and become ugly and abrasive suffragists, they die young, they are "ruined" and left in disgrace....:sigh: (This isn't the author's fault - these texts exist, but perhaps she didn't realize the common thread that leapt out from all of her examples.)

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was surprised by how much I liked this and how well crafted it was, being a book about craft. It was concise and instructional, without being dry at all. I've never taken a creative writing course but I imagine that this is what it would feel like to take one with a good professor who is not only skilled at their craft, but skilled at teaching it. I am very impressed by Joan Silber's ability to explain something as complex as writing in such clear terms.

I've never read fiction with a mindfulness towards craft before. This book was a great place to start. It exposed me to some stories and books that I never otherwise would have picked up, and pointed out aspects of their construction that I otherwise would not have appreciated. I didn't love every work cited, but there are so many, and they are sufficiently diverse that you'll find at least a few to be of value.

Would highly recommend for anyone who is interested in the question of "what makes a story compelling", whether for the sake of writing their own, or for better appreciating the work of authors that they love. Helpful, well-written, and unpretentious.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a wonderful class at Stanford Continuing Education this summer on time and narrative in fiction with novelist Rebecca Sacks. The class was a revelation about the way novelists face the challenge of controlling time: "Figuring out when to jump forward, when to slow down and write a
scene, how to include flashbacks without slowing down the forward propulsion of the narrative, and what about weaving two storylines together?" We studied various techniques and at the end, I still wanted more. One of my classmates recommended this book, and it did not disappoint. The writer focuses mainly on American taste so she has a focus on scene, as opposed to the traditions favored in other parts of the world, but she is aware of this bias and addresses it with several other examples.

How to achieve longtime in scene-driven writing? What is switchback time? She does not tackle circular time but is wonderful on the use of repetition.

I loved the book and want to read more in the series....

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The various techniques writers utilize to tackle the passing of time in works of short and long fiction are often so intrinsic to a work that we don't notice them--unless badly executed (I'd argue Sophie's Choice is an example where bad pacing and over-summary stand in the way of an otherwise brilliant plot). Silber, examining a variety of classic works, asks us to focus on time as the foundation for or executor of plot, and demonstrates how time informs and enriches plot through scene, summary, etc. Craft books often offer general or vague platitudes without enough specificity--however, this book hones in on one important area and provides the reader with specific techniques to employ in his or her own work. A helpful read for writers of both short and long fiction. At the very least, it will cause you to deconstruct your own fiction and to begin to think about time as a silent character or foundational building block.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a person who is enthralled with portrayals of time in society across numerous texts, Joan Silber's The Art of Time in Fiction appeared to be right up my ally. Yet as a text whose purpose is, in part, to help creative writers conceive ways of incorporating time into their works, The Art of Time in Fiction is not necessarily remarkable. The terms Silber provides in her study of time: Classic Time, Long Time, Slowed Time, Switchback Time, and Fabulous Time are all fascinating in regard to how she articulates these concepts. However, the analysis of texts that Silber provides to build on these concepts are not necessarily stirring criticisms. These analyses' foci are relatively narrow, serving more so as tangential examples of how these concepts of time work as opposed to also providing critical analyses that would allow this book to better engage with these other books intertextually.

[Sarah Agar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be more of an essay than instruction or guide to writing ‘time.’ The author talked mostly about particular pieces of writing as examples, which is fine, but I felt that unless I had read and knew the story she was referencing, I wasn’t following quickly enough. Probably to combat this, she gives a lot of detail which is why it felt a lot like a book report. Not a huge fan. I ended up skimming much of it just because I was uninterested about Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship with each other. I wanted to know more about how to write time successfully and I did not really get that.

[Jenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up because I struggle with passing time when writing. I thought the concept of this craft book would be helpful. It’s a quick read and I took some decent notes.

The book mainly examines time using some famous works as case studies but the greatest impact is if you’ve read the works discussed. I enjoyed writing down the stories to read and examine how the author employed the use of time.

The strongest section was classic time as the author used numerous examples from Gatsby, which I’ve read a couple times.

While I enjoyed the examination and reading list, I’m not sure I have a solid understanding of how to implement all that in my own writing.

[M.C. Easton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slender primer on how fiction employs time to make its point, Silber’s book is a rewarding and insightful read. Each chapter examines a different approach to time and its effects on short story and novel structure, character, and theme. From long time to slowed time, switchback time to fabulous time, she provides a plethora of examples drawn from Proust, García Márquez, al-Saadawi, Munro, and Baldwin. Her perceptive analyses of how authors mold time in fiction to make their points inspired me as a writer and delighted me as a reader. A volume I am sure to return to again and again.

[Savannah Creasey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good craft book that dives into different ways that time can fit into a story. I thought I would get more of a guide on how to structure or best utilize time in stories, but this is more of a dissection of how time has been treated in past pieces of great literature. So while this was not quite what I was expecting, I still found it useful. I will warn that the text is a bit essayish and dense to get through, but if you can take the time to digest this I think it is a good read for those looking to reflect on time in craft.