Creative Time in Novels & Life

A day has 24 hours. A week has 168 hours. Months have an average of 732 hours. A year has 365 days or on a leap year 366 days. A year has 8760 hours—unless it is a leap year, then it has 8784 hours. A typical novel has between about 100,000 to 120,000 words in 300-400 pages.

How Many Pages Can I Write in a Year?

It depends on how much time I have at my disposal. It also depends on how many activities I can eliminate from my daily schedule. I have an acquaintance who has written 60 books in 10 years. My output is much less prodigious.

As I have stated earlier in this blog, my goal for 2018 is to write one approximately 365-page novel and to blog monthly about my process and progress. The page total for my monthly blogs will add an additional 50 pages to my writing output by the end of the year.

This combination fiction-non-fiction writing goal is helping me view my process from a bird on a branch perspective. I can see many sticks on the ground. Which ones do I need to build a functional little nest for my story? I also see many little seeds. Which ones will germinate into a compelling fictional narrative? Most importantly, how much time do I have to interlace my sticks and cultivate my seeds?

Concomitantly with my personal goals, and unbeknownst to me at the time, my children established a third writing goal for me that has forced me to increase my weekly page output. They gifted me with a subscription to StoryWorth on my birthday last year. Each Monday, StoryWorth sends me a question about my life which has to be answered and returned by the following Monday. At the end of the 12-month commitment, StoryWorth will produce a book made up of what I write and any photos I happen to include. I am currently answering the 41^st question selected for me. This task has added an additional three to five pages per week to my production.

What Kinds of Writing Am I Doing?

Currently, I am doing three kinds of writing on a weekly basis: Fiction, blogging, and what I would call, rather than autobiography, a type of personal book report. The StoryWorth reporting style writing, done to a weekly deadline, has helped me focus narrowly on structure and editing because the story itself is simple to reconstruct—I lived it. The process has definitely sharpened my ability to see and fix my own errors. On the other hand, the fiction writing is opening up my creative flow. Unexpectedly, I also feel that it is opening up my heart. I am simply happier. Importantly the monthly blogging deadlines are forcing me to think metacognitively about my own writing process while forcing me to focus on the concrete goal of writing the number of pages I have committed to writing each month.

Time in a Novel Is Foundational

Goal setting to guide my writing has made me experience time as a living presence in my life. A presence that looms as well as a presence that seems to slip away faster and faster each week. My experience of time has made me wonder how I should use time in my novel. Should it press on my characters as it has on me this year? Should the story flow at a chronological pace? Or might it shift between time periods? Or will time become an actual protagonist in my story as it did in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—where time manifests as the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?

How Will I Represent Time?

Shall it be as dramatic as a ghost or simply viewed through seasons, months, or years that pass by for my characters? Shall I start the headings for chapters with dates or simply work time into the story more subtly? Recently, I read Anthony Doerr’s, All the Light We Cannot See, a novel that skips back and forth over many years. At the head of each chapter appears a date. As a reader I found myself checking back to the date headings to determine how what had just happened or what had happened years before fit into what I was reading at the moment. Because of his chosen time format, Doerr’s date headings were a useful reading guide.

I also just read A Day in the Life of Denis Ivanovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The book encompasses a single day—from morning until bedtime—of his life in a Russian gulag. The reader trudges through the frigid landscape and poorly heated buildings along with the main character, experiencing the exhausting, cold day viscerally. Two very different approaches. Two very different styles. Now I have to figure out my own “timepoint,” to coin a new meaning for a rarely used word.

Defining a “Timepoint”

Concepts of time shift dramatically across cultures, yet they impact our daily lives and habits. In the West, we see time as the sun rising, then passing from East to West, experiencing time on a daily calendar. Our experience of time is based on a yearly solar calendar that requires the allowance of a leap year every four years because a day is not exactly 24 hours. Human concepts have had to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of planetary time. When the West moved from the Roman calendar to the Gregorian, it resulted in strange occurrences, for example, the Roman “November” is no longer the ninth month, but the eleventh. It fascinates me that the meaning of the names of the months was forgotten or ignored by the creators of our calendar. It also made me realize that our general approach to time has an element of fiction, the suspension of disbelief. A sidereal day is really 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0905 seconds.

Other cultures operate on the lunar calendar. A novel set with lunar time could have many evening scenes. It might also use metaphors that relate to the moon. A novel set in solar time might focus on night or day scenes, creating a more realistic mood. Perhaps a novel that used the image of sidereal time, focusing on the earth’s rotation relative to fixed stars, would allow for a more scientific or a more poetic use of time.

Which approach to time will I choose?

Update on My Goal Setting

I have finished eight months of writing. The challenge of keeping to a schedule is beginning to feel invigorating.

1. I have been able to write fairly regularly working on my novel, my blog, and, additionally, a StoryWorth document. I am now into my ninth month.
2. . Since August 7, 2018, I have made significant progress on my novel. This month I had to devote some time to coordinating my organization. I checked my chapter outline against my page count outline and against my actual chapters. Organizing large amounts of material is tedious, but necessary. I felt good about the reorganization. The story is starting to take on a life.  On September 7th, my page counter should stand at 243. Right now, it stands at 225.
3. Today, September 7, 2018, I am posting my ninth blog. Blogging about my writing has highlighted the parallels between my life and my fiction writing. Not in the sense of story but rather in the sense of organizational and sensorial parallels.
4. I have continued to build my writing network. In August, my Boulder Writers Alliance hosted a talk with Paul Cohen, the author of The Glamshack. Cohen read a short section from his novel. It was fascinating to hear the author’s voice interpreting his own text. Brad Wetzler’s interview with Paul Cohen brought out surprising comments. He was honest about his struggles. I particularly liked the anecdotes he told about working with agents and editors.