The time of clocks & emotions & the space between

The title of Suzanne Frank’s talk at this month’s meeting of Dallas Mystery Writers was “Writing in 4D.” “Did you think that was a typo?” the head of SMU’s creative writing program asked her audience of writers. “I have written mystery, time travel and women’s fiction,” she said, declaring that she wanted to bring multidimensional lessons from those multiple genres to bear on any form of fiction writing.

And although Frank’s talk spanned second, third and fourth “dimensions” of writing, it was the 4D one that particularly resonated for me. In physics, the fourth dimension is usually considered to be time. In fiction, it’s also time, but not necessarily “chronos” time, the time of the ticking clock variety.

Instead, Frank prefers to concentrate on the emotional component of time, the “kairos” moments. It was a concept I’d heard years before, during a workshop the late Lisa Lenard-Cook presented, based on her book, The Mind of Your Story, (discussed here) in which she advocated harnessing the chronological time, the series of constant, measurable moments she termed the story’s “every-ticking present” and emotional time – the way the characters feel about those moments. 

It’s those life-defining kairos moments, interrupting the passage of the chronos moments of ordinary time, that Frank emphasized. The ones she calls, “Coca-Cola moments,” from her first recognition of this following the death of her grandfather.

image: pixabay

“My grandfather broke his leg, went into the hospital, and died. He and my grandmother had a lifetime romance.” 

A tragic but all-too-common end to a long relationship, a few moments out of trillions in chronological time. But in this case, marked by a moment that became family legend as the bereaved grandmother, exhausted and sweltering in her black mourning clothes in the heat of a Texas summer day exclaimed, “I’d give $100 to anyone who gets me a Coca-Cola.”

And for that moment, time shifted from the ever-ticking present to an eternal kairos in which the grandmother’s cry of grief and physical anguish would be suspended for generations. And then, as always in our human condition, melded seamlessly again into chronological time.

Every life has those defining moments. And so must every character if there’s any hope of readers care for her. 

Frank challenged her audience not just to recount their character’s progress through events, but to understand how those events define the character. 

“Everybody has 12 defining moments. If you ask a 6-year-old, they’ve got 12 defining moments. If they’re 60, they’ve also got 12,” although not necessarily the same 12, she said, urging us to remember those 12 moments for ourselves and notating them both in kairos and chronos time. 

“In a book, you are trying to stuff in as many kairos moments as you can, because you’re trying to stop time for your readers. We’re trying to consolidate a life into a book. This is the fourth dimension, because you’re moving through time. I think this is the thing that brings the most magic to fiction.”

And it occurred to me that the definitive, time-suspending nature of the kairos moments were also the essence of Benjamin Percy’s discussion of “Set Pieces: Staging the Iconic Scene,” in his book on fictional craft, Thrill Me, reviewed earlier at this site. 

“What do you remember when you think about the films splintered into your psyche?" Percy writes. "There are probably several pivotal scenes—scenes of spectacle, scenes of horror or joy or absurdity or shock or profound empathy—that you cannot forget.

“Riffle through the catalog of literature and something similar will occur…those moments that exist like dreams—or life, if only life could be so full.”

Find them, use them, and give them their due, without worrying about getting to the next plot point, Frank said. “Your readers don’t want to get to the next thing. They want to be there.”

 ***

Given that Frank is head of SMU’s creative writing program, she did dwell on a few moments of chronos time, including an upcoming information program at 7 p.m., May 22 on SMU’s programs, including an upcoming workshop in Taos, New Mexico, “The mystery of writing a mystery.”

Conveniently, this will give writers interested in writing mysteries time to prepare before the World Mystery Convention, Bouchercon arrives in Dallas Halloween weekend of next year!

The information program in SMU’s Dallas Hall, but Frank recommends registering for it, to get the perk of a parking pass on the university campus. For registration and additional information, see SMU’s creative writing site. 

Review: Tips from genre fiction add thrills to any writing

Review of: Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

Author: Benjamin Percy
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Grade: A

I’ve loved Benjamin Percy’s essays in Poets & Writers magazine, where he evoked the power of thrills and chills, horror and terror to inspire even the most literary of writers. He's a writer who can both contribute to Esquire and write comic book series. Now he’s gathered more than a dozen of his essays on writing into Thrill Me, a volume dedicated to putting the power of genre writing into literary fiction. Or, if you please, showing genre writers how to hone their most cherished tools without descending into clichés.

“When people ask if I grew up a reader, I say yes, but not the type of reader they image: a small, scholarly child with glasses perched on the end of his nose. . . A book was never far from my hand – balanced on my nightstand, shoved into a back pocket, tucked into the glove compartment of the truck – but usually it was a broken-spined mass-market paperback with an embossed title.”

From a boyhood immersed in the words of Zane Grey, Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy; fighting alongside Conan the Cimmerian; zipping breathlessly through hundreds of thousands of pages by the likes of Anne Rice and Stephen King, Percy dropped with a shock into a creative writing class whose rule was: no genre submissions. 

Miraculously, he survived and indeed fell in love with the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro and more, and realized that in spite of his omnivorous reading, he had failed to understand, “the careful carpentry of storytelling.” 

It was from those literary writers that he realized the basic rules of story had been in plain sight all along, even in the goriest and most shocking of genre tales. And in Thrill Me, he lays them out for his readers (and fellow writers). 

First things, though, Thrill Me isn’t a cook book. In fact, at one point Percy assures us that there are no rules. Except there are “rules” which writers are free to break – once they’ve mastered those rules and understand what they’re doing. And if they can make the breaking work.

However, for a refresher of “rules,” Percy starts with the first commandment of all storytelling: establish a clear narrative goal, and takes us through the steps needed to develop a sense of urgency in readers (“. . . the most basic reason we read (is) to discover what happens next”).

He follows this with discussions of how to stage the kind of “set pieces” – the pivotal scenes “that you cannot forget. . . that (readers) will take with them to their grave.” (Tip: be sure a short story has at least one such scene, a novel at least four.) And of the basic methods for designing suspense; how to deal with backstory (his preference is to eliminate backstory – except of course, when the backstory works); of the importance of setting; and the uses of interior monologue (“There is nothing wrong with characters thinking. . . so long as it is strategically employed”).

And yes, he tackles that bugaboo of genre writing: violence. “The concern here is not with what is moral, or right, or proper, but rather with what is effective, asking how depictions of violence best serve a story,” quoting that “dark-hearted godmother of literary fiction,” Flannery O’Connor: “the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.”

But lest we forget, Percy warns us that merely splashing buckets of gore across the pages can throw readers out of our stories, in the manner of excessive special effects in movies – “I’m not weeping or laughing or even gripping my armrests . . . I’m simply marveling at the way computers can create illusions.”

One of the “rules” of writing – if it feels like writing, cut it – applies as well to depictions of violence as to depictions of pretty scenery.

More even than the how-tos of dealing with violence, I give Percy an A for his attitude toward revision. After spending a year rewriting his third novel, his editor’s take was “Fantastic. Exactly what we wanted. Now would you mind cutting. . . and fixing. . . and while we’re at it, how about let’s rethink the ending?”

It’s enough to make a writer cry. Of laugh, reread the rules, pick up the tools, and try again.