The title of this newsletter comes from Claire Keegan. In an interview in The Guardian, she said:
“Because fiction is a temporal art, it’s based on time that’s irreversibly passing in one direction. And I think one of the things that makes reading possible, or pleasurable, is that everybody knows what a day is, whether you’re on a farm in Ireland or at the top of a building in Shanghai. It’s what makes translation possible. And one day we won’t get to the end of that day. And that piece of time between now and then is called our lives. And I think if you’re a fiction writer, you want to say something meaningful about that.”
I chose that title for this newsletter because I love this quote. The shared experience of a day, the passage of time. Other writers may say they’re interested in understanding character or humanity, but Keegan’s emphasis on time and movement and the fact that it all ends is fascinating to me. It took me years to understand that the passage of time is at the root of everything that I write. I am rarely interested in writing about what happens over the course of a day or even a month but, instead, I’m intrigued by how people change over the course of their lifetimes. How the past weighs on the present and the future.
I am naturally drawn, then, to writers who are interested in the same. I recently read Colm Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing. Tóibín moves back and forth in time in the life of Eamon Redmond; the novel begins as Redmond is considering his retirement. Slowly, through these shifts back and forward in time, we begin to understand why present-moment Redmond is the way he is. Interestingly—and perhaps of note to those of us who struggle with middles—the novel pretty much skips over the middle years of Redmond’s life. Beginnings and endings seem to carry the most weight. If you’re writing something that is thinking about how childhood and later life are linked, you might want to take a look at this. It’s really subtle and masterful.
Joan Silber is another wonderful writer who is always thinking about time. Her craft book, The Art of Time in Fiction, part of the Greywolf craft series, is a book I refer to again and again. She breaks down how to use time in different ways, a chapter on each kind of time, with terrific examples that make everything crystal clear. “Evolution,” her most recent story in The New Yorker, uses the retrospective voice and covers many years in the character’s life. I love the title of the story because it works on so many levels, not the least of which is how not only the character but the reader evolves as the story unfolds.
My debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea, covers over thirty years, starting in 1940 and ending in 1977. There is a timeline that runs across the bottom of each page, so the reader always knows where they are in time but it also, I think, underscores the fact that this is a novel about time. I like the fact that the timeline reminds us of other events happening in the world, as the focus of the novel—the world of these characters—unfolds. Recently, someone asked me about the plot of the novel. I said it was about two families, over time. “But,” he said. “In most novels, something happens.” Yes, I thought to myself. Something does happen. In fact, everything happens. Characters live and characters die. It’s all about “that piece of time between now and then.”
And so we begin and end with Claire Keegan. If you haven’t read her yet, you are in for a treat. All of her work is short: Small Things Like These is just over 100 pages and Foster—which Keegan considers a long short story, not a novel—is closer to 90. As Keegan said, “I think something needs to be as long as it needs to be.” Good practical advice, in writing and in life.
Small Things Like These (novel; shortlisted for the 2022 Booker)
Foster (novel, also available as a short story)
Walk the Blue Hills (short story collection)
Antarctica (short story collection)
See you in two weeks!
*Perhaps you too would like to spend the rest of your day singing along with Simon & Garfunkel.