For three weeks, I’ll be blogging about time as an essential part of narrative structure. I’ll be teaching a 3-week class called “Time in Narration” on this subject on Tuesday nights beginning Oct. 4. In the class, which covers both fiction and nonfiction, we’ll be reading, writing, investigating our default choices, and developing our chronological sensibilities. We hope you’ll join us.
Definition: Terroir (pronounced terre-wahr) “Originally a French term in wine, coffee, and tea used to denote the special characteristics that the geography, geology and climate of a certain place bestowed upon particular varieties.”
In the viniculture world especially, aficionados know that the slightest differences in the history of a grape flavor the later wine product, making it something subtle, special, worth savoring. In the world of fiction and creative nonfiction, too, a character has terroir: a history or backstory uniquely his or her own, whether we as readers discover nearly everything in that past or just sense it as a richness, a complicated realness, with all the depth and nuances of a fine wine.
How does a writer convey that depth? One way is through a more skilled handling of narrative time.
Memoirists seem particularly aware of the possibilities for shifting back and forth, blending the narrator’s “voice of experience” with his or her “voice of innocence” (two important varietals in the mix). But take a close look at a nuanced memoir, and you’ll see that there usually aren’t just two stances or timelines (narrator’s current stance in adulthood and a linearly conveyed childhood, say) on the page. A lot of nonlinear storytelling happens in a good memoir, with multiple shifts and flashbacks or even a non-linear series of flashbacks. Even within a scene, there will be subtle micromovements in time, as a character thinks back or anticipates forward, sometimes in no more than a phrase. Those little shifts, combined with larger flashbacks and sections of backstory, revealed in a voice that varies in its capacity to reflect and interpret, all combine to create layers and flavors that a reader will sense and appreciate even without pausing to analyze. That’s the terroir. That’s the richness and complexity of good writing on the page, where a story is much more than just the linear rehashing of event: “then,” and “then,” and “then.”
In the class I’ll be teaching beginning Oct. 4, we’ll analyze many examples, including one longer section from Dani Shapiro’s memoir, Slow Motion. In that memoir — even in just a handful of pages at a time — we meet many versions of Dani: the young woman coping with the first days of her parents’ near-fatal car accident, the woman who entered into a glamorous but damaging affair four years earlier, the young girl who was told all too often that her good looks and pretty face were her most important assets, and the mature woman who has survived it all and will go on to become a writer and a maker of meaning.
If you’re the autodidact type, try this the next time you’re reading a rich, multi-layered memoir: in 5 or 10 pages, mark out all the shifts in time, from longer flashbacks to subtle mentions of past events or hints of future changes to come, as well as shifts in voice or reflective capability. You may find there is more movement than you realized between a character’s present actions and her negotiation with shifting memories, passing thoughts, and a changing sense of self. A character who stays relentlessly in the linearly described moment seems not only less interesting, but less real– worth a quick taste, perhaps, but not worth savoring.
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Thanks for sharing!
Nice post, Andromeda. Interesting to take note of this time-shifting in a piece of writing, fiction or nonfiction–and to think of how consciously the writer makes it happen.