Writing Prompt: The Surprising Power of Slowing (& Even Stopping) Time
The astonishing power of slowing time in writing & how to do it + Carolyn Forche's "poetry of witness," Ocean Vuong's magnification of a moment & Joy Williams on why writers love the dark
Walking Naked Men. Marey Wheel Photographs of Unidentified Model (ca. 1884) by Thomas Eakins
When I was a little girl, my mother was into things like talking to her plants and astral travel. I did not think these ideas were weird (and still don’t, tbh). This was the 1970s. I thought it made perfect sense and was not only determined to leave my body, but also—although I was not sure where this fit into the schema of astral travel—I sought to bend spoons with my mind. I tried repeatedly to accomplish these feats, with no success (well, at least with the spoons; I don’t actually know enough about astral travel to be able to discern if I ever left my body, even if briefly).
What I do know is that writers not only can but must practice astral travel, to a certain degree, in order to fully inhabit worlds and even psyches beyond our own. Here is how fiction writer Joy Williams describes it (from Maria Papova’s The Marginalian, excerpting Williams’ essay in the anthology Why I Write):
And how have I become so enmeshed with works, mere works, phantoms?
[…]
A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough. (Making contact with the self — healing the wound — is even less satisfactory.) Writers end up writing stories — or rather, stories’ shadows — and they’re grateful if they can but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.
She considers the generative power of awareness:
The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the absurdity, the disorienting truth, the question that is not even a question, this is the koan of writing.
[…]
A writer’s awareness must never be inadequate. Still, it will never be adequate to the greater awareness of the work itself, the work that the writer is trying to write. The writer must not really know what he is knowing, what he is learning to know when he writes, which is more than the knowing of it. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light. The writer is separate from his work but that’s all the writer is — what he writes. A writer must be smart but not too smart. He must be dumb enough to break himself to harness.
And in addition to moving in and of other worlds and psyches, writers also have the ability move through time in all directions. We can speed time up, jump forward in time, flash forward in time and then return to the present (or past) moment, and we can flash back in time. Importantly, we can also elongate and even stop time.
Elongating and stopping time is a profoundly powerful technique on the page, and not difficult to accomplish. It's really about magnifying a single moment, entering into a state of slow motion, where everything becomes hyper-specific and realer than real, and where you use many “frames” to (like a cartoonist or filmmaker) to move through a moment that you could otherwise pass through more quickly.
This technique is about close observation, yes, and it relies on carefully wrought exterior detail (highly specific, concrete, sensory detail that lives outside of your own body, in the physical world that I can see, hear, touch, and smell).
So it's about all of that, but it's also about how we can, if we slow down enough, find our way into meaning through a single moment. How we might, if we slow time, find a moment that adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts.
When we focus only on the exterior details of a situation, with little or no explanation or analysis, we can sometimes accomplish something extraordinary, as Carolyn Forche does in her "poetry of witness." Forche’s poem "The Colonel" is a stunning example. Just consider this sliver of a moment, made huge by the quality of detached, granular observation and estranged language:
His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house.
Slowing or stopping time, because it commands such close attention from the reader, provides us the perfect opportunity to say something important—to “leap” into a moment(s) of interiority or desire or offer very brief potentized interpretations of the moment. Watch how Ocean Vuong does that in this short excerpt from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous:
But one night I heard someone praying.
Through the lightless window of a street-level apartment, a man’s voice in Arabic. I recognized the word Allah. I knew it was a prayer by the tone he used to lift it, as if the tongue was the smallest arm from which a word like that could be offered. I imagined it floating above his head as I sat there on the curb, waiting for the soft clink I knew was coming. I wanted the word to fall, like a screw in a guillotine, but it didn’t. His voice, it went higher and higher, and my hands, they grew pinker with each inflection. I watched my skin intensify until, at last, I looked up— and it was dawn. It was over. I was blazed in the blood of light.
Salat alfajr: a prayer before sunrise. “Whoever prays the dawn prayer in congregation,” said the Prophet Muhammad, “it is as if he had prayed the whole night long.”
I want to believe, walking those aimless nights, that I was praying. For what I’m still not sure. But I always felt it was just ahead of me. That if I walked far enough, long enough, I would find it—perhaps even hold it up, like a tongue at the end of its word.
The important thing to note about these examples from Forche and Vuong is how they remain in a moment (well, Vuong departs from the moment very briefly to give us the quote from Muhammad, but then returns to the moment, but from an interior perspective, as he tells us how overhearing the man praying in the street-level apartment made him feel; this is “the leap” I mentioned earlier, and the narrator’s expression of want here is made more visceral for us by the slowing of exterior time that precedes it).
This week’s writing exercise offers a step-by-step method for experimenting with this technique. You’ll be invted to begin, as usual, by letting your mind wander over many possible "moments" you might magnify. Try to keep your moment to no more than a slice of about 10 minutes in real time. Try to include very ordinary moments (e.g., buttering toast) and more extraordinary moments (e.g., a child's first tooth coming out or, as with Forche, a moment of violence, injustice, or grief). The thing to remember is that this moment should ideally include not only the protagonist, but at least one other character or animate being. You will be more successful with this exercise if your narrator is watching something happen, versus just thinking about something. Thinking alone, without observation of the here and now (even in past tense) cannot offer us the opportunity for close granular details that this exercise depends upon, and it can easily lose its way from the moment, which dilutes the effect.
So, let’s give it a try.
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