Another method to imply time passing is intercutting. End one scene and jump to a flashback, alternating between the past and present. That way, when you jump back to the present you won’t have to arrive at the moment you left off. Each jump allows you to fudge time, implying it’s passed.
Or you can intercut between characters. Think of the various plot threads in John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. As each character meets an obstacle, we jump to a different character. It’s maddening if the reader is invested in just one character, but every jump moves us forward in time.
Or cut between big voice and little voice. With this in mind, think of the varied chapters in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. At times we’re with the Joad family as little-voice narration depicts them on their journey. Other times we’re reading a big-voice passage that looks down in a generalized way to comment about the drought, the stream of displaced migrants, or the wary landowners and lawmen in California. Then we cut back to the Joads farther along their route. Then we cut to a big-voice chapter about the weather and the rising floods. Then we cut back to the family.
If you were my student I’d hem and haw but eventually tell you about using the space break to imply time passing. You just end a scene or passage and allow a wide margin of blank page before you begin a new scene. I’m told that early pulp novels used no chapter breaks. They just used smaller space breaks so publishers could avoid the blank page or page and a half that might be wasted between chapters. This saved a few pages of newsprint in each book, and that helped the profit margin.
In my novel Beautiful You I used space breaks instead of chapter breaks because I wanted to mimic the appearance of mass-market pornographic paperback books. In 1984 Orwell mentions pornographic novels written by machine for the proletariat—that and the raunchy, absurd genre of “Slash” fiction inspired me to mimic their use of white space for transitions.
The writer Monica Drake tells of studying under Joy Williams in the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Williams scanned a story submitted to the workshop and sighed, “Ah, white space…the writer’s false friend.”
Perhaps it’s because a space break—without cutting to something different, a different time period or character or voice—can allow the writer to revisit the same elements without creating tension. For example, if we use space breaks to cut between the events in Robert’s day, the story could get monotonous. But if we cut back and forth between Robert and Cynthia and some ancestor of them both in Renaissance Venice, the reader gets time away from each element and can better appreciate it and worry about outcomes.
So if you were my student I’d allow you to start out using space breaks to imply the passage of time. But don’t get comfortable. Those training wheels are going to come off sooner rather than later. Textures: Lists
To add a new texture to any story never hesitate to insert a list. Look at the guest list inserted so beautifully at the beginning of chapter 4 in The Great Gatsby. Bret Easton Ellis once told me that Fitzgerald’s list inspired the guest list in Glamorama. Also look at Tim O’Brien’s lists in The Things They Carried. A favorite is chapter 18 from Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. There the main character pursues a girl through the standing sets of a Hollywood movie studio of the 1920s. Strung together are fake monuments and antiquities, every culture and time period in history crammed cheek-to-jowl, the modern world juxtaposed with dinosaurs. It might be the most perfectly surreal passage in all literature.
If you were my student I’d tell you to read it, chapter 18, then to read the sequence in Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon where an earthquake causes a flood at a similar Hollywood studio and the main character looks on as a long parade of fake monuments and antiquities goes floating past. Note how West has us moving through his litany of objects while Fitzgerald fixes us in one place as the objects move.
Lists break up the page, visually. They force the reader to really read word by word. I loved listing the colors of Ikea furniture in Fight Club, and my dream for Adjustment Day was to write a book of lists that all supported a mythic, unseen list of people to be assassinated.
So, lists. Use them. Textures: Depict a Social Model through Repetition
Do you remember how, as a child, you could throw some boards on the ground and dictate a new reality? “The dirt is lava. The boards are the only safe way across.” Kids can instantly imagine a new setting. They make up the rules. The world becomes what they mutually agree it will be. The tree is safe. The sidewalk is enemy territory.
If you were my student I’d tell you a secret that Barry Hannah told me: “Readers love that shit.”
Barry Hannah
Just look at the successful novels that dictate how people should behave in a group. Novels like How to Make an American Quilt and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and The Joy Luck Club. These are groups bound by the rules and rituals they’ve agreed upon. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is another of the many books that model a way for women to come together and share their stories. For men, there are fewer examples. The only ones that come to mind are The Dead Poets Society and, of course, Fight Club.
My guess is that people haven’t a clue how to get along. They need a structure, rules, and roles to play. Once those are established, people can gather and compare their lives. They can learn from each other.
Tom Spanbauer always said, “Writers write
