To create a narrative world is to create an intricate web of relationships. Everything—from the writer’s sense of the material, to a character’s situation, to sequence in language, paragraphs, and chapters, to a reader’s experience—is relational, suspended in time-space.  

In your stories, novels, flash fiction, and narrative non-fiction, from larger patterning to decisions about pacing, rhythm, and silence, precision with time is foundational to a reader’s experience. Consider your own current or future projects: how might you approach the larger scale questions of beginning and ending points, chapters, sections, or continuous movement, backward and forward shifting, woven time frames, scene and summary, pacing, compression and dilation, ellipses, temporal leaps, stop-time moments/stills, and/or non-progressive time? Are you working with representations of memory? What about character perception? How might tense affect your story? What about variations in speed, the impacts of your style, the degree of space within a text? Or the rhythms in the prose, your choices in syntax and diction? For all of these, time and the (implicitly temporal) ordering of perception is elemental to reader experience.      

Our workshop will be a chance to investigate and play with narrative time and reader perception, and to consider a broad array of available choices and tools, including image and repetition. The session will include generative work. It will likely be of most use to writers beyond introductory level; all are welcome.

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• In-Class Writing Lift: Medium

• Homework: None

• Workshopping Drafts: None

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