Shifting Time Zones
Travelling from past to present on the page
Last issue’s thoughts on struggling to find time to write seem to have struck a chord. It’s funny, because I was nervous about hitting send on that one, worried that in admitting my own deficits, I’d be opening myself up to judgment, that perhaps subscribers would cancel in droves. Instead, many of you sent messages about your own struggles and strategies, and words of encouragement and connection. I think there’s a lesson in there…
Craft: Back and Forth
As I’ve been reading Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, the story of her assault by rapist Brock Turner and its aftermath, I’ve been struck by how effectively Miller shuttles back and forth in time, weaving the background of her past (and her family’s past) through the main storyline of her rape and the court case that followed. It’s tricky, for a number of reasons. Timelines are always challenging and a linear “start at the beginning and end at the end” structure seems like the obvious best choice. Except where’s the beginning? And where is the end?
For Miller’s story, the obvious beginning of her story is the day of the assault. But understanding Miller and the community in which she lived, the context in which the assault and trial took place, requires backstory. If you told Miller’s story in a completely linear fashion, you might start the book with Miller’s childhood and the assault, the incident that is at the heart of the story, wouldn’t happen until two-thirds of the way through the book. But as a reader, the “why” of the story wouldn’t be clear, and the relevance of the details about her childhood and family would be equally opaque. The purpose of the backstory only becomes clear when we understand it in reference to the story in the foreground.
Why did Miller write this book? Because she wrote a victim impact statement that resonated with millions, containing insights forged in the furnace of a hellish journey through the justice system. We’re reading because we want to learn from what she knows about the criminal justice system and the impact of rape culture on women’s lives. Knowing that tells us what the story in the foreground should be: her assault and the trial, because that’s where the story of her insight and transformation resides.
But we still need backstory—so where does it go? One possibility: alternating chapters of the main storyline with the backstory. But that approach poses challenges of pacing: the assault, investigation and trial have a compelling momentum, while the backstory…doesn’t. And that kind of “chunky” approach also makes drawing connections between past and present tougher.
What Miller does is more nuanced. The main storyline of the assault is the spine of her structure: each chapter covers a clear, linear section of the timeline, from the day she was raped, through the investigation, trial, her victim impact statement and the aftermath. The backstory—information about the community she grew up in, her family, Miller herself as a character—gets spooled out in short digressions.
In the first chapter, we learn in one of these asides that Miller’s dad is a retired therapist, her mom a writer who has authored four books in Chinese “which means her books are ones I cannot yet read,” Miller writes, continuing “As open as my parents are, much of their lives are unknowable to me,” a small but lovely insight. As the story progresses, we learn more about her parents, deftly inserted into the narrative where it makes sense: As Miller sits in her car outside their house, wondering when and how to tell her parents she’d been assaulted, she digresses into a section about how she and her sister Tiffany “picked up early on that they had serious discussions while walking our dogs. They’d head out in the evening, walking with arms linked, crinkly bags stuffed in their pockets. Tiffany and I would stalk them, ducking behind parked cars to listen.” A lovely little scene, inserted in just a few words, that tells us something about this family—the connection between the parents, the connection between the sisters.
When Miller does sit her parents down to tell them what happened, the tension builds as we wait for their reaction. We’re inside this dramatic moment, and Miller slides us into the past: a single paragraph about how, when she was six and her sister four, they’d been playing in the swimming pool and her mother had leapt into the water to save her sister from drowning. Then, we’re back in the moment, in the scene as Miller waits for their reaction to what she has said. Miller feels herself break in the tension of the moment and starts crying in “wet gasps” (a small but nice echo to her sister’s wet gasps in the pool). Her mother leaps to save her:
“I heard the chair scrape the wood as my mom pushed away from the table, springing up, immediate, the same way she had when my sister was drowning. She held on to me tightly, one arm locked firmly around my side, the other hand stroking my hair, whispering Mommy’s not mad, mommy’s just scared. She would be there until I found my breathing, until I felt the reassurance of ground beneath me.” (p. 43)
What’s particularly artful is that Miller is using the backstory, the details of her childhood, to create a metaphor—her mother is saving her from drowning—that both illuminates her mother’s character and provides specific information about their past. Of course her mother leaps in to save her—because that’s the kind of mother she is, she’s leapt in before to save her daughters.
Another example: later in the book, Miller is struggling emotionally but is reluctant to go to therapy. She doesn’t want to admit “the magnitude of the role this case would play in my life,” but she’s coming unravelled, fighting with her boyfriend, “volatile, enraged.” Again, she builds the tension: an argument with her boyfriend, she smashes her phone, she sits alone.
And she lets us sit in that tension for a moment too, as she digresses into a 111-word anecdote about her past:
“When I was ten, I attended a sleepaway camp, atop a hill dense with sugar pines. My dad gave me his down sleeping bag from his college years. But it had a tiny hole. When I woke up, little white goose feathers rested in my hair, all over the place, like it had snowed. Instead of asking a counselor to repair it, I decided to wait until we were scheduled to go to the art room, to get tape. I took one long piece, about six inches, and held it at the tip of my finger. After art, we had swimming, so I hid it, dangling off a bench, away from backpacks and legs and water. At night, I delicately carried the flappy piece all the way up the hill. But by then it had become wet and dusty, didn’t stick on like I hoped it would.” (p. 99)
And then the transition back to the present point in the foreground story:
“For months after the assault. I’d been carrying around this little piece of tape, planning to patch everything up on my own. But it would not be enough. You need to tell somebody, you need to seal the holes, restore your warmth, stop cleaning up the feathers. The next day, I agreed to go to therapy.” (p. 99)
She illuminates her character with evidence from her past, just as she illuminated her mother’s character with evidence from her mother’s past, and that evidence allows us to build a picture of Miller (and her mother and others) that has enough of her past to make her present actions coherent and believable, and enough of her overall story to feel that we “know” her.
These background sections serve multiple purposes.
Reinforcing evidence: They deepen the resonance and believability of the present action by presenting “evidence” that the behaviour is consistent across time.
Making insights stick: They make the insights Miller is revealing “stickier” because they’re reinforced with stories that often provide visual metaphors for the emotional truths she’s getting at.
Managing pace: They help with the emotional pacing of the book, pausing at moments of high tension to allow us to absorb information and reinforce important insights.
Controlling emotional intensity: They also often lighten the moment in some way—the image of a kid trying to keep a piece of tape sticky all day is kind of charming and gently funny, and the emotional distance of knowing this is something that happened in the more distant past allows us some breathing room in the middle of that more emotional scene of Miller’s grown-up fight with her boyfriend.
If you’re struggling to figure out how to weave present and past, foreground and backstory, one excellent resource is Sven Birkets’ The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again. (I mentioned his book in the Dec. 27 newsletter, “The best advice I could find.”) Birkets is tackling this from a slightly different perspective than I have in that the “then” he is discussing is all of the writers’ past—foreground and backstory—and the “now” is the stance, the moment, from which the writer is writing, as the writer reflects on the full arc of her story. Perhaps relabelling those three positions helps: the “then” of the backstory, the “then-now” of the foreground story, and the “now” of the writer writing the story (or what memoirist Dani Shapiro calls the “immediate future” in an interview in Writer’s Digest magazine that I quote below in the “Other Good Stuff” section). A few of Birkets’ insights:
In mining memories of childhood in particular, but also in using any memory from a time in our lives “before” some critical incident, the emotional tension is upped because of the “powerful emotions we always find when innocence is backgrounded by the unrecognized sorrows of hard experience.” (p. 165) When we “see” Miller as a little girl at sleepaway camp, trying to keep a piece of tape sticky all day, and we know what awaits grown-up Miller, we can’t help but feel sadness for what that little girl will face someday.
It’s worth noting how short Miller’s digressions are—often just one or two hundred words long. As Birkets writes: “where sufficient suspense has been created, interruption and digression (controlled, of course) can heighten rather than diminish the effect. Readers will wait eagerly for resolution, for the other shoe to drop, but they must not have forgotten the sound of the first shoe hitting the floor.” (p. 179)
It’s all in aid of deepening understanding. “The writing is in every case propelled by the need to find closure in the self, to make pattern from contingency, and to enact the drama of claiming a self from the chaos of possibility. For this reason, inescapably, memoir requires that a balance be struck between then and now, event and understanding. The manipulation of perspectives is but the means for achieving this. It reflects the restless search for sense that is universal, but which achieves its most realized expression in the artistic memoir.” (p. 187)
And finally, its appeal: “Memoir is a narrative art, but through its careful manipulation of vantage point it simulates the subjective sense of experience apprehended through memory and the corrective actions of hindsight. In other words it gives artistic form to what is the main business of our ongoing inner life. Memoir returns to the past, investigating its causes in the light of their known effects, conjuring the unresolved mysteries of fate versus chance, free will versus determinism. To read the life of another person put before us in this way is inevitably to repossess something of ourselves. The writer’s then and now stir to life our own past and present.” (pp. 190-191)
Exercises
Hit pause: Take a section of your writing that deals with a scene of high emotional intensity. Look for a point of high tension, where readers will be anxious to find out what happens next—and hit pause. Stop. Like Miller, can you reach into the backstory, into the deeper past, and find an anecdote, a story, an example that illuminates this current moment in some way? Write it tight: no more than 100 words. Insert it into the scene, and then transition back to your main storyline. Put it aside and come back to it a day later. Does the insertion illuminate your foreground story? Can you use it further to create a metaphor that deepens the point you are making in the foreground?
Hit fast-forward: Working with that same scene, consider what you now understand about the episode that you didn’t understand in the moment you were experiencing it. Near the end of the scene, use the phrase “What I wouldn’t realize until later was…” and explore what additional insights time and distance have given you on the situation. Look back at the scene: Do the insights make sense—is there strong enough evidence for these concluding insights in your original scene? If not, perhaps you need to strengthen the scene. You may decide to keep the “What I wouldn’t realize” line in or drop it out, but the purpose of the scene will be clearer if you know what insights you are driving towards.
What I’m reading: Louise Penny’s A Better Man
I’m a big Louise Penny fan, from her first Inspector Gamache novel more than a decade ago through the whole series. One of the things that Penny does so well in her mysteries is to reinforce the theme of her main story arc with echoes of that theme in secondary story lines. If the main story touches on what it means to be a good father, the secondary story lines are also subtly probing that question. In a way, it’s similar to what Chanel Miller does in developing metaphors from her past life to illuminate current episodes: crafting and editing so that the themes and insights resonate at multiple levels, with the result that what looks like background information actually functions like rebar through concrete, supporting the structure around it.
Other good stuff
Read The Jan/Feb issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine features a cover story interview with Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance and four other bestselling memoirs. She talks about struggling with the structure of Inheritance—she wrote 200 pages, which she then threw away and started over—and working to weave the present-day story of her search for answers after a DNA test revealed that the man she thought was her father was not, with the backstory of her childhood and her parents’ relationship. She says:
“I had the sense of a fulcrum in mind—a place from which I could move into the deep past—my childhood, even the past of my parents before I was born, and the ‘present’ of the story as it unfolded at such breakneck speed. But I also wanted the reader to have the awareness that I was telling the story from the slightest distance—the immediate future. The speed and intensity of the story itself needed to be slowed down. I understood that. I did think about the reader quite a bit, and wanted the reader to understand that this narrator (me) was telling the story not from the white-hot center of it, but from that very slight remove. So sentences toward the beginning clue the reader in—flashes forward, particularly the line that begins: ‘In the weeks and months to come…’”
There are some lovely insights from Shapiro in the interview about writing our own stories, including this one: “Is it possible to reject the past? I don’t think so. But it’s possible to change and shift the stories we understand about ourselves.”
Watch The Photograph, a film by Canadian director and screenwriter Stella Meghie. The New York Times calls it “an unabashedly old-school love story”, and it is: a charming romantic drama with Issa Rae as Mae and Lakeith Stanfield as Michael, a modern-day couple whose romance is influenced by the ghosts of Mae’s mother’s romantic and maternal failures. What I liked most: they’re fully-drawn characters with believable back-stories, behaving as any of us might in circumstances that are less than perfect. The structure is also interesting, as the film weaves the present and the past, and we shift from seeing Mae and Michael now, to Christina (Mae’s mother) and Isaac (a Louisiana fisherman) in the 1980s. Director Meghie’s professional story is inspirational too: she was working as a fashion publicist in New York, but dreamed of making movies—so she applied to graduate school, quit her job and started studying screenwriting. In 2016, she wrote and directed her first film, Jean of the Joneses, and has since directed three more films and numerous television episodes (Grown-ish, Insecure, and First Wives Club). I’ll be looking up her past films now too. (You can hear an interview with Meghie here.)
Listen For a lovely example of foreground and backstory in song: check out “My Favourite Picture of You,” written by the legendary Guy Clark and Nova Scotia’s Gordie Sampson. In this video of Clark, you’ll get to see the photo that inspired the song.
Willie Nelson also recorded it on the album Ride Me Back Home. You can hear Nelson’s version and read the lyrics here.
I’ve seen Sampson perform a number of times in Halifax, and I’m always fascinated by the way songwriters work together. As Clark mentions in the video, he and Sampson hadn’t met, but songwriters are often paired (I’m guessing by record labels and managers, but I’m not sure of the mechanics) to collaborate. They bring in lists of ideas or potential song titles, and throw them out to each other to see what sparks interest. On Sampson’s list that day with Clark: the phrase “My Favourite Picture of You.” Five words that prompted the creation of a lovely piece of music.
Bonus exercise: Find your favourite picture of someone you love. What story can you tell about it?
Book industry stuff
NourbeSe Philip honoured by PEN America: “The PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honoring an author of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and/or drama with $50,000, will be given to M. NourbeSe Philip for writing that has, for four decades, merged vital formal experimentation and considerations of race, gender, colonialism, and African Diasporic identity.” Philip’s most recent book is a collection of essays titled Bla_k: Essay and Interviews (Book*hug, 2017).
More romance fallout: The remaining Romance Writers of America board members have resigned + the fallout for the once-thriving Toronto chapter.
France’s #MeToo moment: Le Consentement by Vanessa Springora shines a light on a celebrated French writer and pedophile—and the people who protected him. Read the full story in this New York Times feature.
Amazon and Chapters online alternative: Bookshop, an online book site that supports independent bookstores, has launched in Beta in the US. It’s an interesting model, with a percentage of sales going to independent affiliates, promotion of local indies on sales slips, and on-site promotion through favourite book lists. Books are mailed from the distributor Ingram, and for now, it appears that the site’s stock mirrors Ingram’s catalog.
Conference advice: Thinking about signing up to attend a publishing-related conference this year? Jane Friedman has some great advice for conference attendees and presenters.
Tweets & stuff
This family photo sure prompted some interesting conversations!
Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty—and mama kitty!
These will come in handy
Obligatory picture of Buddy
Buddy says “I don’t want to go out—I want to go back upstairs to bed!”
Stuff at the bottom
I’m a writer, editor and teacher. This is my personal e-newsletter on the craft of writing nonfiction, sprinkled with occasional feminism and social justice. You can find out more about me on my website at kimpittaway.com. You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter. I’m the executive director of the MFA in Creative Nonfiction limited residency program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. If you’re interested in writing a nonfiction book, you should check our program out!
Kim, It is such a delight to have your thoughtful, wise and thought-provoking take come into my inbox on the regular! Thank you for doing this. xx andi