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Staying in Place & Breaking Time




"Chronology doesn’t interest me. I don’t like its linear map. I avoid its signposts." ~ Sinéad Gleeson

 Time is weird right now. My family and I have been more or less only in our own home for three weeks. I'm losing track of days. I looked at the calendar recently and was shocked to see that it was still March. Still March, I thought. How? The days are both long and short, time simultaneously stretched and compressed in this period of both utter sameness and wild, uncharted newness. 

 You're probably feeling this too. 

 It has me thinking about time's fluidity and fragmentation, and it has me reading fragmented narratives. One of my favorite examples of a fragmented narrative is the incomparable Bluets, by Maggie Nelson--her meditation on the color blue, but also, of course, so much more. Another is Anthony Doerr's novel All the Light We Cannot See. (Both of these, by the way, include mature content that may not suit readers of all ages and sensibilities, so I recommend checking out reviews and previews--and having a conversation with your adult--before picking them up yourself.) 

 There are plenty of short stories and essays that utilize the fragmented narrative to explore the nature of time, of memory, of identity, of trauma, and of perspective/point of view. Here, for instance, is Melissa Febos's "Call My Name"; and here is Kevin Wilson's "The Dead Sister Handbook." And here is an essay on fragmentation as craft (from which that line heading this post is taken) by Sinéad Gleeson. 

 Today's writing exercise is a riff on this theme. Play with breaking up your narrative, with abandoning the need for transitions, explicit bridges, and time markers. Let go of linear plot and chronology. See what happens!

 Exercise:

 Write about staying in one place. What does that mean for your character/narrator? Where is your character/narrator? Why stay there? What is the emotional outcome of staying in place? And is "staying in place" literal or metaphorical for your character/narrator? How does staying in place bend or warp or erase time? What does that look like on the page?

 * If you're stuck and need a place to begin, borrow from the Gleeson quote above. Start with a map of where your character is staying. 

 * Write in any form that makes sense to you (fiction, essay, hybrid, poetry, etc.). 
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