Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland

There are lots of moments from Gabriel’s childhood that I want in slowed scene.

The slower the action, the more important it must be to the story. Yaa Gyasi isn’t satisfied with even one lifetime-her first novel, Homegoing, unfurls across eight generations. Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things traces the life of Alma Whittaker from the moment she is born to the moment she dies, nearly a century later. We set our stories over weeks, months and years. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” takes place over the course of-no surprise here-an hour, Ian McEwan’s Saturday a single day. How much time passes is up to the writer. Most stories, in the Western literary tradition at least, are linear, which means the narrative moves forward in time.

So, how is it that I don’t have a better handle on where the last 18 years have gone? In fiction, time is flexible, and if I manipulate it carefully, my story’s pacing is neither too fast nor too slow. The success of my books is dependent, in part, on how deftly I can manage this most precious of commodities. I’m a novelist who spends a lot of my time thinking about time. I spent hours looking through old pictures, trying to figure out how it was possible that this child of mine could be both the wide-eyed baby staring up at me from an exersaucer and the young man sitting across from me at our dining room table. My son, Gabriel, turned 18 a few days ago, and while I’d like to say that I am generally good with birthdays-even milestone birthdays-I was not particularly good with this one. The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter- sign up here.

Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland