Stuck in a time hole
Everything, everywhere, all at once
Obviously the moment I decided to start this blog/newsletter for real and hit ‘publish’ on my first post, I panicked. People are supposed to be regular and predictable with this sort of stuff – and I’d thought posting once every couple of weeks sounded good. Not too much that it’s intrusive, not too little that I forget I’m even doing it. Just right.
One small problem: my sense of time is appalling.
Conversely I’m usually good at hitting deadlines because a) someone else has an expectation of me and I don’t like letting people down, and b) I try to view them as sacred, immovable objects. But when it comes to managing, judging, or understanding the flow of time, I’m definitely less the sluice gate, more the person drowning.
My sense of time has always been pretty bad, but it got even worse after one particularly fuzzy night about 20 years ago when I somehow convinced myself (and I can’t exactly remember the details of how or why, now) that time isn’t linear at all – but that *everything* is happening simultaneously, and our experience of it as linear is an illusion created by our brains. I know, I know. It was a heavy night. But because my brain apparently has trouble processing time anyway, the idea sort of stuck.
Think of it like a book. It’s only when a person is reading and experiencing it that the story becomes linear. At rest, with the book’s pages pressed together, it is one big lump of information with every moment essentially equal and parallel – it is its whole self, all at once. (I could start rattling on about what happens to time inside black holes, here, but I will not do that to you. This is my problem, not yours.)
It’s not really a view I’m advocating. It can be quite upsetting if something bad happens to think that that’s something that’s happening forever, on some level. (A little more comforting if it’s a good thing.) But it can be quite useful to use this in writing. As the writer you sort of *need* to be outside of time – at least, outside of the book’s time. When I wrote Nevertell I knew I wanted the first line of the story to be directly echoed in the first line of the last chapter – what became the epilogue. Both lines start: In the depths of Siberia, in harshest cold… and go on from there. (Loads if not most books make some sort of reference back to the beginning at the very end – whether it’s directly or indirectly using an image or a symbol of some sort, so I wasn’t exactly smashing new boundaries. But I like the way it links the start and finish.)
Approaching time this way when writing can help you to connect certain moments that would otherwise be separated by sequence, using language, a setting, or whatever you want, really. And when you do think of everything happening at the same time – at least when it's inside a work of fiction – it can help you understand and give weight to certain moments in a whole new way. If you’re a writer you might do something akin to this, or perhaps it’s something you’d like to try.
If you want to immerse yourself in the idea, imagine that we’re just information that’s inside a black hole (which we all will be one day, apparently, and therefore following that logic already are) meaning that everything is simultaneous, like a closed book... Or, don’t. If you get too hung up on it in real life you tend to end up missing dinner. And anyway, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve now discovered the ‘schedule’ button.
In other news:
Speaking of deadlines, I’ve got less than a week left to work on my current manuscript before I send it back to my agent (she read the first draft and sent me off with some notes to essentially bulk it up a bit, as it was a little bare bones. Was it the great Terry Pratchett who said that a first draft is basically you telling yourself the story? I agree with that – mine are usually a lot of action sequences strung together tenuously, that then need fleshing out). I’ve also been reading Network Effect by Martha Wells – one of the Murderbot Diary series which are my absolute favourites. I think I’ll throw a few book posts on here at some point soon actually: some adult reads (probably sci fi/fantasy) and some of my favourite children’s books that could also make great class reads. Let me know if you’d like that, and also tell me: do you think fortnightly posts are too frequent? Not frequent enough? Just right? Let me know what you think.