Unlocking Time: How Jumping Timelines Can Revolutionize Your Writing Craft
How does the spiral of time connect to writing?
As memoir and creative nonfiction writers, we are given the amazing opportunity to play with time. If we freely enter the spiral in the writing process, we open ourselves up to connections we may not have imagined. Often in memoir writing we gain new insights about ourselves, and access to patterns and connections we may have missed while living the events. This is how the looping of time allows us to cycle through the layers of experience.
It is a natural way to write and explore our story. We can easily move through the spiral, because it is our lived experience. The key is to manage that complexity in the revisions, which means providing markers for your reader of where we are in time. Some tips here are adding dates to the start of the chapter or sections of the chapter, providing ages/dates within the narrative, to provide clear markers like “When I was younger,” “In the past I,” etc. The writer can also rearrange the pieces to return the story to a chronological, linear narrative in the revision stage. The editing process allows you to return to the time system you prefer, but it is important in the draft stage that you don’t lock yourself into a timeline that doesn’t seem to match the way you are experiencing the story as you write.
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