Writing Challenge
The Sliding Bubble of NOW
by Jeni Grossman, ANWA General Vice President
An excellent way to add color and variety to your writing is to be flexible with time and place. Mike McNally, my writing teacher at ASU, called this "The sliding bubble of NOW." Almost all good writing uses this technique which can add layers, background, and hints about the future to your stories. It also allows the author to create tension and suspense, and to do more showing (by briefly entering other setting in the past, present, or future) rather than telling--which we all know is one of the keys to powerful writing.
Learning this technique gives the writer an endless array of story elements to add richness and variety to any tale. As long as you let the reader know when he is back to the actual timeline of your story, it will work quite well for you. For more practice, pick up any well-written book and look for examples of this technique.
To explain how the "sliding bubble of NOW" works, I created some scenes and dialogue to show how to move your reader back and forth in time and place. Even though you move the reader to other places in other time periods, you use the present tense to create a sense of immediacy.
* * *
As Gloria touched the tarnished silver urn from the box in the attic, she was suddenly transported to her wedding shower in her aunt's backyard almost thirty years before. She saw the tissue fall away from the box as she gasped at the name of the sender. Looking up, all of her friends from Chicago--thirty years younger, of coures, laughed and crowded closer to see the gift.
"Are you sure it's from the Bill Gardener, the guy who broke your heart in the tenth grade?" asked Kate Ollander, her organdy dress fluttering in the breeze off the lake.
(provides back story)
* * *
Jim lovingly cleaned and oiled his hunting rifle--a possession that would change his life forever in a few short days--then he put it back in the tall glass cabinet, forgetting to lock it as he always had before.
(foreshadowing)
* * *
Taking a drink of the familiar brackish well water made Hank realize he had always had a bad taste in his mouth when he visited his uncle's farm. There had always been too much work during the summers when he was a boy. So much work, he had very nearly missed getting to know Delia Ledbetter who had become the love of his life until her death two years ago.
Though Uncle Walt had been in the Owl River Retirement Home for the past five years, Hank could still hear him calling out from the barn to come help him with the hay.
"I can't! I got something important to tend to!" he yelled back, already running toward the back fence where sweet, pig-tailed Delia leaned, smiling, tapping her foot impatiently.
"Wouldn't ya rather pitch hay, today, Hank Tully?" she asked impishly . . .
(shows rather than tells how Hank felt about the woman he married)
* * *
The phone rang twelve times until Frank finally decided that Laura had left for Seattle without calling the car lot to say good-bye as she usually did. Ignoring his urge to go home to check on her ("promptings," they always called them at church), Frank went back to selling cars. He wouldn't discover till he got home that evening that Laura had slipped in the shower and had been lying unconscious while the phone rang and rang not five feet away.
At work that afternoon, he sold more cars than he had all that week. In fact, the guys took him out to lunch for having been top salesman that month.
"What'll you have? You just order the best, Frank. I've never seen a new salesman do as well as you have!" said Will Stettler, the boss Frank had feared since he took the job . . .
(allows the reader to know something the character does not know--creates tension by contrasting the ordinary events of Frank's day with the emergency that is really occurring at home) |