Ayeşgül Savaş on Creating Your Story’s Clock

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . In a letter to his friend John Fisher, the landscape painter John Constable writes that “it will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment… The sky is the source of light in nature and governs everything.” I know this from a small, square-shaped book of Constable’s sky paintings on my writing desk. I put the book there when I was starting the second draft of my novel The Anthropologists , so that I could remind myself of the tone I was trying to achieve in my book; my attempt to capture the various, shifting skies of a day. Most inspiring for me are Constable’s clouds—luminous, puffed out and weightless; or moody and drifting. I never tire of looking at them for their fickleness, the way they capture the light, and drag darkness behind them. These clouds are the mood for my book, which has nothing to do with meteorology, though it has to do a lot with everyday life. In The Anthropologists , I wanted to meditate on the daily textures of a couple’s life: their friendships, their weekends, their video-chats with parents, the TV shows they watch, the foods they eat on a festive evening and on a lazy one. I wanted to meditate, that is, on the various skies of everyday life. Just as clouds are the clocks of our days, my book ran to the meter of many internal measures of time that make up our routines. All novels have clocks built into them—the time in which the story unfolds, be that in the form of generations, the duration of a single day, the span of a season, a pregnancy, a journey, a homecoming or reunion. It was the writer Sabina Murray, a master of fictional time, who shifted my attention to clocks during two weeks we spent teaching in Mexico. In Murray’s latest novel, The Human Zoo , the clock is […]

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