Short Story
Month 2017—Part 6: Short Story Writers on Time in the Story
Julio
Cortezar: The short-story writer knows
that he can’t proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His own solution is to work vertically,
heading up or down in literary space.
Maurice
Shadbolt: The real challenge is to pull
as much of life as a story can bear into the fewest possible pages: to produce,
if possible, that hallucinatory point in which time past and time future seems
to co-exist with time present, that hallucinatory point which to me defines the
good or great short story..."
Russell Banks: The short story and the novel bear greatly different relations to time. The novel, I think, has a mimetic relation to time. The novel simulates the flow of time, so once you get very far into a novel, you forget where you began—just as you do in real time. Whereas with a short story the point is not to forget the beginning. The ending only makes sense if you can remember the beginning. I think the proper length for a short story is to go as far as you can without going so far that you have forgotten the beginning.
Russell Banks: The short story and the novel bear greatly different relations to time. The novel, I think, has a mimetic relation to time. The novel simulates the flow of time, so once you get very far into a novel, you forget where you began—just as you do in real time. Whereas with a short story the point is not to forget the beginning. The ending only makes sense if you can remember the beginning. I think the proper length for a short story is to go as far as you can without going so far that you have forgotten the beginning.
Jayne Anne
Phillips: “I think that stories in
reality are often circular; past and present and future are mixed up in terms
of the way we think; and the closer a story can get to that—the more completely
it can represent that—the more timeless the story becomes.
David Means: In a short story you’d better do something with time or it’ll feel short.
