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 the narrator’s return to the Philippines for research, during which other clocks are set in motion: the repeating time of family meals, the disruptive time of tragedy, the hazy time of an affair. Around the time I read Murray’s novel, I started thinking about a book that would be comprised of different clocks running at different speeds. The main marker of time in The Anthropologists is the couple’s search for an apartment to buy, and within this domestic frame resides many others: the changing foliage of a city park, for example, or the slow aging of a parent that is nonetheless visible on a phone screen.

In most novels, the time structure is the stage on which the plot unfolds but it is often hidden from sight, its ropes and machinery tucked behind the curtains. This is a sleight of hand that is difficult to master. I was re-reading Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies recently, because I wanted to remember how a particular dinner scene was written. I recalled that it was very intense, and quite long, and that by the end of it the characters were weary and had nothing more to say to one another, like in a story by Raymond Carver. How had the author achieved the sense of duration?

Looking back at the scene, I was surprised to see that once the scene is set—greetings, pouring wine, sitting down to eat—the characters have a single conversation, barely three pages long; something that might last fifteen minutes in real time. The conversation is about a mugging that has happened in the dinner host’s neighborhood. She does not know the man who has been mugged; but has looked him up online and is perturbed to think that any one of them might have been in his place. This is all. And yet the conversation carries the weight of an entire evening, because of the way Kitamura has rendered it with such detail, as well as the way she slips out of dialogue to offer moments of interiority that, however brief, feel expansive: “I gazed at him across the table, that must have been what he felt when he gathered the children and sat them down, when he searched for the words to tell them that their mother was gone. Every certainty can give way with no notice.”

The sense is of looking at a soaring cloud, presaging rain, and feeling in that instant all that it will bring with it. In the next paragraph, the skies have shifted, the storm is over, and yet we still feel the lingering sense of darkness:

“Perhaps a full minute later, she looked up and smiled. What a depressing turn to the conversation, that’s my fault. She reached for the bottle of wine and poured herself another glass, and then filled both my glass and Adriaan’s (…) Not too long after that, Adriaan looked at his phone and said that we should be going, and that he would order a car.” The scene’s clock—the duration of a dinner—is tucked out of sight, until the moment that it has run its course and it’s time to leave.

Other writers will reveal the workings of their clock, lifting the curtain so we may see the machinery: think of the Big Ben striking hour after hour in Mrs Dalloway, shattering the clouds of thought with its booming announcement. In Woolf’s novels, time measured by clocks is always at odds with interior time, and the two streams are what give her works their intense feeling, the sense that human experience is molded by the push and pull of these opposing forces, which are present in the most granular scale of a day, like Constable’s dark and bright cumulus clouds, as fleeting as they are magnificent.

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The Anthropologists by Ayeşgül Savaş is available now via Bloomsbury.