Questions on the Classic Readings

Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

The story has three parts. Where does Bierce stop the clock, and where does he step back in time?
How long does the escape in the third part really take? What clues does Bierce give before the last sentence?

Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”

Irving skips twenty years without describing them. How does he show the reader that they have passed?
On the inn’s sign, the face of King George has been “singularly metamorphosed.” What else has changed in the village, and what has stayed the same?

Fiction can stretch a moment or skip a lifetime. Bierce turns the seconds of a hanging into pages; Irving lets twenty years pass in a single sleep. The example below, the opening of a novel, moves in a few sentences from a grown man remembering to one morning of his childhood.

The classic readings come first, and they are the heart of the lesson. A passage from a novel by James Mulhern follows as a working example, for a practical reason: he can tell a class what he was trying to do in it, and where he is still unsure he managed it.

Aiden, the narrator, is grown when the novel begins, and he is looking back. As a boy he lives with his grandmother, his mother is in a psychiatric hospital, and his father is gone.

A page from the novel · the opening

When I was a child, my grandmother gave me advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Never forget where you came from.” So I remember my origins. I am borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Nana sat on the toilet seat. I was on the floor in front of her.

She brushed my brown curly hair until my scalp hurt.

“You have your grandfather’s hair. Stand up. Look at yourself in the mirror.”

I touched my scalp. “It hurts.”

“You must toughen up, Aiden. Weak people get nowhere in this world. Your grandfather was weak. Addicted to the bottle. Your mother has an impaired mind. Now she’s in a nuthouse. And your father, he couldn’t handle the responsibility of a child. People have to be strong. Do you understand me?” She bent and stared into my face. Her hazel eyes seemed enormous. I smelled coffee on her breath.

There were blackheads on her nose. She pinched my cheeks.

I reflexively pushed her hands away.

“Life is full of pain, sweetheart. And I don’t mean just the physical kind.” She took a cigarette from her case on the back of the toilet, lit it, and inhaled. “You’ll be hurt a lot, but you must carry on. You know what the British people used to say when the Germans bombed London during World War Two?”

“No.”

“Keep calm and carry on.” She hit my backside. “Now run along and put some clothes on.” I was wearing my underwear and T-shirt.

“We have a busy day.”

From Give Them Unquiet Dreams.

The first paragraph belongs to the grown narrator, who has been turning his grandmother’s advice over “ever since,” and its last sentence echoes the last line of The Great Gatsby. With “Nana sat on the toilet seat,” the novel drops into a single morning and stays there, moving at the pace of the scene: a brushing, a lecture, a slap, an order to get dressed. The hope was that the reader would feel the adult’s distance in the first sentences and then lose it, the way a memory can take over the person remembering.

A suggestion. If a remembered scene in your draft keeps stepping back to comment, you might try one sentence that marks the shift into the past and then staying inside the scene until it ends.

Questions on James Mulhern’s Example

Give Them Unquiet Dreams

Which sentence moves the reader from the grown narrator into the past?
How much time passes in this passage? How can you tell?
The first paragraph echoes The Great Gatsby’s “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Why might a novel begin by looking back?

Activities

These draw on the classic readings and on the example on this page.

Stretch a moment. Write one page about something that takes less than a minute: a fall, a telephone call, a door opening.
Skip the years. Write a short scene, then one sentence that moves twenty years ahead, then a second scene that shows what has changed.

—Silver Current Press