time fuckery
One of the things I am most loving mucking around with in my play scripts is time--the movement backward and forward. GRAVEYARDS OF CHICAGO takes place in two timelines, one of which changes mid-scene through cues like music, lights, and actor posture. THE YELLOW WALLPAPER drifts back and forth between present events in Gilman's original story and fictional scenes that go back slightly in time. ALL THE BEST SONGS ARE CHEATIN' SONGS is perhaps the most egregious use of time jumping, with alternating scenes between the main characters adulthood and childhood, while SWARM, the last draft I finished, also jumps around in 17 increments to tell the story. I've written more plays with unusual and fluxing time lines than I have those without (though the zombie/hotel play in its very rough zero draft does take place in overlapping scenes in the same night/location.) Even the weird sisters play jumps around a little bit, beginning when the witches are younger and ending after the events of MACBETH.
Time in poetry is always less precise. The voice is often fractured and exists sometimes in multiple times all at once. Since poetry relies so much on the associative brain, it reminds me of the scenes in WESTWORLD, where they talk about consciousness for robots meaning past, present, and future are all happening at the same time. Sometimes the voice has no sense of time or history at all. Other times, its all history and flashback. Fiction, I suppose can be similar, as can essays (especially more lyric and fragmented essays.) Though since fiction often requires a more careful sense of movement and relation, this feels a a lot more complicated. the dystopian/ sci-fi fiction project J and I are plotting to write together (well, we have a few pages from the first chapter, but little else) . This will have a more fragmented structure that will create the whole, but its going to need a lot of finessing (especially melding two writers and two imaginations together.) Mostly, the biggest challenge, amid him having many gigs and me having a lot of other paid things taking up my time, is actually not time in the novel, but actual time to work on. We are probably going to be planning a self-guided getaway/retreat solely to work on that over the winter months when things settle down.
Meanwhile, I am having glorious fun manipulating timelines and past/present/future in the plays, with even smaller one-acts allowing for small doses of it, even if its just a little flashback sequence, which can be noted in so many ways on stage that you don;t necessarily have when just putting words on the page.
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