This is a great question. The story I'm working on--the new one I'm doing--takes place on three different time lines, and in two different cities. It starts in 1956 Paris, then goes to 1947 Berlin recovering after the War, and back to Kristallnacht in 1938. Each time is crucial to the story, and moves it along, not in a linear narrative, but by explaining what happened in the first two, earlier timelines, and wrapping it up in the last one. I haven't been working on it this week. I've had to catch up on editing my SERIAL. (I like to get at least six chapters ahead. I'm only 3 ahead of where I am.) But the whole concept of time is where the idea for the story came along. I mean there's a lot of other stuff involved, obviously. (It's 14,600 words at the moment.) But by using and manipulating time I can jump from one place in the story to another. It's an interesting challenge...sort of like Tarrentino in prose.
Time is different for me now. I haven't worn a watch in...five years? The battery died, and the wife took it, put it in her purse, and said she was gonna get a new battery. She didn't. I don't have a phone, either. And then I retired. Now, I go to bed when I want, but still wake up 6:30-7:00 am, no matter what time I go to sleep. I have an idea of what the time is, but don't really pay much attention to it unless I have to be somewhere. It's like being a kid again, on permanent summer holidays.
There's a lot I could talk about in this. All my self-published fiction deals a multiverse of many different worlds with parallel Earths and many fantasy/sci-fi worlds without humans, accessed through different sorts of portals, and there is a big fallout event that means that time passes more quickly in the affected worlds. I've been talking about this series for a while in my Writing Journey series on here: https://harveyhamer.substack.com/s/my-writing-journey
I worked on that universe of 22 interconnected books from age 12-18 and the full chronological omnibus (across four volumes) can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B093QKN2FL
This Friday's chapter will explore further what could be an alien world. I have used the portal element further to examine process of change and good and evil and as a tool for time travel in the second full-length novel in the same universe as Children of Shadows. Together they make a duology of sorts, combining modern ideas of time and dimensions with the most ancient of spirituality of our ancestors that painted on cave walls... Time certainly plays a big role in all that entails, from interludes taking place five thousand years ago to a whole chapter that runs from that time into the future, or simple things like having a diary section skip the days of travel in my story for the reader, while also providing insight into the protagonist's mindset in that journey.
I really appreciate these prompts as they get me to think about my own work and its themes and features and actually get the words out there. (Hopefully they'll stay in my mind.) The book I plan to write next year - if I get to it - will be a story about three time periods in England's history but parallel lives, maybe the same life...
So cool, Harvey! You always have a lot to offer in the dialogue here. You sound a lot like Auster. Have you read 4321? Based on your work, you might enjoy it. You are quite prolific. It sounds like you have a lot of ideas to work through in literature. Fantastic.
Thank you so much! Hopefully ine day when all these ideas are worked through they'll be shared beyond a few comment sections. Somehow I was more prolific while at school than now! I haven't read 4321 but will rectify that! I just read a little about it and it sounds amazing.
Of course! I think we go through ebbs and flows of writing. That’s just life. Hope you love it. I talked about it a bit on Tuesday’s show and my Auster posts this past spring.
So much energy, Harvey! Thanks for your comments as always.
I confess I've always been fascinated by stories where time moves faster/slower between different worlds - mainly scifi and fantasy - all the way back to Rip Van Winkle. I've never actually been able to finish a story of my own with that element, but that may change - there's one story I started a long time ago that I've thought about reviving at some point...
RVW! Great call. Yes I also want to play more with time in my work. So many possibilities and it has so much with how we experience life (maybe it shouldn’t?)
Haven't ever really thought about 1 before (until now, of course), 2 somewhat, though despite never liking Marvel I feel somewhat that the whole multiverse trope has become very much a trope. Sanderson's Cosmere is an example of a v. popular fantasy writer dealing with a multiverse. King also does this too, with various characters cropping up across his stories and implying a shared/interconnected set of worlds (which he then essentially makes explicit in The Dark Tower series).
Re: 3, the one I most like think about.
[Spoilers, haha] Brae is, essentially, a time travel story, but set in a fantasy novel and (I hope) presented subtly to be the case. I wanted to try and write something related to time travel, but in a non-traditional manner and with an emphasis on loss/memory/love rather than it being centred on the time travel itself.
Precipice deals with time in a different manner. Everything is linear, but the presentation of the story isn't, which again (for now) is meant to be fragments of Jisa's memory.
Brilliant comments as always, Nathan. Thank you. This is a really fascinating topic of the multiverse. I guess that also a lot of authors do this implicitly or perhaps even subconsciously. There are parallel types of characters (maybe a different name) that the author is working through or fixed on because they’re trying to figure something out about that kind of person. A lot of times it’s a reflection of a part of themselves.
Time travel is a big one to tackle and I really like the way you’re connecting it to loss/memory/love. I think the intersection of TIME with those themes gives us even more to consider. Looking forward to more!
I’m glad I listened to this in early morning darkness, the period of time when my mind is simultaneously receptive and muddled. It’s given me the idea to focus this particular time slot for a scene in my novelette.
PS: how does alt-history fit in your physics exploration of fiction? Or does it?
Isn't that just the best time of day to seep into writing? I love the early morning hours, especially when a sudden flood of caffeine hits the system and begins to nudge at those creative nodes.
I may submit a Chapter from an unedited Novel ‘Diamond Walker’ but again, within the theme of ‘shamanism’ it mentions or utilizes the ‘memories’ of past Orca & their Matriarchal Societies - local pods & integrations among Transient Orca pods - ‘memory, warnings etc & instincts’ re encounters with humans passed on through uncountable generations’ - ‘embedded instinct’ I assume is ‘open ended’ - thus if the coastal pod in BC & Washington State’s shared Salish Sea become extinct in the next 2 - 5 years.. will the ‘reasons or behaviour’ be shared during future ‘Super Pod’ gatherings or exchanges ? One could speculate on this via all cetaceans.. all species such as bison, boreal caribou, sea turtle.. hoho .. is this. ‘portal or pipeline ?’ .. or DreamTime ?
.. bueno ! Much of my fiction stuff - short or ‘flash’ or even Novel Length or meant for Feature Film Adaption involves shamanism .. cannot even explain why
But as such I have a portal into .. uh .. realms I cannot actually physically explore unless via hallucinogens - which has resulted in some pretty wild experiences on several occasions - a la Hunter S Thompson, a patron saint of mine. But via shamanism my characters interrupt ‘time & space’ in sparkling positive ways - never either malice - delivering serendipity via a great bear or black dog, and especially via Orca .. even Baseball cannot escape my creative clutches. I also have characters not blessed with the ‘full load of shamanism’ but instead have a more focused channel.. a sort of zen aptitude for ‘tracking’ - missing people or criminal elements.. perhaps not ‘a second sight’ but a variation or bridged ‘special pathway’ .. & I give creatures similar treatment in how they communicated with homo sapiens.. often with abrupt humour or whimsy.. How else to explain my affinity for wild or domesticated creatures - on land, on water or below the surface ?
Sounds like there’s a ton going on there! The portals sound a bit Murakami like. Exciting how many layers you’re weaving together. Thanks for sharing your work and ideas, Thomas 😁
I'd like to draw your attention to this quote from the Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland book The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.:
"We've seen it before in creative arts settings, especially storytelling. If you think about what is going on in a storyteller's mind when he or she spins a fictional yarn, what they are trying to do is come up with a story that did not actually happen, but that seems as if it might have happened. In other words, it has to make sense and to be plausible. Typically such a story makes use of real places, historical events, characters, etc. but the events of the story itself seem to take place in an alternate version of reality.
The conventionally accepted explanation for this is that storytellers have a power of imagination that makes them good at inventing counterfactual narratives. In the light of everything we've learned about Strands at DODO, however, we can now see an alternate explanation, which is that storytellers are doing a kind of low-level magic. Their "superpower" isn't imagining counterfactuals, but rather seeing across parallel Strands and perceiving things that actually did (or might) happen in alternate versions of reality."
To contextualize, in this book witchcraft and time travel are largely the same thing, and have to do with the ability to select and follow threads of reality backwards to places where you can, sometimes after great effort and repetition, eventually branch reality off, usually only a bit (this book takes my favored outlook on time travel, that I got from the old DragonLance trilogy Time of the Twins: "time is like a river and we're ricks at the bottom of it. Taking a rock out and moving it upstream is highly unlikely to divert the entire river." But as real life shows, move enough rocks enough times and the diversion will happen). Anyway in D.O.D.O. magic is very quantum physics based, to be practiced you must enter an observer-less chamber (which of course Stephenson and Galland describe in great detail).
So putting the magic and time travel aside, the joke here is that fiction storytelling is the parts of our brains that are alert to parallel dimensions and access them typically when we're spending less time "observing reality" and collapsing the cat to life or death states: when idle, sleeping, usually when alone, usually when not working. Fun concept!
Also pairs well with Stephenson's Anathem re: parallel universe.
What I dislike about the current meta verse/multiverse (ooo we should call it the metamultiverse because that makes sense) stuff in pop culture is that it's actually more a way for Hollywood to separate a character or storyline from any sort of obligation to any particular actor, storyteller, or talent. It's a bad faith endeavor to separate IP from talent.
This is a great question. The story I'm working on--the new one I'm doing--takes place on three different time lines, and in two different cities. It starts in 1956 Paris, then goes to 1947 Berlin recovering after the War, and back to Kristallnacht in 1938. Each time is crucial to the story, and moves it along, not in a linear narrative, but by explaining what happened in the first two, earlier timelines, and wrapping it up in the last one. I haven't been working on it this week. I've had to catch up on editing my SERIAL. (I like to get at least six chapters ahead. I'm only 3 ahead of where I am.) But the whole concept of time is where the idea for the story came along. I mean there's a lot of other stuff involved, obviously. (It's 14,600 words at the moment.) But by using and manipulating time I can jump from one place in the story to another. It's an interesting challenge...sort of like Tarrentino in prose.
Love it! Do you question the way we typically experience time?
Time is different for me now. I haven't worn a watch in...five years? The battery died, and the wife took it, put it in her purse, and said she was gonna get a new battery. She didn't. I don't have a phone, either. And then I retired. Now, I go to bed when I want, but still wake up 6:30-7:00 am, no matter what time I go to sleep. I have an idea of what the time is, but don't really pay much attention to it unless I have to be somewhere. It's like being a kid again, on permanent summer holidays.
.. sheer unrestrained envy ..🦎🏴☠️
There's a lot I could talk about in this. All my self-published fiction deals a multiverse of many different worlds with parallel Earths and many fantasy/sci-fi worlds without humans, accessed through different sorts of portals, and there is a big fallout event that means that time passes more quickly in the affected worlds. I've been talking about this series for a while in my Writing Journey series on here: https://harveyhamer.substack.com/s/my-writing-journey
I worked on that universe of 22 interconnected books from age 12-18 and the full chronological omnibus (across four volumes) can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B093QKN2FL
In terms of the fiction I'm sharing on here or am working to traditionally publish, the chapter of Children of Shadows I shared last week contains a portal of sorts... https://harveyhamer.substack.com/p/children-of-shadows-b78
This Friday's chapter will explore further what could be an alien world. I have used the portal element further to examine process of change and good and evil and as a tool for time travel in the second full-length novel in the same universe as Children of Shadows. Together they make a duology of sorts, combining modern ideas of time and dimensions with the most ancient of spirituality of our ancestors that painted on cave walls... Time certainly plays a big role in all that entails, from interludes taking place five thousand years ago to a whole chapter that runs from that time into the future, or simple things like having a diary section skip the days of travel in my story for the reader, while also providing insight into the protagonist's mindset in that journey.
I really appreciate these prompts as they get me to think about my own work and its themes and features and actually get the words out there. (Hopefully they'll stay in my mind.) The book I plan to write next year - if I get to it - will be a story about three time periods in England's history but parallel lives, maybe the same life...
So cool, Harvey! You always have a lot to offer in the dialogue here. You sound a lot like Auster. Have you read 4321? Based on your work, you might enjoy it. You are quite prolific. It sounds like you have a lot of ideas to work through in literature. Fantastic.
Thank you so much! Hopefully ine day when all these ideas are worked through they'll be shared beyond a few comment sections. Somehow I was more prolific while at school than now! I haven't read 4321 but will rectify that! I just read a little about it and it sounds amazing.
Of course! I think we go through ebbs and flows of writing. That’s just life. Hope you love it. I talked about it a bit on Tuesday’s show and my Auster posts this past spring.
So much energy, Harvey! Thanks for your comments as always.
I confess I've always been fascinated by stories where time moves faster/slower between different worlds - mainly scifi and fantasy - all the way back to Rip Van Winkle. I've never actually been able to finish a story of my own with that element, but that may change - there's one story I started a long time ago that I've thought about reviving at some point...
RVW! Great call. Yes I also want to play more with time in my work. So many possibilities and it has so much with how we experience life (maybe it shouldn’t?)
Brilliant piece again. There is always a nugget in here and for me it was unexpected as it was about the pace part of time. Thanks for the ace work!
Thanks Jon! Happy it’s useful for your work 🕵️♀️
Haven't ever really thought about 1 before (until now, of course), 2 somewhat, though despite never liking Marvel I feel somewhat that the whole multiverse trope has become very much a trope. Sanderson's Cosmere is an example of a v. popular fantasy writer dealing with a multiverse. King also does this too, with various characters cropping up across his stories and implying a shared/interconnected set of worlds (which he then essentially makes explicit in The Dark Tower series).
Re: 3, the one I most like think about.
[Spoilers, haha] Brae is, essentially, a time travel story, but set in a fantasy novel and (I hope) presented subtly to be the case. I wanted to try and write something related to time travel, but in a non-traditional manner and with an emphasis on loss/memory/love rather than it being centred on the time travel itself.
Precipice deals with time in a different manner. Everything is linear, but the presentation of the story isn't, which again (for now) is meant to be fragments of Jisa's memory.
Brilliant comments as always, Nathan. Thank you. This is a really fascinating topic of the multiverse. I guess that also a lot of authors do this implicitly or perhaps even subconsciously. There are parallel types of characters (maybe a different name) that the author is working through or fixed on because they’re trying to figure something out about that kind of person. A lot of times it’s a reflection of a part of themselves.
Time travel is a big one to tackle and I really like the way you’re connecting it to loss/memory/love. I think the intersection of TIME with those themes gives us even more to consider. Looking forward to more!
It's almost too daunting to tackle haha. So many potential plot-holes and issues to fall into!
I’m glad I listened to this in early morning darkness, the period of time when my mind is simultaneously receptive and muddled. It’s given me the idea to focus this particular time slot for a scene in my novelette.
PS: how does alt-history fit in your physics exploration of fiction? Or does it?
Love those morning hours!
Oh, I hadn’t considered that here but it could be an extension. Any initial thoughts?
It’s kind of like a parallel universe, I think?
Definitely think so. I just know very little about it! 😅
Isn't that just the best time of day to seep into writing? I love the early morning hours, especially when a sudden flood of caffeine hits the system and begins to nudge at those creative nodes.
I may submit a Chapter from an unedited Novel ‘Diamond Walker’ but again, within the theme of ‘shamanism’ it mentions or utilizes the ‘memories’ of past Orca & their Matriarchal Societies - local pods & integrations among Transient Orca pods - ‘memory, warnings etc & instincts’ re encounters with humans passed on through uncountable generations’ - ‘embedded instinct’ I assume is ‘open ended’ - thus if the coastal pod in BC & Washington State’s shared Salish Sea become extinct in the next 2 - 5 years.. will the ‘reasons or behaviour’ be shared during future ‘Super Pod’ gatherings or exchanges ? One could speculate on this via all cetaceans.. all species such as bison, boreal caribou, sea turtle.. hoho .. is this. ‘portal or pipeline ?’ .. or DreamTime ?
.. bueno ! Much of my fiction stuff - short or ‘flash’ or even Novel Length or meant for Feature Film Adaption involves shamanism .. cannot even explain why
But as such I have a portal into .. uh .. realms I cannot actually physically explore unless via hallucinogens - which has resulted in some pretty wild experiences on several occasions - a la Hunter S Thompson, a patron saint of mine. But via shamanism my characters interrupt ‘time & space’ in sparkling positive ways - never either malice - delivering serendipity via a great bear or black dog, and especially via Orca .. even Baseball cannot escape my creative clutches. I also have characters not blessed with the ‘full load of shamanism’ but instead have a more focused channel.. a sort of zen aptitude for ‘tracking’ - missing people or criminal elements.. perhaps not ‘a second sight’ but a variation or bridged ‘special pathway’ .. & I give creatures similar treatment in how they communicated with homo sapiens.. often with abrupt humour or whimsy.. How else to explain my affinity for wild or domesticated creatures - on land, on water or below the surface ?
Sounds like there’s a ton going on there! The portals sound a bit Murakami like. Exciting how many layers you’re weaving together. Thanks for sharing your work and ideas, Thomas 😁
I'd like to draw your attention to this quote from the Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland book The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.:
"We've seen it before in creative arts settings, especially storytelling. If you think about what is going on in a storyteller's mind when he or she spins a fictional yarn, what they are trying to do is come up with a story that did not actually happen, but that seems as if it might have happened. In other words, it has to make sense and to be plausible. Typically such a story makes use of real places, historical events, characters, etc. but the events of the story itself seem to take place in an alternate version of reality.
The conventionally accepted explanation for this is that storytellers have a power of imagination that makes them good at inventing counterfactual narratives. In the light of everything we've learned about Strands at DODO, however, we can now see an alternate explanation, which is that storytellers are doing a kind of low-level magic. Their "superpower" isn't imagining counterfactuals, but rather seeing across parallel Strands and perceiving things that actually did (or might) happen in alternate versions of reality."
To contextualize, in this book witchcraft and time travel are largely the same thing, and have to do with the ability to select and follow threads of reality backwards to places where you can, sometimes after great effort and repetition, eventually branch reality off, usually only a bit (this book takes my favored outlook on time travel, that I got from the old DragonLance trilogy Time of the Twins: "time is like a river and we're ricks at the bottom of it. Taking a rock out and moving it upstream is highly unlikely to divert the entire river." But as real life shows, move enough rocks enough times and the diversion will happen). Anyway in D.O.D.O. magic is very quantum physics based, to be practiced you must enter an observer-less chamber (which of course Stephenson and Galland describe in great detail).
So putting the magic and time travel aside, the joke here is that fiction storytelling is the parts of our brains that are alert to parallel dimensions and access them typically when we're spending less time "observing reality" and collapsing the cat to life or death states: when idle, sleeping, usually when alone, usually when not working. Fun concept!
Also pairs well with Stephenson's Anathem re: parallel universe.
What I dislike about the current meta verse/multiverse (ooo we should call it the metamultiverse because that makes sense) stuff in pop culture is that it's actually more a way for Hollywood to separate a character or storyline from any sort of obligation to any particular actor, storyteller, or talent. It's a bad faith endeavor to separate IP from talent.
like this lens of yours a ton.. probably why I’m so attracted to Exemplars - in any field
The idea of ‘leadership’ via Editorials in Fast Company really turned my crank
already posted this Chapter to Notes - otherwise would never be seen here - I’ve come to realize..
I’m a slow learner.. but do get there most of the time.. learned that negotiating with horses
Diamond Walker was an idea for feature film initially & happenstance intervened bodaciously 🦎🏴☠️
https://diamondwalker.wordpress.com/chapter-four/