In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 239.
We all know the feeling. We’re looking at a photo of an earlier time in our life, and we’re overcome by two conflicting emotions. First: That feels like yesterday. Then: That feels like a lifetime ago. Or we hear a song from our youth, and suddenly, we’re teary-eyed, filled both with the joy of the memory and the sorrow of knowing it is far in the past. What imbues these experiences not just with longing, but also with emotional tension, is the contrast between two different versions of time: one that is standing still and one that is rushing along. The desire to reclaim a moment from our past comes up against our recognition that this can never happen.
All novelists are masters of time manipulation. They fast-forward using summary. They jump across centuries in one section break. But speed alone doesn’t create tension. As in our lives, it’s the friction between individual moments and the passage of time that fills not only the characters, but also us, as readers, with those same two conflicting emotions: the desire to hold onto the past while knowing that we will never succeed. How do authors create this friction? It’s usually a sudden narrative change—when different tenses, styles, or perspectives collide—that gives me the same gut punch I feel from an old photo or song.
Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (Knopf, 2021) starts in the past tense, until we reach a chapter that begins: “Fifteen Thousand Years Ago. An ice sheet advances from the north.” All at once we’re thrown backward fifteen millennia and, at the same time, forced into the present tense. Talk about friction! As the chapter continues, we are caught between the immediacy of the present tense and a feeling of great distance. Shipstead’s main character, who is the center of our world, is a speck in the sweep of history. This recognition fills the reader with a deep sense of loss and longing.
Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers (Viking, 2018) follows a traditional narrative structure and style, until the moment a character receives crushing news. Suddenly there is no action, no plot, just a heartbreaking list of memories and desires, beginning with: “Lake Michigan, impossibly blue, the morning light bouncing toward the city” and ending with “Oak trees. Music. Breath.” Time stands still in that chapter, but the story inevitably starts up again—a devastating reminder that life goes on, indifferent to our most painful and harrowing moments.
C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead, 2020) is told almost entirely from the perspective of the protagonist, Lucy, until we get to a chapter in the voice of Lucy’s dead father. It begins: “Lucy girl. Sun’s sinking down these hills and here you are sinking too.” We are outside of time, listening to a voice from beyond the grave, and aware that we’re merely a substitute audience. Lucy’s father will never be able to communicate his love and regrets to Lucy. When we leave him behind to return to Lucy’s perspective, we feel his sadness deep in our bones, because we recognize that he, too, will fail to do the impossible. Even an otherworldly voice from beyond the grave cannot fully bridge past and present. He is gone, and Lucy is unreachable to him. Time moves on—as it always does.
In his 2017 Nobel Lecture, Kazuo Ishiguro said: “But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me…. Does it also feel this way to you?” We all experience a world where time never seems quite linear but always too fast, and we recognize the tension of longing for moments we can’t reclaim. I encourage you to explore this universal human emotion in your writing and to linger with your characters in that all-too-familiar tension between past and present.
Tamar Shapiro’s debut novel, Restitution, is being released in September 2025 by Regal House Publishing. A former housing attorney and nonprofit leader, she is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph College.
image credit: Spencer Demera