Writers On Writing: Joan Silber on Garcia Marquez

Dear writers,

Craft books abound. For every possible writing problem there are six books on how to overcome it. Some of these books are uniquely instructive and transformative, a guiding light in the endless dark of your creative process. Others less so.

As your friendly neighborhood writing center we've separated the wheat from the chaff and in the coming months we'll be sending passages from our favorites.

This month's selection is about repetition and time, and the different ways you can move a reader through a story, from Joan Silber's The Art of Time In Fiction:

One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its luxuriant prolixities of repetition, forces the question: how can narrative drive be maintained if one is always turning back? It’s worth looking at how Garcia Marquez’s techniques for handling time hold up the tumultuous mass of his book. It’s clear enough that repetition is a way of anchoring an ornate narrative, of suggesting a grid of order within an overspill of invention... One of Garcia Marquez’s other practices is the use of exaggerated image. His characters are obsessed with one thing—a notion or a principle or a person—that gets to work itself out fully in action.

What does this have to do with handling time? The fixed ideas that take hold of his characters mean that the readers don’t have to spend pages hearing about everything else. We get to jump over intervening details and go right to the heart of the matter—exaggeration is a way to channel and focus the movement of time. 

Ready to get started on a project of your own? Check out our calendar of upcoming workshops (both in-person and online) and see what sort of stories you can tell. 

—The Writer's Rock