On time, philosophy and carboard boxes - by Rowena House

Last week, my husband – with mostly moral support from me – transferred van loads of my dad’s stuff from storage to his new house near us. His downstairs back room is now stacked high with cardboard boxes of things he’s accumulated over a lifetime.

Some of these things, no doubt, will be precious, others unremembered and unwanted. All were packed with equal care by the removal men.

As I stood in the now-cluttered room, gloomily considering the scale of the task of helping my elderly dad to sort it all out, it became clear that he will need a new shelving system: somewhere to put the things he will keep; somewhere he can find them again, and not forget them; somewhere for this accumulation to be useful, not junk.

And that, I realised, is exactly where my historical research stands: after eighteen months, it has become a giant accumulation of notes and ideas, acquired at random in the hope of harnessing serendipity in pursuit of original insight, with boxes of (potential) gems packed loving away, some half-forgotten and others now lost in the disorder.

It’s time to build a shelving system for the story.

One label I hadn’t expected to need for these mental shelves is philosophy, though, really, it’s a bit dopey not to have worked that out before. I’m writing the work-in-progress as part of a PhD; the ‘Ph’ bit was bound to get a look in. Duh. Half-understood chapters about the relationship between language and reality, definitions of truth, and whether history is found or constructed will therefore all have to be unpacked and examined closely.

Another collection that needs attention is labelled ‘time’. How to treat time in any story is, I guess, one of the most important things we have to work out. For the past year or so, I have been writing in close third person present, living the story alongside my two viewpoint characters, but that changed in the past month as I experimented with a more fluid, retrospective telling of the main plot, with the narrator-protagonist also commenting in his present. The opportunities of this fresh treatment of time now seem richer than Plan A (the dual present tense narrative) so that’s the WIP’s immediate future. At least for now.

As well as playing with time in my writing, I’ve also been reading a fascinating PhD thesis by Victoria Browne on the historiography of feminism and ‘historical time’, available via https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/9297/, which discusses among many other topics the relationship between different measures of time, including calendar time with its authority, authenticity and precision; narrative time of beginnings and endings, flashbacks and flash forwards, echoes and resonances; and the time of traces when past events affect the present and the future. All three measures seem to me to have a direct relevance to storytelling as well as history, alongside – in my tale’s case – various and evolving seventeenth century conceptions about time, plus (timeless?) notions about sacred time, too.

Less grandly, but just as important to keep handy, are nuggets picked up along the way about how to get to The End. The sort of things that keep us keeping on, even when we’d rather not. As I’m pressed for time to walk the dog and make dinner, I’ll quote a tweet that sold me a forthcoming book by @OliverBurkeman, wonderfully titled Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals:

“...confronting finitude is ultimately a huge relief and empowering, a way of getting round to what counts. And not in a white-knuckle state of ‘OMG I’ve got to seize the day’ either.”

To which Tim Harford, of BBC Radio 4’s More or Less fame, replied, quoting Nietzsche: “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from themselves.’

Personally, I think writing is the antidote to such self-deluding haste. But then I guess I’m very lucky to have time to stop and think. After dog walking/dinner duties, of course. Happy days, whatever you’re doing. 

 @HouseRowena on Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook

Website: rowenahouse.com