Musings on the Nature of Time, by Neil McGowan

Musings on the Nature of Time

The last few months have been manic for me and seem to have passed by in a blur. The daytime job has been full-on, and my old laptop decided to die (top tip – have a decent backup strategy; when the hard drive failed I only lost a few hundred words due to multiple backups. I got my fingers burned many years ago when I lost work due to not having backups).

It also took quite a while to source laptop – admittedly because I have slightly unusual requirements, chief of which is an unlocked bootloader to load my preferred operating system. I’ve been a Linux user since 2003, and my workflows have evolved around it; trying to use Windows is jarring for me (and TBH, I’m not a fan of Windows 11, or the latest version of Office that comes with it – it also doesn’t play nicely with my home server setup).

To cut a long story short, I eventually found a reasonable spec Dell that’s only a few years old. Twenty minutes after powering it up, I was up and running, with my backups restoring, and happily tapping away that night.

But it got me thinking about the nature of time, and how we perceive it. It wasn’t until I was sitting transcribing my (very messy) handwritten scrawls that I realised I’d been without a computer for almost two months. My kids looked at me like I was mad when I mentioned this, asking how I’d survived, and that’s what started me thinking about time and time sinks.

I’m not a user of social media – I’ve never really ‘got’ it, and the few times I’ve seen it it’s been festooned with adverts for things I have no interest in (no, Amazon, oddly enough, not all men like football and sports). I’m not on Tik Tok, or Twitter (or whatever it’s called these days), and my logins to Facebook are minimal, maybe once or twice a year. I don’t have WhatsApp or Snapchat, either. My phone doesn’t even have Google on it – it’s rooted to run a cut-down operating system as I don’t use many apps. My music consumption comes from CDs and radio, not Spotify. I’m the only one in our house that regularly gets two to three days between charges out of a phone. Somewhat ironically, I’m using a Google Pixel phone – good hardware, but stock Android has too much waste for me, hence rooting it.

It occurred to me – after having the usual ‘Social media is a waste of time’ – that I had similar habits, just from a different perspective. I can spend hours tinkering with technology, getting it set up just how I want it, whereas my kids think it’s a waste of time and just want to turn a machine on, log in, and use it. It’s that dichotomy that got me thinking about time, and how we perceive it’s passing. It also got me thinking about stories, and how they portray the passing of time. I’m currently 700 pages through the fifth of Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike novels, and that’s spanned a period of nine months without ever feeling like things are dragging. The book I read before it (Orbital, by Samantha Harvey – it won the Booker Prize, and has had mixed reviews but I liked it) is much briefer, covering a mere twenty four hours in under a hundred and fifty pages.

Both are quite extreme examples, but they illustrate my thoughts quite well, in that the story expands to fill the necessary time. The style of both books is very different – Harvey’s book is full of carefully polished prose that’s almost poetic in nature, often blending several concepts and ideas within a sentence or two; it’s deft and clever writing, dealing with almost abstract ideas. The Galbraith novel is the complete opposite – the prose is, like the story, more down to earth and grounded in reality. Is it as polished as Harvey’s writing? No, but that’s beside the point – it fits the story it’s trying to tell.

Both books are trying to do very different things, with varying degrees of success, but both of them play out across a time-frame that seems ‘right’. One is plot-driven; the other isn’t. But both authors have used time to ground their stories in reality – in the case of Harvey, literally, with each chapter occurring during the 90 minute period taken to orbit the Earth. Heady stuff, and thought provoking. Yet the Galbraith is entertaining in a different way – it feels almost grimy and lived in, a million miles from the polished prose of Orbital, which suits the story being told. You can feel the weight of time on some of the characters in their actions, more so than in their words.

It got me thinking about my writing, and how I frame the passing of time. Most of my books take place in a fairly tight time-frame, usually a week or so. That gives me the time to develop the characters and their motivations in sufficient detail for the story I’m telling. I’ve written pieces over much shorter periods, usually short stories, but not much. I need to allow time for the story to breathe, almost.

One final thought – during the time I was writing by hand, I realised my prose felt more considered, that the thought behind the words was more evident. Did I enjoy it? Yes, absolutely. Am I going to write my next book by hand? Unlikely – I like the convenience of a word processor (or in my case, a distraction-free editor; I use FocusWriter, which can be imported into a full-fat word processor for editing). But for short stories? I may well try it, see what difference it makes, if any.