snzz...

i got this ask thru twt/strawpage but im gonna answer it here first bc i need to lay out my thoughts without cutting them into tweets.

i dont think there is any one trick, it's actually a bunch of tricks stacked together. you as an author have to really think about the passage of time and the rhythms of human behavior. do you want to convey the idea that no time passed at all? or that hours passed? or days? or even years? when you have to cover a long period of time, the two mainstays are to describe that period, or just say "years passed." but the middle road of sorts (that i take) is to think about the person youre writing and their relationship to that span of time that passed.

It was only a week; the days dragged their heels as though chained. Interminable hours of meetings, stale coffee and the humidity that gathered inside a suit when it was worn too long; interminable hours of dinners with his family, the bare veneer of tolerance unable to conceal the despair and sheer dislike underneath; interminable fucking hours spent in traveling, from the metro to the bus to the train to the car, none of them easy on the senses. By the time he was peeling the sweat-soaked shirt off his skin at the bleak end of Saturday, he wanted more than anything to scream. But there could be no screaming. He showered, ate dinner, went to sleep.

note: the repetition, and also the deliberate use of sensory details to anchor time. as much as possible, the flow of time should be pinned to the impression that the time has left on the senses. you can get abstract with it, as in the family section, but if i rewrote this paragraph i'd add some sensory detail there too: sour wine, the grating sound of forks scraping ceramic too sharply, split gravy.

if you spend a lot of time telling your reader exactly how a character spend 7 boring days then your reader will assuredly get bored (sometimes you want that). on the other hand if you just say "he was bored. monday and tuesday were both boring. on wednesday he ate dinner with his family, and on thusday he spent all day traveling. on friday he had another boring day full of meetings." even if you word it a little more nicely, in effect you're not departing much from this idea that you have to List It Out.

but a list is not a bad thing in itself. if you look up list poetry, you'll find a lot of poems that use the list as a medium for metaphor and meaning.

essentially, for me, these types of paragraphs serve as transitions. they are like...doors, or metros. they move the character from one important moment or scene to another. but in the middle, the character isn't dead. it is in this space that the character's and the reader's thoughts have room to grow, shift, settle, teeter. a character walks away from a happy anniversary but then, in the subway or in the living room alone, she breaks down crying. why? because she has space to think, to exist and feel.

and secondly it cements the illusion for the reader that the character is a feeling, thinking, living person. because it is really the small things, that no one would ever text anyone about or talk about: the funny taste of a rotten mealy apple, how your body feels like it's physically turning to paste at hour six of meeting day but theres two hours to go, the overplayed song you hate but sing anyway. how it sticks in your throat sometimes.

be attentive to the texture of human life: it is the most richly abundant resource of any writing. keep your eyes open and glued to the world and to other people. you can write things down but you don't have to remember them: a writing exercise i do all the time on the bus or train is i look at someone and describe them in a story. or just a moment in time, any moment. your life's unique textures, the microhabits of the people around you (adding sugar before the instant coffee, refusing to tie their shoelaces properly, dawdling in the cab hunting for stuff in their purse right when you have to get out) force you to be attentive in life and to the distribution of details in your work.

lastly: try not to overdo it. 3 things, four, five at an absolute stretch. dont belabor your point. people get it! focus on paring that 3 to sharpness. use images, where you can, in lieu of any descriptive word: use descriptive words obliquely.

image it's texture, color, vividity. the absence of it can make your writing feel washed out; go for that sometimes and see how it feels to you.

#this is an incredible breakdown#i really want to practice a lot of this noticing that op talks about — your ability to list these details at the drop of a hat is incredible#the other thing that is really effective to me abt the excerpted section is the anchoring image of the suit#we only see it twice — once having already been worn for too long (man the way that is inextricably tied to the passage of time is SO COOL)#and then once being taken off at the end of the day — that revisit of the same image with a change (some craft books call it an escalation)#if i had to break it down into specific individual word choice:#i think the core of the escalation here is 'gathering humidity' in the first mention and then 'sweat-soaked' in the second mention#and part of why escalation works (says george saunders) is because#is it signals to the reader: something is happening here — there is somewhere we are going with this#which keeps the reader reading#i'm not familiar with the source but this whole passage is also so richly emotionally grounded — which to me contributes to the forward#momentum that differentiates the reading experience from reading just a list of sentences or actions or descriptions#and of course the varying of sentence length#there are two sentences — one medium one long — that set up and progress this initial feeling of tiredness and apathy#then a sentence about taking off the uncomfortable and disgusting suit — a brief moment of relief; a moment where the reader feels the#character acting — i'll say for their own benefit (since again idk broader arcs)#but then that's followed by several shorter sentences that indicate nothing else was done to change the character's situation#and that to me produces a really delicious build of tension — a brief relief — and then brings the tension back again#everything op says about detail and specificity is so right (and a lot of it is a new way of thinking about this for me!)#but there are a few other things that for me as a reader contribute to pulling me through the reading of this 'passage of time' paragraph#that i wanted to pull out#op i hope you don't mind me going off in these tags. this is intended to be along the lines of 'i liked it so much i ate it' energy

thanks so much for taking the time to write this all out! i found it really useful and also really touching :) i actually wrote that excerpted paragraph myself for the sake of this ask and your analysis of it is really very kind to me haha. also your tags brought up something i wanna talk about as well, which is the idea of escalation, as you've described it and as i understand it, it's a writing device where an image recurs? and it's one i use all the time and that i like SO much because, as you pointed out, that it signals to the reader that something is happening here. and it also creates like you said that sense of movement, of momentum, but i've literally never thought about that thing in this sense before and my mind is blown.

i'm accustomed to thinking of it vaguely in terms of a motif, a repeated image that garners meanings as it moves through the story. to me they act like different colors of thread, which are stitched through the narrative and hold it together. sometimes they vanish but when they reappear it's not because they suddenly came back but because they've always been there, and they're important to me because i don't write in a very plotty manner, i write loosely cobbled feelings stuff, and so characters and interiority and detail matter a lot to me.

@dandelion-de-deus okay so here’s how I did it!

You need:

7quart crockpot (if using a smaller crockpot then also reduce amount of bones)

2lbs Bones (I used two large beef soup bones and threw in a couple oxtail bones for beef bone broth but you can use literally any animal bone. Bonus points for using leftover bones from a meal like rotisserie chicken or Thanksgiving Turkey)

3 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (this is KEY as it’s what extracts the marrow from inside the bone and makes the broth rich and nutrient dense)

Salt

Enough water to cover the bones.

Literally thats all you technically need but I highly recommend also adding additional flavor in the form of:

Aromatic: scraps of onion, onion peels, crushed garlic, shallot scraps

Veggies: celery scraps, carrot scraps

Spices: black pepper, thyme, rosemary, oregano, etc

For Pho specific broth I used: Lemon grass, stick of cinnamon, star anise, ginger and onion scraps

Pretty much the sky’s the limit with extra flavoring but you can also make it very plain to keep it versatile. For me my plain bone broth I season with only salt, pepper, onion and garlic

All you need to do is throw everything into a crock pot and cook on low for 12-24 hours. When it’s done, use a fine mesh strainer to strain the broth into jars and store in the fridge.

All the fat from the broth will rise to the top and harden into solid Lard. You can pull it out once it’s hardened for fat free bone broth and save the lard for cooking, or optionally you can leave it for full fat bone broth (useful for soups like Pho)