The Accordion of Time
Imagine yourself at a coffee shop with a new friend. Your paths crossed a few days ago, and you carved out this hour to chat. Sometimes that’s as far as it goes. The talk doesn’t run high or low, just idles along on the surface of things. Current events. Work. The latest happenings around town.
But this time the hiss of the milk steamer, the scraping chairs, the jingle of the door swinging open and shut — all of that dims because you’re swapping stories that carry you both back into your pasts. The moment expands. Time falls away. A lemon tart you devoured on a Paris sidewalk ten years ago feels just as close at hand as your latte does.
We experience time like an accordion. When we are immersed in our bodies, attuned to our surroundings, as fully present as we can be, the accordion opens wide and air rushes in. These are the lulls in our days, the hour on the yoga mat, the fifteen minutes of meditation, the ten-mile run that takes us out of other responsibilities. Soon enough, duty beckons and we are speeding our kids out the door to school, running through the mental checklist of backpacks, snow gear, water bottles, and snacks. The accordion squeezes tight. The air rushes out. We’re racing from point to point, knocking tasks off the list. There’s music in it as long as the air lasts, but squeeze the accordion too long, and there’s nothing left.
Good storytelling works those bellows back and forth, drawing the accordion out to linger in specific places and times, squeezing it together to fast forward over time shifts, back story, and necessary incidentals. There’s no formula for it, just an intuitive sense that a reader needs a break from the what and the how, a little time to sink into the who and the when and the where. Then that gut sense of when drawing the moment out any longer would suck too much air into the story. Time to squeeze those bellows again, keep things moving, add a little context or explanation.
Don George, author of How to Be a Travel Writer for Lonely Planet, explains that memoirists and travel writers can’t simply relay everything that happened, they have to edit their own lives. This means reflecting on all the salient moments and then choosing a handful that capture the essence of the whole.
Your narrative focus moves in and out, in and out. You expand the accordion to full arm’s length in order to focus closely on a moment in time, then you push it in to skim over whole days; then you draw it out again to focus on the next significant experience, then push it in to jump over more days.
Some travel writers draw a five-minute episode out over three pages, then crunch two weeks into two sentences. As George says, “The full meaning and impact of the story is created through the accumulation, organization and integration of these event blocks.”
We do this instinctively as we open our lives to new friends. When we feel a strong connection to someone and recognize uncanny echoes of their experiences in ours, the stories flow freely. Their embarrassing moment in third grade triggers one of our own humiliations. Back and forth it goes. But even the most sympathetic listener will look away if we linger too long in an anecdote or pile too many scenes on top of one another.
The motion of the accordion follows the natural movement of breathing. Breathe a moment in, breathe out over a few days, weeks, or years, breathe in another vivid memory, breathe out the meaning as you see it now. Create those spaces for your reader to breathe with you.
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I don’t claim to practice this method perfectly, but I’ve used it often in my memoir writing.
In this essay about an ill-fated road trip from Montana to Tennessee in a car that a childhood friend had fixed up on the cheap, I anchor into a few key moments along the journey — warnings or signs of escalating trouble — and balance them with thoughts on the strange psychology of poverty: the superiority complex that sometimes comes from growing up with less and that occasionally caused me to skip right over the lessons I might have learned from failure. Where do you see the accordion bellows drawing out and squeezing tight throughout this piece?
Before one firefighting assignment in northern Alberta, my crewmates and I were warned not to trust our crew boss. Emboldened, we mounted a mutiny against him that blew back on us with a vengeance. This piece errs more on the side of showing, drawing the bellows out, but it also speeds up and slows down several times to keep the story moving. Note also how characterization is one way to squeeze the bellows in. That seems counterintuitive, because developing a character is similar to how we set a scene with physical details. Indeed, dialogue draws the accordion bellows out as we imagine ourselves listening in. But painting a portrait of someone or taking a moment to reflect on their behavior or psychology can also create a break in the action in much the same way that fast forwarding through days, weeks, or months can do. Are there any moments in this piece that crystallize the accordion of time concept for you?
Finally, this essay dramatizes a pickle I got myself into while fishing at Kootenai Falls, near my hometown, where I once swam a fast-moving current to escape the crowd. It covers only a few hours but dips in and out of the action. What do you think about the idea that a memory can be thirty years in the making? Are there any places where I ought to have drawn the bellows out more or squeezed them together sooner? Any places where that pacing felt just right to you?
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One of my fun coaching projects this spring has been building a four-month syllabus in the art of the personal essay — customized to one of my client’s needs and interests. If you are tired of mediocre results from online courses and struggle to create structure and accountability for your writing practice, I’d love to prepare a curriculum just for you.
Love it. This sounds like what my favorite writing teacher, Jack Grapes, calls "psychological time" as part of his Method Writing methodology. I paraphrase Jack here
'The image can be very short or can expand to fill several paragraphs—or pages—depending on how much psychological time we want to create for the reader. The more words you use describing an Image, the more psychological time is created, the longer it takes the reader to read the Image, and the more dramatic tension is created in the reader's mind.'
I like the accordion analogy. My favourite slow piece of writing was a chapter by Steinbeck describing a tortoise crossing a road. It was never boring.