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.
