READER-WRITER TIME DILATION

I was reading something earlier, that I wrote last summer. It wasn’t a thing that went anywhere, just thoughts really - though I did have an audience in mind so it was formatted to that effect.

I was recapping the story of the last ten years or so - in what turned out to be whistle stop fashion. Some of the points I made flew by with the narrative. Some made me raise an eyebrow, and some made chuckle. Not many though - and all the beats I’d obviously written in as humorous... suddenly came across as flat and mistimed.

(You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?)

It’s that old thing; when I was young I’d flick back through my daily diaries at night. Thick biro bobbled along the lines, on and through February, January, 1993, 92, 91: scrawls and scrawls of me filling each page with how I felt about friends, about school, about church, about punctuation, all in the same cringey blue ink. “How could I have been so young, so immature, so twelve?” my thirteen year old brain would wonder, gently clutching the blue pen (I thought) like Da Vinci over the newest blank page of unwritten genius.

I got the same dull feeling today, reading last year’s notes. I would rewrite the whole thing if I were to start again! Edit, edit, edit, edit! And yet at the time I remember... I was absolutely happy with it.

Time is clearly flowing differently when you write. It’s much slower; thoughts happen in between the words, little moments of subtext that you have chance to pursue as they dart along the dilated train of thought. You can twist grammar, bend the syntax, make long sentences that might tumble out of your mouth, and the voice in your head judges it well.

But your experience then is not the reader’s now. That’s a good lesson - it isn’t like recording a song or a melody on the piano; you have no real control over the playback speed. In text, the person at the other end is completely in charge of the sound desk, and by then there’s nothing you can do about it.

That’s why ten years flashed by today. All the nuanced story, the character development, the aches and pains I wanted to convey, not to mention my lame jokes and moments of wonder, all zipped on by like the 8:25 to Manchester. I was not engaged, and then I’d read the lot.

You see the irony don’t you? There’s every chance I’m making the same mistake right now. I guess you, and perhaps a future version of me who forgot this moment and wondered what this post had been about, might just be reading this a lot faster than I’m writing or thinking about it.

But I think I’ve reasoned that that’s okay. Just like me propped up in bed with my blue biro and my 1993 desk diary, this is simply practice. Finding a voice that feels right. Choosing words that swoop and glide, and a way of thinking that makes as much sense in 2023 as it might have done 30 years (or even 3) prior.

And maybe by 2023 I’ll have actually got there.

Until then I’m afraid, the cringeworthy scrawl and unfunny asides continue. And I do need the practice.