Writing Excuses 9.6: The Experience of Time

Mette Ivie Harrison joins us again for a fun discussion of how we experience time. This episode runs a little differently. Howard shares an experience he had driving on black ice, Mette shares an experience about a bike accident during an Ironman, and Mary shares a story about falling down a flight of stairs.

Each of these stories point up the way that our perception of time can change. There are physiological reasons for this, and knowing just a little bit about that physiology can help us write this actual, real phenomenon in a way that does not seem cliché. We talk about how we can write time compression or dilation phenomenon in ways that seem fresh.

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Take something you’ve already written where you relied on cliché (bonus points if it’s time-related) and rewrite it using different tools.

Déjà Dead, by Kathy Reichs, narrated by Barbara Rosenblat.