NaNoWriMo-ToGo: Establishing Time
A lesson plan for helping students establish time in their novel
“Once upon a time…” is not only the most familiar opening line of hundreds of classic fairy tales but the oldest. Since at least 1380, the phrase has been used in English storytelling and its oral history likely predates that. Often followed by an introduction to an equally unnamed place and some characters, the line is so efficient that the reader is immediately ready for the story to unfold.
However inviting and lean-into-able “once upon a time” is as an opener, it doesn’t tell the reader one thing: the actual time of the story. Instead, as Maria Konnikova writes, it creates distance and vagueness to drop us into fantasy:
The world of once upon a time is not reality. It is a creation of make-believe. It is an invitation for fantasy and imagination to take the stuff of real life and do with it what they will—and perhaps, to translate the newfound truths back from story to actuality.
While “once upon a time” is often the tag for fantasy, it can also be used as a broad introduction that sets the reader up for a much different kind of novel, such as Anne Tyler’s Back When We Were Grownups, which begins “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”
Whether you use “once upon a time…” or not, opening a novel with time is a well-established element of fiction. Some of the greatest first lines of literature begin with time unfurling the plot from that specific moment.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
George Orwell, 1984
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
David Lodge Changing Places
In the following lesson, students can find ways in which writers establish time in novels and apply that craft to their work:
INSTRUCTIONS:
Introduce the below text set. You can do this using a cooperative learning strategy, such as jigsaw reading where you create groups of three and assign one article to each student or you can give every student all three articles to read, annotate, and discuss. Invite students to discuss an essential question: What are the attractions and distractions of starting a story with the classic “once upon a time”?
Why So Many Stories Begin With ‘Once Upon a Time’ by Lorna Wallace |
The Power of Once Upon a Time : A Story to Tame The Wild Things by Maria Konnikova
Once Upon a Time” and Other Formulaic Folktale Flourishes by Anthony Madrid
While students are discussing the above articles, pull 30-40 books from your classroom library and lay them face up on a table like a novel buffet.
After they discuss the articles, invite groups or individuals to select 2-3 novels from the novel buffet. Open each novel and read the first page or two. Using a triple-entry journal format, ask students to list the title and author and answer the following question:
When does the author situate the reader in time? How soon does an actual time - year, day, season, epoch, hour – appear in the novel?
Example A:
John Green, Looking for Alaska: The author situated the reader immediately. A subtitle before the first line reads: “one hundred thirty-six days before.” The first line reads: “The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going-away party.
Example B:
The timestamp in the first paragraph of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You is an arresting and efficient situating of the plot in the reader’s mind. Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.
Have students return to their NaNoWriMo project and look at how they have established time in their novel either at the beginning or in a particular chapter. Ask them to choose one of the ways they discovered from the novel buffet that they can use in one of their chapters to establish time.