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What You and I and Everyone Else Fixate About—And How to Exploit It.
How your stories here can make money off the passage of time.
Last week I wrote a piece I wrote for The Atlantic.
I struggled for quite a while trying to figure out the structure to impose on the piece. And that’s what I want to talk about today: How the passage of time is our obsessions and the source of any story’s richness.
In my reporting I saw how the story would need to be blocked around four periods of time: Jarrett Adams’ life, wrongful conviction, and eventual exoneration; the murder in Virginia, which occurred in 1998; Adams’ present-day efforts to free the men acquitted of the murder but nonetheless serving life sentences, as if they had done it; and the case law and story around that bizarre legal precedent.
As I flailed to structure it I thought about the stories I love that manipulate time brilliantly.
One was Atonement, Ian McEwan’s novel.
That story followed a girl, Briony Tallis, who witnessed a sexual assault and accused a 17-year-old boy, Robbie Turner, of committing the crime. Briony then began to have doubts about her accusation, which sent Turner to prison. The story spanned 60 years of Briony’s life but McEwan blocked it brilliantly. He structured it in episodes. Each was a clean…
