Storytelling Technique—Time Dilation

Issue 242

New York City, 2023

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The gap between Cleopatra and the building of artificial intelligence is smaller than the gap between Cleopatra and the building of the Egyptian pyramids. She’s closer to our civilization, unbelievable as that may seem, than to the founding of her own civilization. And once you start looking for time distortions similar to this in the popular imagination, you’ll find plenty of other examples. We don’t orient time in a neat and coherent way in our minds: we garble, skip, and forget events, holding a muddier chronology about the past than we assume. Nor does it help our understanding when there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen, as goes the famous line. If you happen to be telling a story, however, the dilation of time, the capacity to slow down the fastest parts of life and to speed up the slowest parts of life, is fundamental to narrative.

Sometimes you want to concentrate on details. You want to pause, lingering on the moment that’s most potent. Such as when I heard a pilot deliver a forty-five minute story about a two minute emergency. In that story, the pilot described the nuances and risks and calculations that occurred when the ground became uncooperative in its closeness, remaining breathless during the entire story.

But how this pilot distilled a flash of activity into a lengthy, comprehensive speech isn’t—once you consider it—that unusual. The timeline of memory almost never matches the actual duration of an event: minutes stretch, hours compress, entire years pass in a few words. When we encounter the grandiose, stunning, or horrific, there’s a shift in how we account for the passage of time; the experience of a moment in a windowless, empty room feels rather different than the experience of a moment just before a car veers into your lane—which is a lesson for anybody thinking about the pace of a story.