TELLING TIME
Artists & Thieves won the 2011 San
Diego Book Awards in the action/suspense category. In writing it, I paid attention to one of the
essential elements in suspense stories, Time. I compressed the action of the
story into four days and used some fairly standard images to show the passing
of time.
The story is about a task left was unfinished
in the past which the heroine, Mai LIng, must complete in the present. So a sense of the long ago is as important in
the story as present time flying by. Here are four images which are easily
associated with Time:
1.
A clock.
This is obvious. Show a clock and we
know it means tick, tock, time is passing: “[Mai] was racing to find Toni,
getting nowhere, the hands on the dashboard clock sweeping away minutes.”
2.
A decayed building. We know that what is now
falling apart used to be new. So if I show a dilapidated building, you will
understand that time has passed. I set the scene in which Mai first hears that
she must steal the ancient Chinese bowl in the old Chinese town of Locke on the
Sacramento River. Her grandfather tells her, “Listen to me, Mai. There is an
obligation from the past, a duty bound to male heirs.” What happened centuries ago now imposes a
task on Mai. I needed the reader to sense history. I surrounded her with
Locke’s old buildings: “She continued along the walkway and then turned left
into a narrow wooden plank passage between the unsafe, rickety buildings which
barely maintained a vertical alignment.”
3.
An old photograph. A static picture of something we know is from
the past makes us aware of how far the present is from that point: “[Mai] went into the bedroom. A single bed
was covered with her grandmother’s blue and white quilt. That quilt was as
familiar to her as breathing, although her grandmother had died before she had
been born. On the bedside table was a black and white photo she had seen many,
many times, her grandmother holding an infant. Each time she looked at the
photo, she tried to see that infant becoming Lily, her mother. But she
couldn’t.”
4.
Before and After. A quick look at something that has changed
will tell us that time has elapsed. Movement and recurring sounds put us in the
present: “Gulls no longer roosted on the tops of the pilings but flew in low
pursuit of the bait tanks or fought over scraps of bread tossed by the tourists
over the wooden railing into the water. Otters played around the rocks close in
and farther away seals barked.”
There are many ways to show time.
Since it is a very abstract concept, I used concrete images to convey it. The
above examples worked for me as I tried to anchor a character in the past or
present.
Telling
Time is one of the challenges of storytelling.
Linda Schroeder divides her time between the right sun of
California and the high mountains of Colorado. She has a Master’s degree in
English and one in Communicative Disorders/Audiology. In addition to her novel,
Artists & Thieves,
she has published a college text.
Her early interest in English expanded to include language disorders and she
began a second career as an audiologist and aural rehabilitation therapist
working with deaf and hard-of-hearing children and adults.
Currently, she studies and practices Chinese brush painting, celebrating the
vitality and energy of nature. She follows art and art theft blogs and writes
her own blog about art and sometimes includes reviews of novels. She is working
on two more novels, a second Mai Ling novel about the Diamond Sutra, and a
Sammy Chan art mystery about the forgery of a Goya painting.
You can visit her website at www.artistsandthieves.com.
About the Book:
Winner of the 2011 San Diego Book Awards, Action/Suspense category
Where there is art, there are thieves.
Mai Ling is both. Artist by day, thief by night, she recovers stolen art for
Interpol. It’s a business, not a passion, until her beloved grandfather
reveals a family secret that is also a destiny. He is duty-bound to return to
China an especially precious bowl which belonged to his ancestor. Mai must
steal it for him.
But Mai Ling is not the only one after the bowl. Four others plan to extract
the bowl from a private California art collection. The rival thieves grasp and
then lose the bowl until finally Mai is faced with the ultimate dilemma:
save the bowl or save herself. Her duty to her grandfather gives her only one
choice.
Set against the vibrant backdrop of the Monterey Peninsula and peopled with
quirky characters, this stylish art caper entertains on every page.
Book Trailer:
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The old grey donkey, Eeyore stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, "Why?" and sometimes he thought, "Wherefore?" and sometimes he thought, "Inasmuch as which?" and sometimes he didn't quite know what he was thinking about.
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