Time as a Thing
If time were a thing—would it be
red, blue, green, yellow, black, or clear?
Solid, hollow, thin, short, or tall?
Could you see through it—
see the back of it,
look at it from the side,
see it from the top,
from the bottom?
Would it be straight?
Twisty?
Upside down?
Topsy-turvy?
Or would it circle around?
Would it end?
Would it start?
Would it have seams?
A machine.
Yes. That is it.
For Writers, time is a machine—
It has seams, and it can be used.
You feel it the first time a sentence bends instead of ends. A paragraph opens a door it didn’t announce. A character steps backward without asking permission. The clock on the wall keeps going, but the room does not.
Time isn’t built of gears or wires. It’s made of words arranged in a particular order. Change the order, and the machine responds.
Push a verb into the past and the machine lurches backward.
Lean too hard into the future tense and it begins to hum—fast and thin.
Remove time entirely and everything freezes people suspended mid-breath, coffee cups hovering inches above desks.
Some of us discover the emergency brake: white space. Silence stops everything cold. Others learn how to flip time upside down, tell the ending first and let gravity pull the rest into place. A few figure out how to run it sideways, looping the same moment until it wears smooth as a river stone.
The machine’s gears are punctuation marks. Periods, commas, n dashes ,em dashes, ellipses—each one is time, each one a different pace.
Time can be dangerous:
It goes back—not carefully, not academically, but fully. You can sit again at kitchen tables that no longer exist. You can listen to voices you thought you had forgotten how to hear. You can rewrite nothing. You only observe. That’s the rule. The machine tolerates observation. It punishes correction.
Forward travel is easier. The future is poorly guarded. You can walk into it with a single sentence that begins, Years later. You can look around, take notes, and come back pretending you never left.
Stopping time is the rarest skill. It requires attention so complete that the machine stalls, uncertain what comes next. In that pause—barely a heartbeat, you can examine a single moment from every angle: top, bottom, inside, behind.
Most people live entire lives without ever seeing one moment that clearly.
