Time Is Relative by Jane Kelley

Time.  Oh what tricks it plays. And we writers exploit them, if we can. 

Manipulating those minutes on the page is a skill I struggle with. Sometimes I simply forget that I can be free to jump to a new moment. Sometimes I forget to take the time (so to speak) to describe events. We have to choose whether to be fast or slow.

We've heard Einstein's quote about how a minute seems different if one is suffering or savoring.

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.”

But that explanation is more like what fiction does than physics.

It's our job to make those different kinds of experiences work for our stories. 

We can't completely ignore the ticking clock; that's the reality of our lives. Our own hearts beat at that rate. But we also need to forget that clock. The reader wants to escape from his or her time. Isn't that one of the measures of a story teller's success? To transcend?