Stayin’ Alive: The Space-Time Continuum Applied to Writing a Novel

There are two kinds of people in this world, those who appreciate science fiction and those who do not. Or, in other words, those who are able to grasp the concept of the space-time continuum, the idea that space and time are one and the same, and those who can’t wrap their brains around it. I am one who cannot. I was always lost during Lost.

“The past the present and the future exist together, they are all just there,” my husband has repeatedly tried to explain to me.

I stare at him and then at the television for a second or two, trying to process, hopeful that this time I’ll get it. But the idea that things are happening on different planes, that time can condense, gives me a headache. Or, these days, more of a headache than I already have. So I tune out or turn on The American President. I’ve always been more of a rom-com kind of person. I’m more interested in relationships between people, particularly those scripted by Aaron Sorkin or Nora Ephron, than in those set forth by scientists. Move me via pathos, along the continuum of emotion, rather than drag me through intangible dimensions.

But a few months back, I had a breakthrough. I didn’t grasp it fully, like Einstein, but I sensed for a moment what Einstein was able to set into formula. My flash of understanding came last December, when The CBS Sunday Morning Show did a piece on the 40th anniversary of Saturday Night Fever.

“Forty years? How could that be?” I said to my husband.

“1977,”’ he said. “Forty years.”

I understood the math, but going to see Saturday Night Fever with my brother, parents and grandparents over winter break of ‘77, during our two-week stay in my grandparents North Miami Beach condominium, felt like it had just happened. Because for me, in a way, it had. Over the past ten years, I wrote a novel set, in part, in 1977. In North Miami Beach. In a mammoth condominium complex that smacks of the one we visited every year for the first 20 years of my life.

In the novel, the Melman family goes to see Saturday Night Fever when it premieres in December, 1977. The fictional outing is far more harrowing than anything that transpired in real life, my book is by no means memoir. The events are made up. The characters, too, are made up, or at least amalgams. But the space—the setting—is real, pulled from my memory, from pictures, from conversations with my parents. The gigantic apartment building. My grandparents’ tiny apartment. The pool. The lobby. The Sunny Isles Theater where the Melman family takes in the show on Christmas Eve. I watched Saturday Night Fever, too, countless times in order to choreograph on paper the timing of the events that go down in the theater for the Melmans with the actions of Tony Manero on screen.

Not only did I re-create that place on paper, I went there almost daily in my mind. For some part of most days between 2007-2017, I was living in 1977. With those people, in that place, in those times. I was thirteen. I was riding in the backseat of my grandfather’s Cadillac. I was in line at the Rascal House Restaurant. I was in the lobby with the pinball machines, and at the showing of Saturday Night Fever.

The upshot being that I, like Einstein, compressed space and time, meshed the present into the past. Which is why I feel closely connected to people long dead, to places and that no longer exist, to my younger self. As he begins to narrate his story, the main character, David, says, “Even though the people are long gone, the memory still lives.” For the author, too. So I was surprised, when Jane Pauly introduced the anniversary segment, that 40 years had, suddenly it seemed, gone by.

Not that I didn’t know that stories could transport you. This is why I love to write and why people love to read—the ability to inhabit alternate realities, and in so doing, escape one’s own. Not that my own reality is so terrible. But whatever the issues of the day, whether personal or national and political, it’s always nice to move about a different space. (Or is it a different time?) Especially to a space-time that now seems simpler, easier.

Given our current political climate, experiencing the past seems not only comforting but important. The images of the Jewish people killed in Pittsburgh are reflections of the inhabitants of my grandparents condo building, down to the numbers burnt into their arms. In my book, I meticulously drew these senior citizen characters, including the cigarette brands they smoked. But I gave none of them numbers. Up until recently, I’d forgotten that detail; that many of them were Holocaust survivors. The times had allowed me to forget. But now the present meets the past, and I remember.

All along, I’ve thought my novel would move readers via Artistotle’s dramatic structure—via forward moving action. But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe, Einstein’s theory is at play, too, moving readers emotionally by taking them back in time. In that sense, my story is, in part, science fiction. The rest, of course, is plain old romantic comedy.

—

Francie Arenson Dickman has been using her family as the source of writing material her whole life. Her personal essays have appeared in publications such as The Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, Today Parents, Motherwell Magazine, and Brain, Child Magazine. She lives in the same suburb of Chicago in which she grew up, with her husband, twin daughters, and dog, Pickles. She received her BA from the University of Michigan and her JD from The George Washington University School of Law. Her first novel, Chuckerman Makes a Movie, is available now.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/franciearenson

Find out more about her on her website https://franciearensondickman.com/

About CHUCKERMAN MAKES A MOVIE

“Love matters a little, but luck matters more.”

The words of thirty-five-year-old David Melman’s Jewish grandmother still haunt him. He’s scared to settle down. Instead, he dates twenty-something pop stars that he meets through his celebrity-branding business. But when his niece and nephew inform him that he’s hit “rock bottom” with his latest inappropriate relationship, David realizes that change might be in order-so when his sister Marcy, with her own ulterior motive, pushes him to take a film-writing class taught by her friend Laurel, he agrees.

Will writing a movie about a childhood visit to his grandparents in Florida, an unforgettable driving lesson, and a 1977 Cadillac bring David love? Luck? Or both?

Alternating between David’s present-day life and his past through his movie script, Chuckerman Makes a Movie is a romantic comedy blended with a comedic coming-of-age.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing