
Writing Times: Novelists Bernice L. McFadden and Hamdan Dammag discuss how they use time as a novel writing tool
by Maryam Ismail
Allah in the Quran, swears by the time that we are all lost unless we do good and learn from our mistakes. Time, that elusive, illusion, that escapes all of us from one moment to the next, is gone when its gone, unless we capture it in literature, through it, we can beat the clock, even if only for a chapter or two.
Through the use of subplots, backstories, and foreshadows time becomes more than a point on a continuum, it turns into a tool in which the author add drama, infuse life, and create new dimensions. Authors Bernice L. McFadden and Dr. Hamdan Zayed Dammag, during the session, the Nature of Time, at the 2019 Sharjah International Book Fair, discussed the many ways they use time as a vehicle to write their storytelling.
The Telling of Time

The lesson of the day was, it is all about intention and perspective. What is the author’s aim? To inform to be innovative? Dammag, the wiiner of the 2015 Sharjah Arab Literature Prize, told the audience, that by mixing myth and reality, imaginary figures and real personality, within his short stories, he is telling his reader that time, is irrelevant. “All of them are a reality,” he said. “Duality, seriousness/humor, light/dark, acceleration/extermination, these are elements that I love using. I want the reader to explore and think about the world in a different way.” Normally time is expressed in a literature through dates or hours passing, but Damaag, has another technique-narration. In his novel, The Jewel of Mt. Attakkar, he spoke of using different characters to tell different points in time. “I am free to play the facts because I am the creator of moment.” These different narrators, do not follow a single narrative, instead provide subplot,” he added.
Lessons of the Past: Everything Old Is New Again
“Time is very important to my work. I like to layer stories, used nested stories, and lots of foreshadowing. When I used nested stories, I can space the story over several years and different eras,” said McFadden. In her latest book, Praise for Song for Butterflies, a story that deals with religious sacrifice, sex trafficking, and healing. She told the audience: “In space and time, everything connects. As an American descendant of slave, this helped me make those comparisons between the experience of those in slavery in America with those who were traded as sex slaves in present day Ghana.”
For those without context, sex trafficking, control, oppression, in humanity, the most dreadful of human activity today, have their direct connection to American chattel slavery in which many of the same cruelties were used against women and men for centuries.
Literature can unlock the doors of history and show us “Everything old is new again,” added McFadden. She uses the adage as inspiration for her work. “Most of my novels are historical fiction and I like to take real events and play with them in order to examine the parallels between the past and what is happening now.
During the Q&A session a member of the audience asked, “How can I write a historical event and create drama within a story that seems to be just facts? Dammag’s answer was have a plan. “Many writers do not plan out what they are going to write. The assume that the reader with just follow the protagonist and love him. This is not always the case. Thus a writer needs to vary narration, move back and forth between time, people and place, to keep the readers on their toes.”
The questioner said he was a journalist and had trouble making his mind switch from the journalistic style of writing to fiction. “I have students who have this same problem. I understand you. There is one thing you can do; interview the character/person you want to write about. Ask him anything, then you will have enough information to move them forward,” answered McFadden.
In this fruitful session, I learned that time, is more than a setting. It can be a character, an impetus, and an inspiration. It is also a creative tool by which an author can play with, explore, and create a new world for us to revel in and learn from. It can also help us find our way, just when we think that all is lost.
