I spend a lot of time sitting in a chair with a fountain pen and a notebook. There is something comforting to me about the scritch-scratch sound the nib makes as it glides across the paper. Sometimes the morning sunlight glares directly into my writing space and onto my page, and I can see the wet trail of water-based ink as it disappears into the thirsty surface of the paper. I might be working with green ink, but the feathering of the pigments makes ten shades of emerald as I work, instead of one constant hue, and time stretches.

Some days this summer I got down four thousand words in a notebook; on others, the kids came tumbling into the room and I abandoned the page with only a sentence or two to show. Either way, the words added a layer of time over my day that hadn’t been there before. As I accessed the part of my head where the words come from, the days stretched and stretched, sometimes feeling like two days in one, the day I was writing and the day I was living.

Later, when I go back to those words to transcribe them, I will see the choppy parts where I couldn’t get my head on straight, or the change of ink color, perhaps from cosmic cobalt to orange crush, indicating that I had stopped on one day and returned the next to keep going. So outside of the story, I have a sense of the present, the past, the potential of the words in the future.

When I have a block of uninterrupted hours, I time-travel up and down my stories, from page one to page thirty, then back to six and forward to fifty-two. I notice a character who should have been back in chapter three so I travel back there and put him in. I see in chapter four another character who seems lost and does something that makes no sense, so I travel forward and give her a reason that clears everything up in chapter nine. I didn’t see that coming, but I can time travel again and again and again until the whole thing makes sense. What a gift.

In the end, I’ll have traveled across my story dozens of times or more, forward, back, forward, and back. It took me a long time to realize one thing: writers seldom sit down and write a brilliant novel. What they do instead is write a crummy novel and then they time-travel back and forth, ahead and reverse, until they finish with a novel that’s been worked on by fifty authors, a different one for every time they journeyed.