Thursday Thoughts - Sunrise, Sunset

If you've never seen or heard this song from the musical The Fiddler On The Roof, you've been missing out.



This video is from the film version, and the entire movie is easily comparable to any stage performance of this same story that I've ever seen.  In fact, The Fiddler On The Roof is one of best performed musicals on film ever IMHO.  Okay, stage performances have their own type of intensity, but this film is one that I regard just as highly.

If you listen to the words of this particular song however, you'll understand how I'm feeling lately.  No, I don't have any adult children getting married, but I do feel like the days, weeks, months, and years are flying by.  This is further emphasized by the fact that it's been a week since my last post and I hadn't even realized I'd let the time slip past.

I was thinking about this concept of time flowing past quickly, and I realized it would be great if I could continually capture that idea in my writing.  I don't mean that stories need to rush the reader along, but I think we can all agree that stalling the movement of a story is bad.  And since our lives generally keep moving along (whether we notice the passage of time or not), our stories should probably do the same thing.  This is not to say that there aren't moments in our writing where the pace should slow for a bit to savor a scene, but on the whole we need to keep things moving.

It's funny that we often try to create these worlds that are completely different from our own (especially those of us writing fantasy or sci-fi) and yet it's absolutely necessary that we include the same basic framework from our own realities.  I guess there actually are some universal truths, one of them being the unstoppable passage of time.

On that note, I'm going to get back to working on things.  But when was the last time you noticed the passage of time (either in your own life or your writing)?  And how do you deal with it?