I think one thing that I find myself saying to readers sometimes who are a little bit confused by the book because it’s not certainly for a novel very unusually to have no clear chronology and to have all of these different voices and moods and textures.But I think some readers feel a little bit anxious because they feel like there’s some bigger picture they should be getting and might not be getting.
Greg Sanders: Did you have to re-tool any of the previously published stuff, or what that pretty much-- Jennifer Egan: Very little in fact, because it wasn't just a matter of trying to work chronology , we of course, don't get to 1979 until eight chapters later, because I'm going backwards. So, by that time, when we hit the punk rock scene in San Francisco, the reader
Now that catapulted him out of the cultural story of his time. Because the chronology was way, way different than he was Discovering. But it wasn't until the 1950s that we realize that the energy is coming from the nuclear fusion
And so he knew he had a lot of assurance that when they fired a shell, it would strike and blow up. concerned-- is chronology . Beginning, middle, and end.
He was then the first Secretary of State. So this is the chronology .
I really enjoyed meeting these bright applicants and I was quite interested to see what they were doing with their lives. One of my particular points of interest was to analyze the chronology of what they had listed on their applications so I could understand what they had done year by year since high school, a period of 8 years for these applicants. Sometimes a little probing would disclose they had traveled in Europe for a year or worked on an archaeological dig. During one interview
Greg Sanders: Did you have to re-tool any of the previously published stuff, or what that pretty much-- Jennifer Egan: Very little in fact, because it wasn't just a matter of trying to work it's a reverse chronology ." Rather soon, I had problems with that because I knew I was going into the future.
Greg Sanders: Did you have to re-tool any of the previously published stuff, or what that pretty much-- Jennifer Egan: Very little in fact, because it wasn't just a matter of trying to work This backwards chronology is really costing me a lot of opportunities for surprise, and payoff for the reader." As one clear example, you mentioned that Bennie is in the car in
Oh yeah, leadership is not some rare genetic imperative. It's innate in every human being and it's damn well innate in you. You just have to know where to get started. If you study the chronology of every iconic leader in history, their leadership all starts in pretty much the same place: with their personal values being put under tremendous pressure. You wanna know if something's important to you? Meet somebody trying to take it away.
So "The Baroque Cycle," internally, is eight books. I need to be writing-- the chronology forces me to write things in the near future, starting a few years from now
And I thought, why don't I do this? Why don't I create this chronology of stories that are all thematically linked through having a baby, but each one is their own thing? And so of course, the overall theme of the book is motherhood and becoming a mother.
What sort of rituals are you creating? and what the thinking was behind the chronology of the world.
going to have too much of a dramatic effect. If you actually look at the chronology here, this experiment was done in 2002. We did this biologic experiment in 2006.
So he claimed that it was 1200s, 1300s, something like that, Kaye himself. And he dissed the Indian chronology by saying, well, the Indians claim that their history goes back several million years. So of course they don't know what they're talking about.
Because it's easier to remember the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 than 5, 3, 2, 1, 4, our brain provides us with the illusion of an order by positing a chronology or causal links that do not exist. That's how a woman walking down the street at 8:00 AM holding the hand of a young girl with a backpack automatically becomes a mother taking her daughter to school.
And Google had formed on campus. Although I'm not even sure of the exact timing and chronology . But I worked for the "Stanford Daily," the student newspaper.
What sort of rituals are you creating? But I'm curious if taking this non-linear chronology and exploring the reasons for earlier things, if you ever
They keep to themselves. And this is a bit probably a leap forward in the chronology , but it's worth doing. But there's a period where the British government is suspicious about whether or not the Americans are going to have the technological wherewithal
Giving them that sense of historical perspective and chronology would go a long way to giving them
And so he knew he had a lot of assurance that when they fired a shell, it would strike and blow up. And then finally I place everything into a chronology , which is essentially an index to everything.
And so he knew he had a lot of assurance that when they fired a shell, it would strike and blow up. You know? But this chronology is my index, but it's also something else very valuable.
So through the-- I'm going to just do a little chronology here-- through the '80s and '90s, I wrote about food and cooking
Greg Sanders: Did you have to re-tool any of the previously published stuff, or what that pretty much-- Jennifer Egan: Very little in fact, because it wasn't just a matter of trying to work as much of a strait jacket as a forward chronology . So, that was when I understood that I was gonna be moving around and that my only criteria, really, were gonna be things like, what would
I'll I I'll sketch briefly a chronology of what we did just to remind all of you
The second thing is his life doesn't lend itself to a tidy chronology .
And so I kind of thought of this book as the book of the childbearing years for these various women. And so just to give you a little sense of the kind of chronology of the book, it's all different characters. But it starts with a couple who are having a hard time conceiving, want to have a baby but are struggling with it.
I mean, it was a chronology .
And so he knew he had a lot of assurance that when they fired a shell, it would strike and blow up. And then during-- as the action accelerates, this chronology goes from-- it might start just with things sorted by year, then by month,
If they could just take a tiny bit of it and radiocarbon date it, the whole history of mathematics would come into much, much clearer view. And we would know what the sequence, the chronology , was like. But the Brits don't allow you to do that.
And I guess I can kind of run through a little quick chronology .
is just as limiting when it goes backwards as it is forward. So what I realized is that I had to let go of chronology completely and let curiosity and little pleasures and satisfactions be my guide. And so those little connections that you talk about and those little surprises were things that started to matter more when I let them guide me--
in the tie tells us. There's the chronology that we're taught to believe is essentially the story of American
at carneg Hall Hammond's intent here was not just to lay out the chronology of African-American popular music but to
What sort of rituals are you creating? to book, but I don't need to keep track of a timeline of the internal chronology of each book in any subsequent book.
And I get up on stage and I do a concert, and the setlist is a chronology of my life
There's an index in the back of my book in which I tried to do a chronology of big brewer efforts to play in our category.
John, you met Nick, if the chronology I have is correct, in 1971, so seven or so years after this picture is taken.
in terms of clarifying that And it doesn't have to be a full essay, but maybe it's bullet points, maybe it's a chronology ,
Well, in order to understand how that works, we have to understand the chronology of the demographics in the United States.
And so he knew he had a lot of assurance that when they fired a shell, it would strike and blow up. it goes down to the day, to the hour, to the minute, in some cases, in this chronology .
I think growing up in a home where I always had this dream image of my mother, you have to really break down the family chronology .
To basically let the principle of curiosity which guided me through the material also informed the reader's experience. I think that was what I was kind of missing that I removed a lot of the fun that I had had taking these kind of lateral steps for the reader by imposing this chronology which is just as limiting when it goes backwards as it is forward.
of life. Also the religions that hold out the prospect of a future utopia, messianic age, a kingdom of heaven on earth, often write into their chronology one last spasm of violence
Greg Sanders: Did you have to re-tool any of the previously published stuff, or what that pretty much-- Jennifer Egan: Very little in fact, because it wasn't just a matter of trying to work So, there's no immediacy to the payoff. And I realized that that was totally wrong and that I needed to structure it much more intuitively. And in a way, a backwards chronology is just
Greg Sanders: Did you have to re-tool any of the previously published stuff, or what that pretty much-- Jennifer Egan: Very little in fact, because it wasn't just a matter of trying to work At that point, I started to be pretty systematic about what we already knew about people and what the ages they were when we last saw them, because I didn't have that ramrod of a chronology
Dan Sinker: So how are they in the car? I'm confused. My own chronology is off. But they hadn't moved into the house, but at ORD Camp, they had decided to haunt the guy living