The structure of time in stories

"Whereas a film has 24 frames per second in which to tell its story, a traditional comic book only has a small number of frames, or panels, per page, usually between five and nine, across a total of 22 pages. Comparatively, a comic book is equivalent to about six seconds of film. But obviously, any comic contains more narrative than the time it takes to read this sentence. So where, then, does the content 'hide'?"
— Roy Schwartz, Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero, McFarland & Company, 2021.

“I need a meta-time, a thing fueled by the kind of heartbeat I desire — one that is rule-breaking, empathetic, aware of its power enough to offer some kind of mercy.
In DC Comics, there is a concept called hypertime, an in-universe framework formulated as a diagram, making the timelines of stories accurate, even without continuity across existing collections of storylines. The idea postulates a kind of multiversal transit map where each line, representing its own story, runs parallel, crosses over others, and carries on, with characters hopping from one train to another across universes. A reader in the third-dimensional space can look down and make meaning of the stories between the pages, leaving room for the possibility of a fourth-dimensional, hyper-cubic reader who examines that space, a geometric vision incorporating our universe along with the comic story world."
— Kristin Keane. An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. Baltimore: Barrelhouse, 2022. p. 60.

"...pretty much all of my favorite books screw around with the order of events, or come shaped like puzzle boxes, or have seven separate 'third acts.' Like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest or Rebecca Roanhorse's Black Sun, which jump around in time, or Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which intersperses two timelines that slowly converge.
Time is the one drug that absolutely everyone is hooked on. And fiction is the only place to get a really potent hit."
— Charlie Jane Anders. Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. Tordotcom, 2021. Chapter 24.

"Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost."
Charles Yu. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Pantheon, 2010. p. 14.

"This experiencing of time, it seems to me, is what sets writing apart and makes it more than simply words, more valuable than a commodity, more pleasurable than the audio-visual product which digital culture has converted into a space of hollowed time, like the time you spend flying between two airports. Writing is time packed full. It derives its morality from its immorality; it achieves compassion, not by flattery or glib misrepresentation, but with a gaze that is concerned only with seeing what is there, uncompromisingly, avoiding all fakery. This, then, is what it means to search for the truth: the objective that attends me whenever I ask myself, in an ironic spirit, Why do you write? or, What does writing mean to you?"
— I write like a lover, I write like one dead. The opening essay of my second Mutanabbi book, translated by Robin Moger. Youssef Rakha. Language of Loss (Substack). Dec. 31, 2022.

"Linear history, Oedipal history, is our fantasy, and to perpetuate it we invented the myth of an authoritarianism arising from the preterit, even though authority can only be exercised from the present. Borges, whose work was concerned with the manipulation of time, claimed that each author invents his precursors. Or, to put it in Phillip K. Dick’s terms, the Oedipal structure is a Counter-ClockWorld, a world where, as in this Dick novel, the libraries destroy books and the dead emerge from their graves.The best-kept secret of linear oxidental time is that it is written from the future to the past."
Heriberto Yépez. The Empire of Neomemory. Translated by Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, & Brian Whitener. ChainLinks, 2013. Originally: El Imperio de la neomemoria (Oaxaca: Almadía, 2007). Part I: America, Pseudo-Patriarchy, Pantopia.

“Any sequence of events is interesting because of its positive and negative shapes. Take a pair of scissors and cut something out. Anything. Why not a devil with horns and a tail and cloven hooves. So. There is your paper with a devil-shaped hole in it. Two devil-shapes, one positive, one negative, and both of them made at the very same moment. Was the Battle of Manzikert the shape of the paper or the shape of the hole? It’s as I’ve said before: there is always a twoness in the oneness, and for this reason it’s almost impossible to know what is happening in the space-time configuration. Not only that: as soon as an effort is made to look at any particular thing the aspect of that thing becomes other than what it was—that event that happened in full view when unlooked-at covers itself when observed, spins around itself one of those wonderful encrusted eggs with a peephole in one end of it; I the observer, receding reactively from the gaze that proceeds from my eyes, find myself shot into the distance thousands of miles away from the peephole. Inch by inch I think my way back; closer, closer, closer I come and here it is all tiny—the tiny, tiny Battle of Manzikert.”
— Russell Hoban. Pilgermann. London: Bloomsbury, 1983.

"If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were."
— John McPhee, in an essay on structure in the New Yorker (January 6, 2013), quoted by Aimee Liu in "Picture Your Structure," Legacy & Lore (Substack), February 16, 2024.