There is something future-oriented about what we do. Writing, as I perceive it, is predicated on the belief that there is a future, because in order to go on writing we need to believe that what we have written will be read. As we reread what we’ve written, we continue writing; the new text will hopefully catch the saccadic shifts in our thinking. But there are always gaps, ellipses.

In fiction, these gaps present opportunities: characters can misunderstand each other, which in turn spawns a swerve in the plot; or, within the telling of a story, there may appear sentences or gestures whose meanings are open-ended to the degree that the reader must fill in the blanks. Dreams function similarly. Because they use a kind of shorthand the symbolism is manifold: it is through the attempt to narrate these through linguistic and emotional registers of grammar, word choice, description, and elision that they come to be understood as meaningful.

In order to achieve this effect, one might consider experimenting at the level of grammar in select instances by choosing to remove every word that does not somehow evoke or invite a new image. For example, this memorable instance of lyric compression from Ann Quin’s novel, Three (1969): “This afternoon half a fossil discovered, intaglio, cut from a rock, cool against my cheek. My hands. Against his.” The novel alternates between different styles of narration; in this instance, “S,” who is given to expressing herself in a fragmentary style, relays the details of a day spent at the beach with Ruth and Leon, the married couple with whom she resides. Rather than advance the plot, these sentences enliven point of view by bringing deeper dimension and subjectivity to her character. This poetic style of speech does not strike me as ornamental. To read meaning into these imagistic passages, the reader has to do some triangulating between S, Ruth, and Leon in order to get a sense of what has taken place, narratively speaking. The collage-like sections narrated by S, which are often though not always lineated like poetry, invite further complexity into any attempts to understand the dynamic between Ruth, Leon, and S. All this adds up to a formally enigmatic, haunting, and singular reading experience.

I am generally fond of narratives that reject closure and disrupt linear styles of storytelling because I’m interested in exploring the ways it might be possible to tell a story that goes beyond A lead to B which then in turn caused C. Creating a sense of time and pacing and transition, one that resembles, though also breaks from and challenges hegemonic styles of tracking time à la clocks, calendars, and so on, is one of the biggest challenges in writing fiction. Contradicting the flow of clock-time while also staying connected to some relative sense of realism is not easy. How does one break from the shared hallucination that is time in order to create another time—a time that has never been—through the work of fiction?

Let’s look at the opening of Patrick Modiano’s novel Honeymoon (1990), translated from the French by Barbara Wright:

“There will be more summer days, but the heat will never again be as oppressive or the streets as empty as they were in Milan that Tuesday. It was the day after the fifteenth of August. I had put my suitcase in the left luggage, and outside the station I hesitated for a moment: no one could walk in the town in that blazing sun. Five in the afternoon. Four hours to wait for the Paris train. I had to find some refuge, and I was drawn to a hotel with an imposing facade in an avenue a few hundred metres from the station.”

First sentences. First paragraphs. I am held fast by the way novels begin in the way of establishing mood. Modiano’s narrators never seem to know where they’re going and this sense of lostness is so resonant; his protagonists are often compelled, as if by some gravitational pull, to some lost reservoir of past experience. His sense of pacing is evident from this paragraph alone in the manner of how it invites readers into the mystery of memory, time, fate, and chance.

Another memorable beginning, from Javier Marías’s The Man of Feeling, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (1986):

First sentences are opportunities to produce a sense of embarkment. What is the first line that is being cast? Will I as a reader want to chase this? A lackluster first sentence is not the end-all be-all, but a lackluster first paragraph is a total mood killer. This opening paragraph invites an experience of transport. The style of Marías’s beginning as relayed through this beguiling translation centers doubt, skepticism, and ambivalence, but by the paragraph’s end, arrives at an intense and psychologically loaded last line. In this spirit, in order to produce that sensation of enticing my reader to go deeper into the dream, I’m particularly mindful of beginnings and endings. Put another way, the main event in fiction does not have to be what happens “in” the story—it can be the storytelling process itself.

Because of the relationship I would like to have with the future, my relationship to writing is typically one where I am seeking to interrupt or alter something that has yet to come to pass—it is to anticipate but also introduce a rupture in the future, to affect something, from a distance, like telekinesis. I like to call upon all the poetic elements of language as I’m attempting this—rhyme, metaphor, repetition, alliteration. Maybe the most difficult thing to convey to another writer is that there is no one poetic technique that necessarily guarantees some corresponding outcome, which makes creative writing feel closer to quantum physics. Particles have unpredictable ways of behaving and communicating with other particles, and these behaviors seem to defy what we think we know about time and space. So too with writing, the work is instinctual and perceptual and does not often lend itself to predictable outcomes. I’m reminded of the Christopher Nolan film Tenet (2020), where a scientist explains bullets that fly backward through time: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

This is a risky proposition! But it’s an effective and rewarding way to approach fiction: without an outline, and in the words of Marguerite Duras, “through the flood.” The relationship between the unverifiable, the uncertain, and the future is something I try to remain attuned to as a possibility when writing. So, the question becomes: how to invite more chance and more accident into the process? For example, I periodically free-write with my screen dimmed to black. The intention here is to avoid reading and self-editing as I am writing. A similar thrill is relayed in Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion (1991), translated from the French by Tanya Leslie, where Ernaux writes:

Imagine writing, for an extended duration, as if one could only go forward. Sometimes in fiction, so, too, in life. There is something potentially disastrous in all this waywardness, but too much second-guessing and excess hesitation can and frequently will get in the way of action, chance, and accident, all of which seem necessary precursors to innovation or awe.

Lara Mimosa Montes is most recently the author of The Time of the Novel (Wendy’s Subway, 2025), in addition to two previous books of poetry, THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020) and The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016). Her writing has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, BOMB, Fence, Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches in XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement Master’s program at NYU.

This essay is part of our “Staging Style” series. This quarterly craft series, edited by NER‘s Leslie Sainz, presents innovative writers, translators, and critics articulating the influences and impulses that have sharpened their thinking and writing minds.