Time Tracking

Polish Your Writing and Make It Shine

The Fairborn Theater is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Photo by Logan Rickert on Flickr.

With a Greek American father, our Ohio home ran as a democracy. Sort of. As the only girl in a family of four children, I was usually outvoted in choosing movies. My three brothers voted as a bloc: Shirley Temple, “No” and John Wayne, “Yes.” I watched my share of shoot ’em up Westerns, World War II soldier sagas, and Japanese sci fi.

In 1962, we trundled off to see Taras Bulba, a war-laced feature faintly based on a novel by the Russian author Nikolai Gogol. Dad drove us the six miles to the Fairborn Theater. He went the back way from Medway — down Spangler Road, past the marshy areas, across the Mad River and over the spooky truss bridge. The movie, set in the 1500s, stars Tony Curtis and Yul Brynner.

We watched open-mouthed as the Cossacks, Poles, and Turks clashed on the steppes. Tony Curtis raced his steed…and then my brother Tim ruined it all. “Did you see that, Steve? That guy had a wristwatch on.” The mood was spoiled. The fantasy dissipated like fog in the sun.

An anachronism is, according to Merriam Webster, “an error in chronology, especially a misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other.” A wristwatch on a sixteenth-century Cossack, in other words.

For writers, anachronistic errors can sneak into their work through the narrative or…