Time Waits for No One

On April 13, 2020, Clare H. wrote, Any suggestions on a good way to show that time has passed in a book? Currently, my character is twelve, but I want him to be 17 or 18 by the time I hit my climax, that way readers will see him grow. So far I am trying to show that the seasons are changing and I have thought about using holidays almost as checkpoints.

Three of you weighed in:

Erica: Depending on what else you have going on, you might want to put in a big time jump somewhere, such as skipping directly from 14 to 16. I would suggest either making the passage of time fairly slow or fairly fast. If you do put in a big time jump, though, try to have it occur between chapters. It’s less confusing for the readers that way.

Katie W.: I vote for the big time jump. As a reader, I find it much less confusing than simply speeding up time, (i.e., skipping ahead in a movie instead of fast-forwarding.) especially if you can divide the book into parts and have the time jump take place between parts, rather than inside one. A simple “4 years later” (or whatever time interval you want) heading works wonders.

Melissa Mead: Do you want him to go straight from 12 to 17, or show some things happening in between?

Here’s one way I dealt with a big time jump:

“(Juvenile demon) dropped into a hunting crouch beside Malak, who realized with shock that (the youngster) was now as tall as he was. (JD) had changed from a spawnling to a long-legged juvenile before Malak had even thought to notice the transformation. Once, twenty years would have seemed an impossibly long time, but among Aureni years passed almost without notice. He’d lived years upon years, more than a Deeper One could count on hands and feet…”

Thanks, Melissa Mead, for the big-jump demonstration!

I’m with Erica and Katie W. that it’s best not to jump over changes that need to evolve in our story.

I like a direct approach, like seasons and holidays. Chapter headings or book sections can indicate the year–in our world or in a fantasy universe with a different calendar.

Depending on our story, we can use current events rather than years, like Royal Birth, Coronation, Royal Marriage, Assassination, Accession. Not in my case, but in most, we can even use height markers: 4′ 9″, 5′ 2″, etc. Diary entries can work too. July 1, 2008, March 13, 2010, November, 22, 2011. And so on.

We can get creative and have a different character mark the changes, say from a parent to a grandparent in letters, emails, phone calls, texts.

If we’re spanning time with a young MC, we have to think about growth. A twelve-year-old and a seventeen-year-old are different–emotionally, intellectually, and physically. The teenager will have more experience and a broader understanding. For example, if we’re using diary entries, the voice is likely to change over time. And yet, he still has to be the same person, even if the challenges in our plot also cause him to change.

In my opinion, L. M. Montgomery does a great job with this in Anne of Green Gables, one of my childhood faves. At the beginning, Anne speaks at a thousand words a minute with barely time for breath. That fades, though, as she matures. Yet, she remains thoughtful, smart, and imaginative.

These changes will mark time too, more subtly than direct markers, which we’ll probably still need (or I’d still need).

We can list ways our MC may change. Here are a few for starters:
• talkative to quiet, as L. M. Montogomery does it
• quiet to talkative, as our MC becomes more assertive
• incautious to careful
• clumsy to graceful, like Ella after finishing school

What else? List five more.

Then we have to weave these in–draw the reader’s attention to these qualities at the beginning and again later on.

We can also take advantage of plot in the aging of our MC, who at twelve will approach a problem one way, at seventeen another–different, not necessarily improved. We can change the challenges too and raise the stakes.

Having said all this, though, if we can–if our plot lets us–there’s an advantage to having our story happen in a short time, weeks and months rather than years. The advantage is just that it’s a little easier, because we don’t have to work to close the gap, as Clare H. is asking about. LOL: I should talk, because five of my novels progress from my MC’s birth or early childhood to her teen years!

Here are three prompts:

• Intelligent life in the world of your science fiction story is a species that follows the life cycle of a frog: egg, tadpole, frog. It’s a thinking creature every step of the way, but its understanding and temperament change as it goes along. Give your creature a goal or a problem from inception and write its story.

• The evil queen in “Snow White” changes as the story goes along. When the fairy tale opens, she’s beautiful and content; Snow White is barely a blip in her consciousness. After the mirror declares the girl lovelier than she is, she’s filled with rage but not ready to kill Snow White herself, so she commands the hunter to do the dirty deed. When he doesn’t, she’s ready to take over and commit murder. There’s a possible next transformation when she names the punishment that will be inflicted on her (dancing in the red-hot shoes). Write the story in a way that explains the transformations.

• Your MC Marietta is seven when her beloved older sister disappears and she swears to get her back. Your story takes her from seven to fifteen, when she either succeeds or fails definitively. Write the story, showing how she changes as she grows older.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Time Times Two

This is my second post about time. As time goes by, maybe there will be more.

When you’re considering the time span of your whole story, intensity is a variable. If a few characters are trapped together (think of a stuck elevator, a haunted house, a jury room), everything will be compressed. Your characters will be forced to reveal themselves quickly. They don’t have to form long-term bonds. They need only to solve the crisis. The story may take place in just a few hours or a few days. The urgency creates tension – delightful for the writer.

Out in the world, where you do want some of your characters to form deep relationships, you need more time. In the mystery novel I’m working on (which I just finished the first draft of, hooray!) Elodie, my main character, is given refuge by Meenore, another major character. As soon as Elodie is safe, the mystery begins and they separate again. Wrong! They haven’t formed a bond yet. As I revise, I have to build in a few days, maybe a week, for them to get accustomed to each other, and I have to work in some tension while they do.

My Mesopotamian fantasy, Ever, was inspired by the bible story of Jephtha and his daughter. Kids, this is a disturbing tale. If you look it up, you may want to discuss it with a trusted adult. For our purposes you need only know that Jeptha’s daughter has two months before something horrible is going to happen to her. My book isn’t much like the bible story. Among the many changes I made was shortening the two months to one. Two months felt squishy. One month felt tight. Enough time for relationships to form, not so much that boredom sets in.

On to short-term time– Take this scene: Three friends go out for ice cream. I want to demonstrate what they’re like, so we see that Bree can’t decide among four flavors. She twists a strand of hair around her finger and enumerates what she likes and dislikes about each flavor. Vanilla is too plain but also pure. Chocolate has to be rich but not too rich, sweet but not too sweet. And so on. Luna interrupts to order a scoop of mocha in a cone, no sprinkles. Tim tells Bree she has to make up her mind because he wants to have a scoop of whatever each of them has, which sends Bree into more agonies of indecision while Luna tells him he needs to find out what he likes, not what they like, and he thanks her for the lecture. We’ve learned something about each of them, but I’m stuck in real time in the ice cream store. They have to pay, and there’s got to be shtick about that, because Tim has only forty-eight cents, and Luna gets mad when she learns that the store doesn’t take credit cards for purchases under twenty dollars.

Five pages have gone by, and even if I ever get them out of the store, there are a million diversions on the street. What to do?

First of all, I don’t have to lay the detail on quite so thick. Bree can dither among three flavors or even two, for example. But detail is good, so I don’t want to cut too much.

I can just pick a point in the dialogue and hit an extra space bar to create a gap and start again at a later time or in a different place. This works best if the last speaker says something that rings at least a little bit final.

Or I can wrench the story away with a statement like, After half an hour, the three left the store and separated for the day, each one IMing the others by the time they were two yards apart. This introduces telling rather than showing, but that’s okay. Nonstop showing is impossible.

If I’m writing from the point of view of a character rather than an omniscient narrator, my POV character can help. I can imagine Luna saying, “Enough! I’m out of here.” She leaves and I’m gone too. It’s cool when I can do it that way.

Or, an omniscient narrator can simply jump in with something like Meanwhile, across town.

Sometimes I can bring the real-time segment to a crisis, and this is my favorite technique. Suppose Bree thinks Luna is bossy, and Luna is feeling that everyone is criticizing her. If I have Bree say, “Yes, Mommy,” Luna might blow up. If the friendship is important to the story, Luna’s explosion might be powerful enough to end the chapter. Then, ta da! you can start the next chapter at a later point.

Anyway, it’s not so bad if you do go on too long. In early drafts you can let a scene drag, finish it finally, and keep writing. When you revise, you’ll be better able to judge what to cut and what to keep. Just don’t do what I often do: tinker forever to get the segue just right. Then, later, I find that the whole scene is unnecessary and cut it.

It also helps simply to be aware of time. How many minutes and hours are ticking by during a scene or chapter? Is it still morning? Has time arrived for a meal? Is everybody getting hungry? Are they starving because a week has gone by and you (or I) haven’t fed them?

As I revise my mystery, I’m going to write a chronology by days in a separate document. For each day I’ll list the events that happened. I should have done this in the first draft, but I’ll do it now. I have time.

Time Out

After my last post, Erin Edwards commented:

“How you do handle gaps in the time line, or resist showing what the character does every second of every day? I think I’ve almost got the day to day stuff figured out but I wonder how you cover it.

“Right now I’m working on describing a longer passage of time without being boring and trying to give some indication of what the main character was doing. I’m also trying to figure out how long a passage of time I should have this way too. So in a way, I guess my question is about deciding time lines in general.”

I struggle constantly with the long and short of time. I’ll start with the long and talk about the short next week.

For an absolutely masterly handling of time – if you’re a grown-up or in high school at least – read The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, which I just finished. The book spans about a hundred years, but always feels immediate. The prose is gorgeous and the story intriguing.

Some story structures make handling time easy: epistolary novels (novels in letters or e-mails), novels told in journals or diaries, novels in which each chapter covers a specified period (the first chapter may be March, the second April, and so on).

For other sorts of stories, abridging time involves telling, not showing, using such phrases as The next day, A week passed, A month went by. You can also accomplish this with a theme, like the seasons, as in, Winter ended, and mud season began. Mud season ended, and black fly season began. Or a school theme, like, The second graders filled the corridors with fallen-leaf collages. Fallen leaves morphed into jack-o-lanterns. Jack-o-lanterns became Santa Clauses. But however you do it, skipping a stretch of time inevitably pulls the reader out of the story a little, and you will probably have to fill her in on what she missed.

Here’s how I do it at the beginning of Chapter Nineteen in Fairest:

A week passed. The mood in the castle was bleak. The corridor troubadours sang of pain and grief. Whenever I illused for Ivi I was sure the word trickster would appear on my forehead, spelled out in glaring blush-red. I feared sneezing or hiccupping or fainting. I felt dizzy and feverish.

It’s all tell, no show, very direct. That’s okay. Notice that everything in my summary focuses on the tension that’s moving the story forward. Keeping the tension center stage will help your reader stay interested. Suppose, for example, your characters are preparing for a siege. You can enumerate the preparations that took place during the gap. Sheep were brought in from distant pastures. The armorers repaired damaged weapons. Townspeople packed to move into the castle. A string of five or six of these events will make the reader feel up to date. Naturally, if a siege is looming, you won’t update the reader about the progress of the castle seamstress on the princess’s ball gown. Stick to what the reader is worrying about, the siege.

Your break in continuity should be as short as you can make it. The lengthier it is, in general, the likelier you are to lose your reader. If the gap is years or hundreds of years, you have a challenge I’ve never dealt with, and I would try not to plot a story this way.

Still, it won’t be so hard if the main character continues at the end of the elapsed time, because the reader will still care about him – Rip Van Winkle, for example. If he’s in a time capsule along with all the other important characters, then time matters a little, but not much. But if only the main character remains, the reader will have to adjust to a new time and new people.

If even the main character is gone when the story resumes, I would approach starting the next section as if I were starting an entirely new book and would draw the reader in with a new beginning. A page that says just “Part Two” or “Part Three” will also help prepare the reader.

Isaac Asimov does a fabulous job with multiple long time breaks in his Foundation series about the death of a worn-out civilization and the birth of a vibrant new one. He sets up two groups to bring the next civilization into being, the First Foundation and the Second. Although the characters don’t survive each time jump, the Foundations remain, and the reader wants to see what happens to them. The lesson from Asimov: Build an overarching, impending catastrophe as your temporal bridge.

Everything in writing is possible. You will discover your own ways to manage extended time, or you may already know a few. Please comment with your ideas. Have fun, and save your comments!