"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't
happen at once." Albert Einstein
Good advice for authors...
I’m not very good at keeping track of the passage of time in
my novels. I tend to write stories with adventures that happen pretty
speedily, like in Wreck of the Nebula
Dream where the characters only have a few hours to get away before the
ship blows up or Other Bad Things Happen (no spoilers). But even then, in classic
disaster movie format, I did spend the first part of the book letting my hero
meet the people he was destined to rescue, so I had to figure out what the heck
he would do on a spaceliner for two or three days! At one point poor Nick is so bored, and has
exhausted the amenities to the point he muses about spending the rest of the
trip in cryo sleep. Of course that would have meant no novel and maybe no Nick,
given there was going to be this wreck….*
I sort of do what Marcella shared yesterday – at some point
during the writing of the novel, I sit down with a pad of lavender paper and I
start writing out what happened on Day One, Day Two etc.
Sometimes dealing
with the issue calls for research, as in Magic
of the Nile, where my hero Sahure had to travel various places in ancient
Egypt in his chariot, as well as with a small army, some of whom were on
foot. So how fast could a chariot
travel, how far was the oasis of Kharga from Thebes, how far did an ancient
army typically march in a day….apparently the ancient Roman legions covered 10
to 15 miles per day by the way. I gave myself a pass when Sahure and Tyema, the
heroine, end up in an area of the Afterlife, battling demons. That took as long
as it took, while back in Egypt only one night passed. Thanks to the goddess Sekhmet
for an assist there! Gotta love magic when you can deploy it….
In my new novel Ghost
of the Nile (coming in May if all goes well), I set my time-challenged self
a real hurdle. The main character has exactly thirty days in Egypt to
accomplish the task the goddess Ma’at has set for him. (The ancient Egyptian
month was thirty days so my plot was tied to that.) Of course she didn’t
exactly explain everything beforehand (what goddess does?). I had to do a lot of scribbling on my lavender
pad as the writing progressed. “If they spend three days here, and one day each
way in travel…ok, no maybe they stay four days and there’s a mock combat contest…”
I have Periseneb the hero keeping track of each day as it passes – no pressure!
I’d be very bad at writing a novel that spanned decades or
centuries. I’d probably do a lot of “and then time passed until…” stuff that
would annoy my editor and my readers LOL. Kinda like one of those old time
Hollywood biography movies where the person whose life is being dramatized
shows up as a baby for a few frames (blink and you miss him/her), then a kid
for maybe a quick character-building incident, then he/she is in love or in the
army or what-have-you and THEN we get to the part of the lifetime the movie is
interested in. With maybe a final shot of our person as a much beloved oldster
propped up on a lot of pillows, dispensing one last gem of wisdom before the
music swells and the credits roll. Yeah, I could write that!
*Wreck of the Nebula Dream is on sale now for 99 cents, by the way. "Titanic in space..."
