Controlling Time

Finally.

Don’t know if our ISP had a few too many yesterday, or what, but it fell down in the gutter. Probably barfed on its own shoes and got picked up on a drunk and disorderly. A night spent in the drunk tank hasn’t sobered it up any that I’ve noticed. Finding someplace unaffected has been a challenge.

But here I am. To tell you how I keep track of the time line(s) in my stories. Yeah. That sound you hear? That’s my local critique group laughing me off the internet. It is possible I’ve had some challenges on that front. The urban fantasies, especially, suffered a few temporal challenges . . .They may still. I mean, there are plenty of ways to increase tension in a story. Compressing the time during which the world must be saved, the ring tossed into an inconvenient volcano, or the murderer caught is an easy way for a writer to get a story screaming along.

Not all that effecting, however, if you’re writing something other than a heart-pounding thriller-y type story. Someone associated with your story, somewhere, had better be wearing a watch and counting the days on the calendar. I submit you’ll be happier if that someone is you and not your editor. Or worse. Your readers.

In an attempt to take my own advice, (stop rolling your eyes, your face will stick that way) I’ve started mapping out a rough timeline at the same time I try to map out the turning points of my story. It looks something like this:

Open (1st 10th of book)	1st Twist (1/4 through)	Midpoint	Climax (black moment)	Resolution
Hero starts here	No one saw this coming!	This is total surprise, too	Uh oh. Very bad, no good day	Hey. Not so bad, after all
June 5, 4pm	June 7, all day	June 15, (this date is immovable because plot point!)	June 20, 2AM	June 20, 6PM

No. They don’t really look like this. The 5 points I track usually have lots more detail than this – info for me about where characters start, notes about WHEN in the timeline each character enters the story. In truth, none of it fits in a neat table. I usually end up with pages. One for each twist point. I do try to keep my time line loose so there’s room to adjust as surprises crop up in the story, but usually, I find there is one point in time somewhere in the story that determines how the timing of all the other scenes falls out. It’s rarely at the beginning of my stories. Suppose in the example above the midpoint twist is the hero succeeding in convicting a killer, but it turns out nothing like he expects because a death sentence is handed down and the hero subsequently discovers he convicted the wrong person. Worse, back at the first twist point, he’d gotten the news that the cancer he’d thought cured three years ago is back. With a vengeance. The rest of the timeline is driven by his need to right the wrong he committed before he dies.

It’s not a perfect system, but it is better than some of the scenes I wrote for the urban fantasies where the only way my heroine could have done everything I had her doing in the timeframe I had her doing them – would have been if Star Trek were real and teleportation was a thing. New market. Scifi urban fantasy.

Passing Time in 500 Pages

Ever get to the end of a book and feel breathless? Maybe even a little in awe of all that happened in 500 pages? Ever wander to the kitchen after finishing said book and realize everything happened in 3 days? Suddenly all the awesome adventures seem highly....suspect? Improbable? Somehow less satisfying?

I've been guilty of not paying attention to the passage of time when I write.

If aging my protagonist isn't pivotal to the plot, it's too easy to forget that time needs to pass off the page for certain motivations, emotions, and conflicts to realistically develop. And for learning to happen. And for healing to occur. I have one CP that lives to call me on Time Fails, and I absolutely deserve the ribbing that comes along with them.

"One does not find the obscure ancient spell hidden among stacks of books in three minutes.

Not even with Google."

Incorporating the passage of time into a story isn't hard, but it is necessary. Fortunately, alerting the reader to the passage of time can easily be done in an early editing round. Figuring out where to add off-page time is driven by logic. You know, things like:

• Maybe recovering from a spear in the shoulder ought to require two-to-three weeks instead of an overnight. 
• Maybe hiking across the desert ought to take three months instead of three days. 
• Maybe enlisting the aid of the assorted underground guilds takes years to negotiate not one pint at the local pub. 

Yep, logical things. By the time you add it all up, your protagonist has been working toward her goals for months if not years.

What do you do if you need to jump decades? How about generations? Dunno. Since I don't write sweeping epics, my stories don't span hundreds of years. I'm dealing with a handful of years at most. Many of my plots are quest or test driven, so the passage of time is deliberately limited. I like my stories to have a sense of urgency pushing the characters into situations and forcing questionable decisions. To do that, I employ the "If X isn't done by Y, then Z will happen" aka: The Call & The Consequence.

But how, oh how do I let the reader know that "stuff has happened for a specific time off the page"? Simple sentences. Usually just one line. Sometimes at the opening of a scene. Sometimes buried in the scene, particularly if the actions happening off page are repetitious.

Here are a few of my favorite Passage of Time statements:

• "After weeks of ..."
• "Hours became days that became months..."
• "And the ritual repeated for years."
• "Secondary Character had more grey/wrinkles/blubber/children since last they'd met..."

There you have it, dear reader, how to Pass Time in your novel. Do you have favorite (or least favorite) Passage of Time statements? Do share!


Image Source: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-antique-typewriter--the-passage-of-time-kathy-fornal.html

Time in a Novel: What Should Your Scale Be?

Tis the season to be gearing up for the RT Convention! This is just one of the fun reader parties I'm participating in.
So, our Bordello Topic of the Week is 3 Hours, 3 Days, or 300 Years: How Do You Choose & Use The Passage of Time?

As always, that "choose" word amuses me. I like it though. I envision myself gazing into a fire thoughtfully, perhaps wearing a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows and with a notepad on the table beside me, next to the snifter of brandy. I frown as I contemplate the timeline of the novel I'm working up, envisioning the sweep of the story, how many days or years it should take to play out and.... Who am I kidding?

This is so not me.

So far, every single time I thought I was going for a long timescale, it hasn't happened. For example, The on-screen events of the three Twelve Kingdoms books (so far) take place over the course of just over a year. A jam-packed year, for sure. When I proposed the books? I envisioned them being something like ten years maybe. Now I'm adding two more books to the series and I might make it another year into the arc. We'll see. But again - who am I kidding?

I'm a fine-scale writer. Probably because I'm a character-driven writer and I love to focus in on detailed conversations and slow-burn epiphanies. I love to have that stuff on the page and to linger over it. Because that's the trade-off - if you want a larger time-scale, more stuff has to happen off-screen. It's a necessary sacrifice. I recently read a book that I loved, loved, loved - and yet, a number of events happened off-screen that I felt cheated by missing. I *wanted* to live those moments. In that case, I think the author could have made the choice to include some and I'm not sure why she didn't.

In other cases, it's not so much of a sacrifice to lose the boring, daily stuff. Much as I love Jacqueline Carey, she once dragged me through innumerable pages of a long, excruciating journey through monsoon rains. Yes, she made me live the misery and it's obviously stamped indelibly into my brain. But... really, Jacqueline?

I suppose that timescale of the story is ultimately a tradeoff between velocity of the plot and believable character development. In romance, in particular, the worst transgression of this kind is the "insta-love." In fantasy... could be the too-easily resolved defeat of the hero? I dunno. What do you all think?