How do you handle time in your novel?

IThinkICan29 · Feb 17, 2007

Regression (I think they're called flashbacks- :Shrug:

) OR Progression (take your pick--I'll take advice for both)

I know it's possible, I've done it. But it's SOOOOOOOO hard! Why is it so hard? Why, why, why..?*in full whine mode* I find that it often takes me days to work through moving things along in my novel. I map out the scenes, play connect the dots (so to speak), and after having several mini meltdowns, scream EUREKA and click save. Since my eurekas have failed to land me an agent I'm hoping you guys can give me a few pointers.

Thanks in advance

AnnieColleen · Feb 17, 2007

"What with one thing and another, five years passed."

Wait...not my book. Sorry! :tongue

This is one thing I struggle with as well, so I'll be interested to see what people say.

KingM · Feb 17, 2007

I'm not 100% sure I can pinpoint your problem, so forgive me if this doesn't answer your question. I think the important thing is to learn how to focus on what is important. Everything else should be summarized. Think of the film montage of Rocky training to fight. Time is passing. Or the two stubble-faced detectives with a stack of books, rubbing their eyes. "Aha," says one. "Here it is." We know, without being told, that they worked hard to get to this point.

What you're looking for in your novel is called scene/sequel. You have the scene, then you have the transition between this scene and the next, where you resolve the issues of this scene and/or set up the next scene. This might be a line, it might be a paragraph or two, and it might be either appended to the last scene, or attached to the next.

For example, something like,

She abandoned the diet on January 3, when the late arrival of a box of goodies from her Gram broke down her defenses in a single, choco-caramel blow. There was no turning back. By spring break her weight had ballooned to 185.

We're now ready for the scenes surrounding spring break.

Or maybe:

It took the Fifth Legion six weeks to collapse the city's west wall and by then most of the population had either starved or fallen to disease. The few slaves that trickled back to Rome were nothing more than walking corpses. Caesar watched the victory parade with disgust. Where was his great victory? His Carthage? His Jerusalem?

We're now ready to move on to the next phase of Caesar's plan to immortalize his reign, or to deal with ambitious senators, or whatever.

I hope this helps.

PeeDee · Feb 17, 2007

I...dont' see the problem, I guess. Time moves along while things are happening, because...that's what time does.

If you mean a lengthy amount of time passing between one chapter or the next, for example, then what I wrote the last time this happened was similar to,

Time passed. That's what time does.

The years went by and John took to traveling. He was away from America when the towers fell, and he did not come back until three years later. He settled in, grew a beard, gained some weight, got a good job, and passed another two years. It was 2006 by the time he saw Sara again, and she still looked exactly the same.

Just work it into your prose the same way you'd tell a character moving from one end of the room to another. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that.

I would rather you say, IN THE PROSE, that time has passed than putting dates at the top of chapters. I hate that. I don't have them memorized, so if Chapter 1 is 1983 and Chapter 2 is 1990, and I haven't noticed the dates, then I'm very confused when things have shuffled around so much.

Even worse in sci-fi novels when the year is 2267 Standard Space Years and then suddenly, 2281 Standard Space Years. I'm not paying attention to that any more than I'm paying attention to where it says "Chapter One" or "Chapter Two." That precursory information at best.

blacbird · Feb 17, 2007

Lots of alcohol. You'd be surprised what that can do to one's sense of time.

caw

JDCrayne · Feb 17, 2007

Last line of previous scene, three little asterisks, first line of next scene with a comment like, "The following Saturday, Jeanne bit Mark's ear off." For a longer passage of time -- like a year -- you probably would want to have a Part 2 (or whatever) division in your book.

Cassidy · Feb 17, 2007

well you have my sympathy because i'm being driven crazy by time in the first draft of the novel i'm currently being tortured by. i think everything i've written before now has had a straightforward chronological progression, but this one wants to jump around.

i agree with PeeDee about dates as chapter headings-- i don't pay attention to them and just get confused-- but am trying to figure out how to manage these jumps back and forward smoothly and without confusing the reader.

i thought about starting the book at a different point in time-- but that either seems to give me too much backstory or it kills the suspense. so... unless i figure out another solution, i will have to get better at changing time periods. currently, i'm using present tense for, duh, the present, and past tense for the flashbacks... and hopefully soon the past will catch up with the present and the writing will become more straightforward.

i'm looking forward to hearing from others about this.

Jamesaritchie · Feb 18, 2007

Time

Time doesn't bother me. Can't say I've ever struggled with it. Just my experience, but writers who have problems with time passing are usually in full flashback mode. I think the flashback is a very good tool, but if you do more than a simple transition in and out of one, the time element can be a serious problem.

I don't mind time as a chapter heading. Doesn't bother me at all. But it isn't necessary. Just use good transitions, and time takes care of itself.

johnzakour · Feb 18, 2007

Time passes, that's what it does. I believe most readers assume this without you having to note it to them.

If say a day passes between chapters you can always say something, "As the morning sun rose I noticed I was wearing somebody else's underwear...."

Or if you want to show a set amount of time passing, "I gazed up at the clock. I kicked myself for wasting the last two hours watching the Pauly Shore marathon..."

For longer periods of time you can do something like, "Hard to believe it was now 2050. Damn, that's what I get for falling asleep in a cryogenics lab..."

For flashbacks, "I thought back to a happier time, when I was a younger lad sitting on my father's knee... I was twenty at the time and tipped the scales at over 200 pound but my dad was a trooper."

PeeDee · Feb 18, 2007

In A Cantical for Leibowitz, several hundred years past between Fiat Lux and Fiat Homo, the first and second parts of the book. Even more time passes before the third part. And yet, there's no mention of it, no "Three hundred years later."

You know the world's changed, if you're reading the text. That's good enough for me.

Hillgate · Feb 18, 2007

Fast-forwarding your readers can work well, especially if you're writing in the first person, because that is how people seem to speak in real life. I don't think dealing with time is a problem.

Try 'The New Confessions' by William Boyd to get a great sense of movement through the years. It also happens to be a wonderful book.

Mud Dauber · Feb 18, 2007

Timely post (no pun intended

). I just finished the 4th Harry Potter book, and was noticing as I read how smoothly Rowling transitions from one place in time to the next, without even so much as a scene break or an extra space between paragraphs. She just begins a new paragraph with something simple like, "The mood in the castle as they entered June became excited and tense again," and voila--she's accounted for the time gap effortlessly!

I struggle with the same thing as the OP, so I always pay attention when I read to see how other writers handle it.

Sage · Feb 18, 2007

My problem with time passing is a little different. I'm okay with making jumps in time (at least, IMHO), but its the continuous action sections that I have trouble gauging how long has been spent on things. It takes characters less time to act than to read the action (usually), & certainly less time to write it. So when I'm following along with my MC from scene to scene, & later I want to refer back to something that she did ____ hours ago, I struggle to fill in that blank. "Just how long ago was it that she yelled at this character, before she was kidnapped and tortured, escaped, returned, and found him again to apologize?" Or... "Now that I've decided that it's late at night so that this other character can't keep his eyes open, do the events surrounding my MC since the last time we knew the time of day support that passage of time? " This is especially true in my current WIP, where it seems she gets a new deadline every time an old one expires. "Okay, I know she was unconscious for a while, but it had to be less than three hours, because this other thing happens in three hours & it hasn't yet."

PeeDee · Feb 18, 2007

....

Wow. I don't think I could do that much work on the time if I wanted to. Usually, time passes, people are busy with things, and then its later on. I refer back to a couple of hours ago, and just decide it's a couple hours ago.

People DO do things faster than you can read on the page...but they do things slower too. They might take a breath faster than I can read "He took a deep breath," but I bet you I can read "He crossed a trackless desert" faster than he can actually cross it.

I'm not exactly precise with time, because I haven't had the need to be.

ChaosTitan · Feb 18, 2007

One of my books takes place over a period of eighteen months. I broke it into three Parts, because there are three specific event lines that progress the story. The passage of time is pretty obvious in the narrative, but I chose to place the month/year designation at the top of each new Part as a stylistic choice. I want them. If I need those designations to orient the reader to time, I'm probably not doing my job.

Sage · Feb 18, 2007

PeeDee said:
People DO do things faster than you can read on the page...but they do things slower too. They might take a breath faster than I can read "He took a deep breath," but I bet you I can read "He crossed a trackless desert" faster than he can actually cross it.

Absolutely, & the nice thing about having the character cross the trackless desert in a single line is that time can pass as fast or slow as you want it. Was it a huge desert that took three months to cross (hope he brought lots of water), a smaller desert that took the better part of a day, or was he just an hour away from civilization from the point that narrative comes in? That's an easy way to manipulate time passing.

The problem I have is when his journey across the desert is a thrill-a-minute so you have the reader follow his journey as he battles snakes & scorpions & thieves or whatever, & he only has an hour to get back to civilization before a bomb goes off, & whether the timer on the bomb should say he has two seconds or a half hour left when he finally gets there

PeeDee · Feb 18, 2007

Do you have something interesting to fill up the half an hour before the bomb goes off? THen give him half an hour.

Do you have nothing else but the bomb going off? Then tick it down to one second like they do in the movies and have him run for it.

The advantage of "leaving out the boring bits" is that you advance time nicely too.

Sage · Feb 18, 2007

PeeDee said:
Do you have something interesting to fill up the half an hour before the bomb goes off? THen give him half an hour.

Do you have nothing else but the bomb going off? Then tick it down to one second like they do in the movies and have him run for it.

Ah, but the problem was regarding whether the stuff leading up to it would fill up the hour, & whether the interesting thing you can add to fill up a half hour, would actually do so.

PeeDee said:
The advantage of "leaving out the boring bits" is that you advance time nicely too.

Assuming there are boring bits at the current point of the character's life.

PeeDee · Feb 18, 2007

Sage said:
Ah, but the problem was regarding whether the stuff leading up to it would fill up the hour, & whether the interesting thing you can add to fill up a half hour, would actually do so.

It doesn't matter, that's what I'm saying. Even if you only show events that take up half an hour's worth of time, you can leave the other half an hour out and just put in references, now and then, to what the present time is.

John ducked a sword swipe and kicked the man in the stomach. As he fell back, John checked his watch. Only twenty minutes left! He'd been fighting for forty minutes now, and had gotten no closer to the bomb. He hadn't managed anything except tiring out his arms and dirtying his favorite shirt. His mother was going to be so mad at him.

So he steals a camel, races to the bomb, and it's about to detonate.

ChaosTitan · Feb 18, 2007

This is why I gave one MC exactly three minutes to get away from a bomb. Every second counted.

Sage · Feb 18, 2007

Sometimes just telling what happens works for the events of the story. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the journey to the bomb is just as important as those last few seconds before it goes off. I'm talking about when you're following the character for every step of the journey because each new step brings up a different challenge to overcome. When those challenges are all taken care of & the hero ends up in front of the metaphorical bomb, did the time he took equal an hour (or half a day, or a week, or however much time we're talking about)?

Or, conversely, if there was no time limit referenced in the novel, but you've been following his actions pretty consistently, & he looks back & says, "I can't believe that only _____ ago, I was out drinking with my buddies" (assuming one would want to have such a cheesy line). When you fill in that blank, it's worth considering just how long everything has taken. It can relate back to your forty minutes of fighting. If you had been detailing that fight (as some writers like to do), does it make sense that the fight took forty minutes (I hope not. That's a long fight to have in detail

)?

PeeDee · Feb 18, 2007

in Terry Pratchett's Thud, Sam Vimes has to be home every day by six in the evening to read to Young Sam. And as such, the novel has to work around that. Terry talks about the difficulties of making the time work (and I can't find the link, damn it.)

Mostly, I have never had to worry about it. My time flows, whether I'm vague or specific about it. The most I've done is I once figured out roughly how far and fast a horse could (realistically) ride...but even then, I didn't say "I rode by horse and it took my XX. days to get here from XXX miles away."

I still just did the journey. I just quietly wanted to know how much time I had to work with while stuff was happening in the rest of the world.

So...I guess I'm pretty useless in this argument, then.

How do you handle time in your novel?

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