posted
OK here is the bane of my existance... THE PASSAGE OF TIME [that and trying to understand women]
Many if not all novels require passing a significant amount of time. I am interested in the subtle ways besides "10 years later" tags. I have found a few but sometimes I feel like I keep it too concise. "They trained in this manner for months..."--kind of writing--how far do you let that slide as a reader? How do YOU demonstrate regular time passage?
posted
I say "Ten years later..." It's a perfectly fine approach to indicate that 10 years have passed.
Posts: 1750 | Registered: Oct 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
I guess what I am really looking for is a comfortable balance between "10 years later" [in the middle of narration] and Tolkein.
I want the reader to feel like 10 years have passed for the characters, not just feel like he was just told ten years had passed. But I also don't want him to feel like ten years had literally passed in the reader's reality. After reading Hugo or Tolkein I often feel like it took me more time than the characters... I don't want to slow my narrative that much. What I'd like is a happy medium, does that mke any sense?
posted
If a significant amount of time passes it's usually done by a chapter break or sometimes by dividing the book into 'parts'. What I do when I write is to do one of these two and then make sure that the amount of elapsed time is given up front. This can be done as simply as:
Chapter Three (Ten years later)
or:
Chapter Four 2075
If I choose to show it in the text, I take a well known character and let them tell or show that a lot of time has elapsed. For example:
Cullen rubbed his coarse stubble thoughtfully. Ten years. Would she even recognize him?
posted
The best way to make a reader feel as if ten years has passed is to begin the next section (and you should always have a chapter break if such a long period of time has passed) with something to draw a contrast. You really do just need to SAY "Ten years later..." though.
So here's an example.
#####
Mother in labor...baby born...drama, drama...mom dies...beautiful bouncy girl named Anna
Chapter 2 Ten Years Later...
Anna rode her bicycle...
#####
So you see it's obvious that ten years have passed because Anna was a baby and now she's riding a bike. You're not going to make a reader feel ten years in their bones. The best you can do is to equip them with a full understanding of the passage of ten years...at least, without boring them.
posted
Another way is to have some obviously blatant clue.
eg.
Dude joins the space corp, starts training yada yada yada yada that's the exciting first day at training. He'll never forget to tie his shoelaces again. <break of some sort> Dude is tying his shoelaces carefully, as he'd done for the last ten years. Finally, after years of training, exercises, humanitarian missions and dead-boring lectures from aged heros of the last war, it looked like the squad would finally see some action. Double-knots today.
posted
A lot of cinematography techniques can work well, especially when you need to show something. At the same time, thinking about things only visually can be quite limiting - but most of it can be extended to other other senses, and thoughts and attitudes.
quote:You're not going to make a reader feel ten years in their bones.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, I felt the journey to Bree in my bones. I didn't like it at all. So that would be, like, a bad example.
posted
I'm not much of an author yet, but one approach that I've seen in books and then recently in "Memoirs of a Geisha" (EXCELLENT flick by the way), involved a sort of general description of the daily routine.
In "'Geisha," one scene ends with her being sent off to the mountains for her protection, and the next begins with a narrative of the next 10 years of her life. something like:
"News of the war came every day. Stories of fighting, cities going up in smoke, and death. And then, there was nothing.
Rice, work, rice, work. A year passed, and still no word..."
She goes on to say more about how she was no longer the geisha she once was, her world being shattered, and speaks of another year passing and another, until ten had gone by.
I know I'm not describing this very well, but all you have to do is watch Memiors of a Geisha, and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
I can totally relate with your difficulty. I have a similar break in my own story, and haven't been too sure on how to handle it. I hope this little tidbit is helpful to you!
posted
If I have to write a period of elapsed time, I usually write a minor recount of what my charactor does. His training, his lecture's his broken heart etc. Not a full blown part of the story, but I find that it helps me also as a writer to know what my charactor went through in the period of time, and to help set up what he/she is about to do.
Posts: 384 | Registered: Oct 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Here's an example I just found myself writing in which a few weeks pass:
"Suzanne asked Jean to lunch several times, but she refused every invitation. Then she failed to show up for dinner the next Sunday. For weeks, Suzanne tried to strike up a conversation with Jean or get her to help rekindle what was left of their friendship, but for weeks Jean continued to be too busy to talk to Suzanne."
Technically, it's "telling" and not "showing" but do you really want me to go into those passing weeks or would you rather go from, in this case, an argument to this short transition and then to a scene with an even worse confrontation?
If you are using dates in your narrative, its okay to reference a later date in the narrative. Dates should be handled in the least specific matter possible. "In the fall of 2006," (years are written as numbers for the full year.) "In the fall of aught-six."
I have a distaste for writers who take the cheat route and put a date under the chapter title.
I'll use seasons frequently to show change.
"I met her on the first day of class my freshman year but it was not until the daffodils were in bloom that we shared our first kiss."
quote:I have a distaste for writers who take the cheat route and put a date under the chapter title.
That's very interesting because that is my native approach. I'm curious what thoughts exactly go through your head when you do encounter that. Would you share?
Posts: 2195 | Registered: Aug 2006
| IP: Logged |
This writer lacks the skill with words to distinguish the passage of something as simple as time, he probably can't do anything else well, either.
Now, there are places where a timestamp works. Military or Crime Drama, where the minute by minute passage of time is important. Basically if the format is to document a historical series of events, it can be okay.
In most cases, where time is not a regularly important thing, simply telling the story chronologically will be enough. Adding more specific information when time jumps abnormally is the best way to handle most cases. But, I'd avoid any huge jump in time. It's better to drop back and throw in a paragraph of summary than to drop completely out of narrative and give us information as a timestamp. It'd be like stopping the narrative to describe someone who just walked in the room as:
Name: Joe Height: 5'10" Weight: 186 Shirt: Brown - off the rack K-Mart generic. Slacks: Docker knock offs.
You wouldn't do that to describe a person, why do it to describe a passage of time?
posted
Okay what about expressing the apssage of say 20 years between the prologue and the first chapter? And add in that the prologue POV character isn't around by the time the first chapter comes around. When no link between the two characters can be reasonably established without major spoilers being spoiled.
Then is it okay to see:
Prologue [2675 AD] John stared stupidly at the giant clock...
Chapter 1 [2695 AD] Bob was eating a hamburger when a mutant space alien shot him a nasty look, "hey man its just a hamburger!"...
[This message has been edited by Zero (edited August 07, 2006).]
Use things like a news story to establish time or something else external.
Joe glanced out the window at the new bridge they were building.
Bob flew over the now unused bridge. Two decades earlier it had been the worlds newest engineering marvel. With the advent of cheap hovercraft, bridges became obsolete...
Okay so that's not much better, but, its better.
As Joe passed the signs to elect Prisby to Congress, he...
Bob listened to another ReElect President Prisby ad just long enough to change the station.
There are plenty of creative ways to show the passage of time without telling time.
Prologue And John watched David struggling... fighting the currents, and tehre was nothing he could do to help.
Chapter One "Hey there's a new fishing shack over on Thames river." "Thames---the 'haunted river?" "Yeah wanna come?" "No... I'd rather stay here." "What's the matter with you? They haven't found a body in that river for ten years!"
posted
Other than the horrible practice of using "cyberchat" technical practices (like "..." to mean a pause." the dialog would work. Why not just spell "you" as "U"? Do people ever "laugh out loud" in your stories? Be very careful to not include cyberspeak in your literary writing.
The em-dash was used acceptably, though I prefer "--" to the three common in old-style manual typewriter notation.
posted
The only problem I can see with that last approach is that you still don't know exactly when that last body was found. It could have been the body mentioned at the end of the last chapter, or one found 50 years later. However, I'm just looking at the few lines of text you had in your post. For all I know, you refer back to the last part of the last chapter immediately after bit of text...
I'm not helping, am I?
As for the putting the date below the chapter, I've never had a problem with it, but it tends to lend a sci-fi/Military/Futureistic feel to the story. But that's just MY two cents as a READER.
posted
Well, I suppose it *could* work, although in that example above it doesn't sound like a natural conversation. If it could somehow sound natural, then it would work.
I started a topic like this like two years ago because I had a fifty cycle gap (not on earth...year not meaningful) betwen chapter 1 (which almost could have been a prologue but I didn't want it to be) and chapter 2. The first suggestion people gave me was to make it a prologue because prologues really can break rules like that. I also got some suggestions like "Fifty cycles later..." below the chapter heading or mentioning it in the first paragraph.
What I ended up doing was referencing in character thoughts one of the events that had happend in chapter 1. It wasn't even the first thing that happens in chapter 2...it starts in a different viewpoint character and I get you into her head a bit and then she goes to the temple where they are observing the fiftieth anniversary of the crown prince's brutal murder by their enemies. (Yeah motivation to keep fighting.)
And that's one thing to remember. A chapter break is hard. I don't necessarily have an expectation of what you will say afterward and you don't have to reference the end of the last chapter directly .You can start on about something else and, when it feels natural (and probably don't wait TOO long) you can slip in how this chapter relats to the last one.
Options:
Someone (a person, a group, or a newspaper) is talking about the tenth anniversary of some terrible event. (Newspapers do follow-ups like this on slow news days
An intervention....man drinking himself into the grave over the death of his wife, group of friends come in, dump his alcohol, and tell him it's time he got some help, it had been ten yeras since his wife died.
Children growing up is always a good measure of time.
posted
The year under the chapter heading is no more or less intrusive than a quote or any other notation. I usually don't look at them, so sometimes find myself in "Huh?" mode. (My fault, not the author's.) It's been used most effectively, I think, in military-style works, or in books/stories that rely on diary notations and logs.
I say mention the passage of time in whatever way is relevant to your story and POV. What's the point of using an elaborate time-elucidating-plot-device if the only thing that is important is the fact that 10 years has passed. A simple, "Ten years later..." or "Ten years passed before anyone mentioned these events again..."
If anything of importance to the character or plot happened in the intervening 10 years, then you'll need to talk about it anyway, so maybe skipping ahead 10 years is skipping ahead too far. The montage thing works well in movies, but not in books.
quote:Other than the horrible practice of using "cyberchat" technical practices (like "..." to mean a pause." the dialog would work. Why not just spell "you" as "U"? Do people ever "laugh out loud" in your stories? Be very careful to not include cyberspeak in your literary writing.
Come on you're being much less forgiving than the vast majority of readers. I don't think using "..." to indicate a pause in dialogue is as bad as trying to throw "lol" around. And I would very much like to see how you do it mate.
Posts: 2195 | Registered: Aug 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Happen to have read a coupl of novels lately that deal with time flow in very different ways.
One is "Wicked" (the story of the Wicked Witch Of The West, by Gregory Maguire). It actually covers five periods in the life of the MC, with gaps that are anything from two to fifteen years. The story is simply broken down into five sections, and you just jump from one to the next. It is abundantly clear that time has passed (if not always, immediately, just how much), and where the author feels it appropriate you get some explanation/eposition/backstory that accounts for the "missing" period. In context, it works fine, though it tends to imply the author thinks that only the narrated portions of the MC's life are relevant/interesting, and I have a certain caution about that (particularly in "Wicked", where certain significant transitions and character transformations take place "off-screen"; I'm aware that it's deliberate, but ultimately it ends up feeling like an information cheat - "I'll tell you these things, but not these things, and you have to infer them" - made me feel as if the author was testing how clever I was in keeping up with his portrayal.
The other was "Revelation Space" by Alistaid Reynolds. This basically follows three characters, but it deals with near-lightspeed travel and thus simultaneity is pretty meaningless - if you tried to tell the story chronologically, you'd only introduce the "main" character half-way through the novel. So it follows the three in their subjective time to start with, flagging this up with locations and absolute dates (well, years), and then brings them together. It did take a bit of getting used to, but it wasn't too bad. Worse was it's rather Dan Brown-esque habit of ending each POV section with a teaser/cliff-hanger; not a technique that can survive a 500+ page book, it just because wearisome (for *#@! sake, just get on and tell me, already!).
I have a definite tendency to be one of those completists who tries to cover the entie chronological time of a story, but I am beginning to learn to just leave scene breaks in and trust the reader to understand that we've changed scene, time, place, whatever. There's nothing wrong with time jumps per se, but I would be very chary about adopting Maguire's technique of, effectively, only telling parts of the story. Make sure the time-jumps save the reader from the boring bits, rather than hiding the interesting bits.
posted
If a significant amount of time passes, figure out whether and why that's important to the story. Then address the underlying issue. For a span of decades, that will usually have something to do with the character having aged significantly in the meantime. Show me a character at the callow age of 20 in one scene, then show me the same guy as a thirty something in the next scene, and I'll get that there's been a few years in between. Maybe the point is that he's virtually forgotton the events of the first scene. Then show me that. If you understand why you need a time skip in your narrative, it's easy to show the time skip without afflicting us all with some "ten years later" nonsense.
Or you can just say "Ten years later...". There's nothing wrong with that.
posted
You know what, if the story's good none of these are going to be deal-breakers. Big time jumps are clunkyh and unweildy by nature and as long as there's a good reason for it and the rest of the story is good, however badly you handle the transition I am probably going to keep reading.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
