Don’t Go Back in Time

Unless you've already been there

Welcome to Grab the Sky’s Tuesdays on Writing. Each Tuesday I post an article that explores writing ideas and my personal writing journey. All opinions expressed are mine and therefore 100% correct. Feel free to challenge that with a comment.

One thing that writers routinely do poorly is mess with time. If you want to lose the thread of your story and confuse your readers then, by all means, start jumping around in your story’s timeline.

Let’s say you just can’t figure out how to build sufficient suspense into your plot. Go ahead and write parallel chapters where one set of events takes place in the past and the other happens in the present. Then switch back and forth between the two timelines while avoiding giving readers any clue that one set of events happened a thousand years ago.

Finally, jam the two story lines together with a surprise chapter that reveals the present day hero is dealing with the result of the thousand year old action. This reminds me of a poorly written episode of Witcher I once watched. It’s the formula for using a terrible gimmick to try to make your story interesting.

Write a prologue if you must. Or even better, put the past into its own story/book if the details merit their own telling.

I’m one minute into this post and my infallibility is already being called into question. It’s coming from the usual direction, my wife. We watched a rerun of Bones that starts out with a wedding reception. The episode moves on and then, at predefined inflection points, the story rubber bands back to the wedding reception. Except this time (surprise) we see events from another character’s point of view. The story then moves forward again following that character until boing. We’re back at the wedding reception.

I get it. It’s the end of the season cliff hanger and they’re giving all our favorite characters vignettes. Plus they have a couple of subplots rolling to distract from the [spoiler alert] upcoming explosion.

But it’s driving me crazy. My wife thinks all this bouncing back is more interesting. I’m a bottom line guy. I like it when people get to the point. Multiple characters following their own plot lines until it all converges for the show’s climax is moderately interesting but mostly seems like filler. I could have been reading Unintended Cultivator.

Does this mean you should never interweave past and present. No, it does not. Writing doesn’t have hard and fast rules if you understand the pitfalls and overcome them.

I am not telling you it is okay to write everything in lowercase or to never use punctuation. I’m saying alternating timelines should not be used as a gimmick to try to get people interested. If past events are germane to current events, then your present-day characters should discover them and their significance through whatever happens to the present-day characters in the present day. The reader should not have to live through historical events before they are allowed to enjoy the action taking place right now.

Unless you do it well. As in The Prisoner of Azkaban. Whatever you may think of J.K. personally, the story contains a fine example of how to interweave the past and the present. The gimmick problem is solved because everything is experienced chronologically without jumping around in time.

Yes, Hermione and Harry do use the Time Turner to go back in time. But from the readers’ point of view the actions the duo engage in are happening in the present moment. The characters are doing new things right now. We are not viewing static events from the past. We’re reading high stakes actions that are new and have a real chance of catastrophic failure.

Hermione and Harry are still carrying the story forward along its timeline. The characters are in the past, but the storyline is in the present. They have managed to revisit the past, but for this second time around, the past is their present. Nothing that happened previously is changed. Otherwise we’d be launched into time-travel paradox land. (That’s a terrible place for a story to end up in.) Their existence in the past is a way for the reader to discover new details related to past events in the story. But these details are fresh and current. Not simply old information about the past we didn’t happen to know. And not part of some past from outside the story. (Like things that happened a thousand years before the story.)

Hermione and Harry perform actions in what, to them, is their present time. Those actions fill in pieces the reader was missing. And Rawlings doesn’t do it by alternating between chapters that take place in two different times. It’s all one smooth flow because the reader follows Harry all the way through. The story is whatever Harry is doing right now.

That’s a solution to the jumping around in time problem. Keep the narrative focused on what your main character is doing now (whenever now is). If you let your character travel backwards in time, then it’s up to you to solve the time travel paradox. If it’s a flashback, rather than actual time travel, then you have another question to answer.

Is that flashback necessary? Are you using a flashback because you don’t know how to properly introduce part of the backstory? Or is the flashback a scene that really belongs earlier in the story?

Not long ago I read a story that started with the main character standing at one location. Then he flashes back to a conversation that he remembers from some other place earlier in his life. I immediately asked myself, “Why am I reading about a past conversation when the main character appears to be poised to take action in an entirely different setting?” In short, “What’s going on here?”

I was confused. As I read the flashback, I realized that it had dialogue and tension between two characters that really set up the story. By definition, a flashback is a memory of what has already happened. So why didn’t I read it before now?

Why did the story start and then almost immediately jump backwards?

Because the flashback should have been the beginning of the story. It contained important information that defined the main character and his motivation. And it did it through setting and dialogue. It was far more interesting than the current story opening. I suggested to my friend that he switch things around.

Having your story jump around in time can get you in trouble. The more the focus is pulled off your main character and what they are doing at the present moment, the more chance there is that you’ve made things too complicated.

So always remember…

Steve’s (Just Now Made Up) Writer’s Rule of Time Travel:

Never go back in time unless you’ve already been there.

And like every other rule, feel free to break it. You’re creative. You’ll probably find a great way to make it all work out. Even if I hate it.