Time Travel through a Story

No, this post is not about time travel.  We should do that post one of these days, even though it will be painful, but today is not the day to talk about paradox, sounds of thunder, crushed butterflies, anachronistic police boxes, timeships, being your own great-great-great-grandparent, killing your grandparent, or killing Hitler.  Instead, this is a selfish post prompted by issues I’ve been working through with regards to my current novel project, Impressions, and it will focus on how to progress a story through time. It is worth noting that this is separate from a discussion of pacing.

Most books and series take place over a relatively short timespan, at least in genre fiction.  Even massive epics like Wheel of Time confine the main action to a scant handful of years over the course of fourteen hefty volumes; Stormlight Archive might start with a prologue set millennia before, and include flashbacks across characters’ lives, but against the main action happens in a relatively brief span.  Such books as I can think of that expand over a longer timeframe tend not to follow normal narrative structures and techniques, like Foundation.  Name of the Wind accomplishes the feat by presenting it as a framed memoir.

How, then, can we go about writing a story, in the limited third person with a tight narrative viewpoint on a single character and a small, changing supporting cast, that takes place over a much longer time – decades, even?  This is precisely the challenge I face in writing Impressions, with Raven needing to age some twenty years over the course of the book, most of it in the second part.  An obvious answer would be to provide the major time jumps at chapter breaks and signpost each chapter with a time elapsed or a date heading, but I would prefer to avoid being so explicit so that I don’t distract from the story.  Ideally, I think such information can be worked into the narrative, but making that a reality is the challenge.

To address it, I began trying to break down how to pass time in a single section, or chapter, or scene.  Conceivably, you can jump years each chapter, but for the story I’m writing I’ve found that more than a couple of years between each chapter doesn’t work.  A single scene, if showing and not telling, might span a few days at most, and transitions within a chapter of more than a few months rapidly become confusing and can throw the reader out of the story.

Confounding the issue, at least to my engineer’s brain, is how erratic the passage of time must be.  Chapter One spans days, Chapter Two covers days, Chapter Three jumps through months and covers weeks, and so forth.  Moments pass between Chapter Sixteen and Chapter Seventeen, hours pass between Chapter Seventeen and Chapter Eighteen, and months pass between Chapter Eighteen and Chapter Nineteen.  I anticipate future chapter jumps of years, only for things to slow down again around the end of Part Two, and all of Part Three will take place within less than two years.

Part Two is certainly the most challenging, as most of the book’s timespan will take place within its chapters.  Without making Part Two completely disproportional, and bogging down the story with needless meanderings, I still need to convey important events and character experiences, significant character development and growth, and at an unsteady pace.  It’s almost like an extended training montage, except those rarely have the same depth of character growth beyond skill and confidence boosts.  Aside from finding ways to show time passing in the narration, it is Raven’s very character evolution and maturation that will make or break Part Two’s timing.  Over the course of Part Two he changes from a confused teenager to a mature scholar, from an inexperienced naïf who’s seen only two places to a seasoned world traveler.

It would be great to find more examples of this in literature, so if you happen to know of other stories where you’ve seen this kind of time travelling executed, please let me know in the comments.  Maybe this is a unique problem to the story I’m writing, and I doubt I’ll pull it off perfectly on the first draft, but this is how I intend to time travel in Impressions.