I read a lot of manuscript where the passage of time is not well tracked. It’s not a difficult issue to fix, but you’ve just got to know it’s an issue so you can attend to it. Why is this so common? It’s not as if the writers whose manuscripts have time-tracking issues haven’t thought deeply about the story they are telling; or that they are unaware of time is passing through the narrative. Rather, the way a writer tracks time – or doesn’t track time – in their work-in-progress is an indicator of what phase of manuscript development they are in. Let me explain.
Setting aside time slip stories and certain experimental fiction, your characters’ lives will move forward in time over the course of a book-length narrative, either a lot or a little, whether you are writing fiction or narrative non-fiction. There will be some sort of passage of time between the beginning and the end of the narrative. If readers are at all unsure about how much time is passing through the plot, they will struggle to engage with the characters and the story.
When you are discovering the story in the first phase of drafting – writing for yourself, finding out who the characters are, what happens to them, and the fictional world they inhabit – you may have a sense of how much time is passing across the story, but not have it nailed down. Many writers in this phase move through the plot scene by scene, event to event, with scant attention to the gaps between sections and chapters.
In the second phase of drafting, when you are writing for your characters and deepening your understanding of the characters’ actions, goals, motivations, backstory, and relationships, you may get clearer on the pace at which time passes in terms of your characters’ ages and when key events take place. Many writers find it helpful to draw up a timeline of key events in the redrafting process, if they haven’t done so in the early drafting phase.
The reader’s experience of time
In the third phase of development you redraft the work with the reader in mind. Think of how they will travel through the story. It works best when readers are able to easily follow not only the action played out in real time, but the spaces between scenes, between sections, between chapters, in which time passes without the close focus of narrated action. Early in a chapter or section orient the reader in time and place. If you don’t they are likely to assume the action is continuing straight on from the end of the previous chapter or section. For example, if a chapter finishes at the end of a day, and the next chapter starts in the morning, the reader will assume it is the next day. If it’s not the next day, but a week later, you need to tell the reader up front, otherwise it is jarring for the reader later on to realise their assumption was incorrect. And when I say ‘later on’, it can be a matter or paragraphs. The clearer you are about tracking time, the smoother the reading experience.
References to the month, the year, the season, annual events (birthdays, Christmas), characters’ ages, all can be used to situate the action in time and help the reader follow what is going on. It can be as simple as ‘The next morning…’ or ‘Three days later…’ or ‘After a week of trying to catch her boss on the phone…’ You can be more inventive, but you don’t need to draw unnecessary attention to this temporal signposting. Think in terms of a lane marker that keeps the vehicle guiding us in the right direction; we don’t need to focus our attention on the lines, we just need to have them in our peripheral vision, to know they are there, keeping us on track.
If there is a long period of time in which not much happens, and you are jumping ahead by many months or years, you still need to acknowledge the time that has passed with a sentence or two (or more) of summary, such as ‘Months passed and the leaves turned from green to gold…’ This is also crucial if you established some sort of rhythm of time passing – such as a few days or weeks between chapters – and then change it up with a significantly different span of time.
For example, in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury 2011), she is following the lives of Achilles and Petroclus from a young age. Chapter 9 finishes with a one sentence paragraph (p.86): ‘The days turned, and the months, and two years passed.’ Chapter 10 begins (p.87): ‘It was spring, and we were fifteen.’ It’s simple and clear. Note that Miller reminds the reader that the characters are now fifteen, rather than relying on the reader remembering that they were thirteen at the end of the previous chapter. For an example of a summary paragraph covering a period of weeks with reference to what was happening in that time – see my blog The Role of Summary.
Time stamps
Some writers use time stamps at the top of chapters to indicate when the events in that chapter are taking place. A time stamp can include a day, date, month or year, or some combination of those. In a work that is time sensitive, such as a thriller that takes place over a couple of hours or days, clock time might be referenced as well.
Time stamps are very helpful to the reader to provide immediate temporal context for the chapter that follows. In terms of tracking the passing of time between chapters, however, it is still helpful to indicate what the time gap is so that the reader doesn’t have to step out of the story to flip back to the time stamp at the top of the previous chapter and calculate the difference, just as Madeline Miller did with the two year gap.
Being intentionally vague about time
There are, of course, no rules. Some writers are purposefully vague about pinpointing timing. That can work, particularly if you are exploring notions of time, or the story is not in any way dependent on the passage of time (hard to think of an example of that!). However, in my experience, the lack of simple signposting about how much time is passing as the narrative moves forwards becomes an unnecessary distraction for the reader, diluting the impact of the story you are wanting to tell.
Doing a time check
Whatever draft you are on, check the beginnings and endings of chapters and sections to see whether you have indicated clearly how much time has passed in the space between them. If tracking time is not clear or consistent in your latest draft, that is a very useful prompt for what you need to attend to in the next draft. It may be that you need to tuck more temporal references into the narrative; it may mean you haven’t got the timeline quite right and the seasons are out, or the characters’ ages are misaligned.
Remember that the reader can’t know what you don’t make clear to them. After multiple drafts, you are likely to be so familiar with the story that it is easy to forget that the reader doesn’t know what you know. So before you send your manuscript out for review or submission, take the time to attend to time in your story.
See also From Writer’s Draft to Reader’s Draft and The Role of Summary