I touched on time briefly in my post about Leaps in Logic last month and it seemed worth elaboration. Time is a fun concept if you want to get really meta with it. For now, I’m going to set aside theory and talk about timing in storytelling. Here’s my premise: your story follows a linear timeline.
Yes, even if you start at the middle and end at the beginning, your story is still following a linear timeline of events.
Even (especially) if we’re talking time travel.
Space travel, magic, and anything discussing bending time and space (A Wrinkle in Time) are exceptions–and hopefully you’re paying enough attention to your timeline in those instances that you don’t need this advice. My point is that this is not some arbitrary rule, it is a fact of storytelling. Ignoring your timeline introduces continuity errors and, in the worse-case scenario, plot holes. It’s one of my pet peeves because I’ve seen it ruin stories that could have been fantastic.
Compressed Timeline
As in, a story that takes place in a short amount of time. Usually less than a week. It makes for an exciting ride so it’s easy to overlook the plot holes created by this compression. Examples of this style include Truthwitch, The Dresden Files, and A Clockwork Orange. You see it used in movies (especially action movies) more often that TV or books. Either way, there are a few oversights common to this style of storytelling.
Characters Don’t Sleep or Eat
I’m going to pick on Truthwitch because it’s such a successful example of a compressed timeline, something Susan Dennard excels at. The entire book takes place in about three days, which is impressive because it’s so jam-packed with action. If you’ve read my review you’ll know I recommend it.
That said, we see our main characters running around like crazy exhausting themselves, only to sleep maybe 2-3 hours a night. That leads us into a suspicious lack of eating. It’s easily dismissed if there is talk of being hungry. Or tired. Instead, it read as if they spent 2-3 days pushing their bodies (and magic) to the brink with only two small meals in their bellies . . . and no sleep . . . and no symptoms of psychosis.
Mini soapbox: I don’t care how “mentally strong” you are, you will fall victim to psychosis with enough sleep deprivation. It’s a medical fact. I’m very familiar with psychosis and other symptoms of sleep deprivation. I’ve experienced the effects firsthand a number of times (I’m an insomniac) and I survived my bipolar partner’s manic episode (they attempted to suffocate me after not sleeping for 3+ days). It’s not a joke. </soapbox>
In the Dresden Files books, there’s the opposite with a similar effect: Dresden is constantly complaining of his hunger or fatigue and how incredible it is he can muster any magic at all despite his diminished state. When he then wields magics the likes of which he’s never before managed, it starts to feel like the author wrote the sleep deprivation and hunger exclusively to make Dresden seem more awesome. Especially since the hunger was usually due to his general failure at adulting, not lack of time.
The point is, this is a simple oversight. It’s easily remedied by adding a line or two: “We stopped to make camp for the night. We didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, so we cooked up the last of our rations and took turns taking watch through the night.” Regardless, it’s only 32 words and it serves two purposes: orienting the audience in the setting (ie, through the passage of time) and foreshadowing the climax. It also acts as a mental shift for the audience, providing a break as the story pivots from point A to point B.
I’ll challenge you to illustrate the passage of time dynamically. For example, if there’s an important conversation your characters need to have, it can happen over a meal (as seen in the Harry Potter series). Or sleep was interrupted by a climactic event (as in The Lord of the Rings) or because something had to happen at night (also Harry Potter). Simply read one of your favorite novels with a critical eye if you need more. There are a million ways to offer these cues to your audience, so find the one that works for you and your story and add it.
Travel
Travel times are the second most common cause of a timeline error in compressed stories. Honestly, this is only specific to compressed timelines because you don’t need as much time-related detail to keep your audience oriented in a story that spans more than a week. So, there are advantages and disadvantages to that action thrill ride.
Are your characters sailing a boat? You need to know what type of boat it is and the distance they are travelling. How fast can that boat travel across that distance? Also consider what are the limitations of that type of boat. You won’t be sailing a tugboat across the Atlantic, that’s for sure. It takes 10 minutes to research something this common, yet I still see unmotorized sailboats crossing huge distances in a matter of hours. It defies physics.
OK, so beyond being a pet peeve, why am I nitpicking these details?
Well, even if you don’t care about believability, you’re in danger of introducing a plot hole. I’ll lay it out in an equation for you. Travel time + method of travel + optional fantasy modifiers = distance travelled. Your audience is using this equation to understand the world you’ve put them in. As I mentioned before, these are necessary cues that keep them oriented in the story.
For instance, if your characters travel a distance in a short amount of time and they used a car as their method of transit, the distance travelled becomes much smaller than if they used a plane or teleportation. This estimated distance becomes a fact of your world. If that distance is later defined in a concrete way in your story, such as describing it as a circumnavigation of the globe or a vast empire, your audience will become aware that either a) this world is very small, or b) the author made a mistake.
Option b becomes more obvious if characters later traverse the same distance in a different amount of time. Don’t laugh, I’ve seen it happen. It’s a classic continuity error.
Epic and Long-Format Serial Fiction
Long-format serial fiction is just as susceptible (if not more) to timeline and continuity errors as compressed fiction. You see these errors in comics, movie franchises, and series spanning more than four books. I might get some hate for this, but I’m going to call out Star Wars.
I’ve essentially ruined Star Wars for my husband because it’s rife with continuity errors. From the age difference between Padme and Anakin to the reappearance of Darth Maul after his death. When I got home from watching Solo, I had to look up an explanation. I love Star Wars and I take great offense when people mess with my fandoms (I still can’t watch X-Men: The Last Stand). There had to be a reasonable explanation, right?
Now, I love me some Darth Maul, so I really wanted to be excited, but with Star Wars’ track record I was trepidatious. Unfortunately, this retcon (let’s call it what it is, OK?) did nothing but negate the emotional weight of his original death. He was clearly brought back because he was a fan favorite, the shallowest reason to resurrect a dead character IMO (says the X-Men fan whose favorite character has died n times).
Anyways. My research showed that there was an episode of The Clone Wars (the animated series) that resurrected him. I didn’t even know this show was canon. I watched the episode and read multiple fan sites looking for an answer explaining how slicing him in half didn’t kill him but couldn’t find one. If you know, please enlighten me in the comments. All I could find was that he survived through sheer force of will (or hate) and subsisted on garbage until finally making new legs out of droid parts. To date, I have not found any explanation for how he survived losing several important organs or how he didn’t bleed to death within minutes.
Another plot hole where The Force is the answer, I guess.
Just for fun, I’ll pick on Marvel next. One of the most prominent errors we find in Marvel movies (I’m not even touching the comics, guys, there’s too many holes) are the many timeline disagreements between X-Men: First Class (2011) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). One of which is pretty glaring: In Wolverine, set in 1979, Cyclops and Emma Frost are teenagers rescued from Stryker’s labs. In First Class, set in 1962, Emma Frost is an adult member of the Hellfire Club.
Granted, First Class was intended as a reboot and not meant to be considered part of the original timeline, however it was later made canon with X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), therein introducing many timeline disagreements and plot holes.
I’ll step off my soapbox. The point is that this style of writing is very susceptible to continuity and timeline errors. The audience is asked, in these situations, to simply overlook them out of their love for the franchise, but I can’t help but feel disappointed when I encounter them–especially in things I love like Star Wars and X-Men.
This might be a point of contention but I believe that, as a storyteller, it’s your responsibility to take care of your audience and treat both them and your work with respect. Especially when something as simple as creating a brief timeline of established events is the solution.
Everything Else
Other things to look out for include production times, character appearances (as in when they appear, not what they look like–that’s a separate continuity error), setting, and seasonal cues.
Production Time
Production time was the glaring timeline error I caught in my novel. I’ll give you a little background for this here and write an entire post about it later. There is a romance in my novel that acts as a catalyst for bigger things later in the series. This romance occurs between two characters forced together through their work. These characters do not have days off, so the only ways my audience can gauge the passage of time is through sleep, meals, and the progress of the characters’ collaboration. In that time, production of goods was happening MUCH too fast. Like, it’s physically impossible.
This happened because it’s a detail in the setting that didn’t seem important, so I wasn’t paying attention to it. When I finally noticed, it was too late. I had to scrap about 30-40k words. I was devastated and didn’t work on my novel for over a year after that.
My novel is much better now. It makes sense and the new scenes I added to patch the holes are more dynamic.
Appearances
One of the running jokes in Marvel comics back in the early 2000s was that Wolverine was a very busy man. Already a wildly popular character, his presence in a book improved sales so dramatically after the first X-Men movie was released that he started appearing in all the titles. To the point that sometimes he was in two places at once. Whoops.
Especially when working with multiple writers and an ensemble cast, make sure you know exactly where everyone is at any given moment in the story. You can’t just throw a character in because it’ll boost sales. Well, I mean, you can (and people have) but you really shouldn’t. At best it’s a hard eyeroll, at worst it’s a DNF because guess what, your audience will notice.
Setting
One of the most comical and, yes, easiest to do is specific to fiction set in the past. Famously, William Shakespeare included a few lines about using clocks in his play Julius Caesar which takes place several hundred years before the invention of mechanical clocks. You could play devil’s advocate and say that perhaps Shakespeare was referring to a water clock, which were certainly around back then, but by and large this is considered by the literary community to be a continuity error.
This could come in the form of mentioning smart phones when writing about the early 2000s–a time when flip phones were all the rage and Apple was just starting its comeback. It could be calling a hooded scarf a skoodie in the medieval era when they were called snoods. What about a character wearing a crinoline in the American South after the Civil War? Discussing steal swords during the bronze age (I’ll spare you my #soapbox about the history of swords).
This is symptomatic of lack of research and, depending on how far back you’re going, might not be noticed by people without an expertise. But beware, if you’re writing about a time period within living memory, you might want to consider checking your facts.
Seasonal Cues and Time
I don’t encounter this very often in published work because it’s a very obvious error, but I do see it in editing and peer-written work occasionally, so I thought it worth pointing out. The premise is simple: your story’s events should match the setting. As in, your characters wouldn’t go cherry-picking in fall, they would visit a pumpkin patch. They might go to a tulip farm or celebrate May Day in the spring, but certainly not in the summer.
Conversely, this also means that as time passes in your story, it should also pass in your setting. If your story spans more than two months there will be temperature changes, climate changes, and possibly changes in plant and animal life. It’s not summer forever, right? Well, I guess if you’re living in Westeros it can last for years . . .
TL;DR: The Solution
In the end, it doesn’t matter how you write. Not a planner? No problem. Get your words down however you can. My advice comes into play in the edit. As Hemingway famously said, “Write drunk, edit sober.” You need to use a critical eye for your edits and organization can help.
After your write, put together a loose timeline of events. Treat it like an exercise rather than a chore. Skim through what you’ve written to find the important plot points and record when they happen. Once you have a basic timeline, it’s easy to catch holes. You might even notice them as you’re putting the timeline together. Then it becomes a simple matter of going back and making the necessary corrections.
Hopefully if you find holes, they aren’t massive. If they are and you’re like me, you might end up needing to scrap thousands of words. In that case, I recommend using a program like Scrivener to reorganize yourself. No, I’m not making money off this promotion, I just legit believe in the software. It saved my novel. The main reason is because of that timeline error.
Quick gush: In Scrivener you can dissect your novel or story down to the scene. And I highly recommend you do, because you can then easily drag and drop entire chunks of text to the places they fit in your timeline without the hassle of skimming the entire document for each individual point of error, cutting, and then skimming the entire document AGAIN to copy/paste to the correct place according to your timeline. I mean, literally hours of work becomes seconds.
Outside of using Scrivener (or similar word processor) or doing the copy/paste dance, you can also treat your work as a rough draft and rewrite.
Well, writing is a labor of love, isn’t it? I’m an editor and I enjoy editing, but I know that’s not the case for some writers. And sometimes it’s hard to look at your own work critically. It takes a lot of practice, that’s for sure. That’s why I’m here to help. Take my advice or leave it–not every strategy works for everyone. The point is, keep an eye out for these errors. No matter how frustrating or disheartening an edit can be, just remember that it can only improve your work and help you move closer to your goals.
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