As Lincoln Michel recently pointed out in an excellent post, one of the great and magical capabilities of prose is to be able to speed up and slow down time. Years can pass in a flash, or you can dwell for pages on something that happens faster than the blink of an eye.
Physical space works similarly. We can start in one place and then quickly move millions of miles away.
Still, as you utilize this wonderful capability, it’s crucial to provide good connective tissue for your jumps in time and space. It’s really disorienting for the reader when a character sudden arrives somewhere else or when a new character suddenly pops in out of nowhere.
Here are some tips in making these jumps.
When you jump in time, establish how much time has passed
It’s totally fine to speed past uneventful stretches in a story and simply move to where the story picks up again. But be sure to give the reader a sense of how much time has elapsed.
This is particularly important at the start of a new chapter. Readers tend to assume that some time has elapsed between chapters, so even/especially if you are continuing the action from the previous chapter, it’s good to give a sense of how much time has gone by. (And it’s ideal to establish clear physical description if we’re in a new setting too).
You don’t have to be overly precise about this, but even a quick “a few weeks later” or giving some other cue will help the reader get their bearings.
You also don’t need a chapter break to fast forward. Chapters don’t need to take place within a set time period. As long as it feels consistent with the rhythm of your chapter, you can just move forward in time within a chapter and skip to where the story picks up.
Show characters moving through space
We’ve all read books where a character is in one place and then all of a sudden they’re in another place. A character will be upstairs in bed lamenting that they have to go to school, and then suddenly they’re in the kitchen complaining to their mother.
It’s pretty jarring. It doesn’t take much to show a character moving from Point A to Point B. This:
Nathan tucked the covers under his chin and lamented that he had to trudge to Burchfield Elementary School on such a cold Monday.
“Why do I have to go to school?” Nathan asked his mother in the kitchen.
Can just be this:
Nathan tucked the covers under his chin and lamented that he had to trudge to Burchfield Elementary School on such a cold Monday.
He trudged downstairs to the kitchen and found his mother making coffee. “Why do I have to go to school?” he asked.
You don’t have to be overly painstaking about showing every single step a character takes, and it’s okay to elide physical distance. Even something like “blasted into space” can cover many millions of miles. But it’s helpful at the very least to show them on the move.
Establish who is present in the setting from the start
Another very common way to disorient the reader is to set the scene inadequately and then all of a sudden characters who were there all along start popping up seemingly out of nowhere to speak or engage with the scene.
Describe who is present in a scene from the start. It helps give the reader they need to picture the overall scene, and subsequent action will make way more sense.
Good scene setting is crucial to help establish the reader’s mental map, which will then help simplify things when you show various people coming and going.
Show new characters arriving
Fiction doesn’t always have to imitate real life, but in my humble opinion authors drastically overuse characters arriving out of nowhere and surprising the protagonist. It’s usually best to just show characters arriving unless there’s some narrative reason it needs to be a surprise, and if it logistically makes sense.
There’s also a peculiar tic among novelists that always baffles me: the protagonist hears a disembodied voice, only it turns out they know the person extremely well.
It goes something like this:
Nathan reached a clearing in the forest.
“What are you doing out here?!” a male voice shouted.
Nathan turned to find his father striding through the meadow.
If you heard your father shouting at you, would your thought processes really be “Oh wow there’s this male voice that’s shouting at me I wonder who it is wait now that I think about it sounds like a voice I know better than 99.9999% of the voices on Earth I’d better turn around oh hey it’s Dad!”
Unless you’re fine playing a little “neener neener” with the reader and withholding who’s talking in order to create a mystery (and this should be used very very sparingly, as it feels vaguely hostile to the reader), it’s usually best for characters to just recognize people they know.
Remember that you’re a reader’s guide
Providing time and space connective tissue is surprisingly challenging because you know how your novel unfolds and what your characters are doing. It’s very easy to fill in these gaps yourselves and forget what is and isn’t on the page.
Remember that you are the reader’s guide, and like a tour guide you need to bring the reader along on the journey, and the reader only knows what you tell them.
Also: avoid the temptation to abuse your role as the reader’s guide by resorting to tricks that manipulate time and space for cheap surprises, unless you’re doing so very carefully and intentionally. In order to sustain a reader’s magical immersion within a fictional world, they need to forget you, the author, exists. Don’t remind them with sneaky hand buzzers and rug pulling.
See anything I missed on getting characters from Point A to Point B? Let me know in the comments!
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Art: Drags of the Four-in-Hand Club by Samuel Henry Alken
This is a superb reminder to us how important it is to heep the reader in the loop, as it were. We don’t want to throw the reader out of the story by making them think, ‘Hey, I thought Nathan was in bed. Is his bed in the kitchen? That’s just weird.
It’s timely, too, for me. I realise I move from one place to another without saying between chapter 1 and 2 in the novel I’m currently editing. Not only that, but I change POV, too. (I do state whose POV we’re following in the chapter title, though.) Maybe this time and place jump, along with the POV change needs adjusting.
Thank you.
Nathan COULD be sleeping in the kitchen, or have a very loud voice! But why is there a meadow in the forest?
But seriously, thanks Nathan!
Excellent points — just because playing with movement is good for pacing doesn’t mean the reader wants to be *shoved* into the next scene.
I like to think of it as editing a video. Planning scenes in my head is like capturing a day with real-time filming (but on a super-camera that catches all the perspective-based details like recognizing your father’s voice at once). When it’s written down and rewritten, it adjusts that with different speeds of fast-playback (actually more like a montage, using summary lines like “All the way into town the clouds darkened…”) and sometimes cutting past things. But like a movie, the montage or the cut has to be clear to the people who follow that story.
“the reader only knows what you tell them”–every writer should keep this on a post-it note beside their keyboard. I think some writers are so good at visualizing scenes in their own heads that they take everything they ‘see’ for granted and forget that they need to show it to readers. I find that reading aloud (or better yet having someone else read the story back to you) helps highlight these blind spots.