KEY CREATIVE WRITING SKILLS
Controlling time in a story
(part 1)
the basics
This is part 1 of our 2-part series on controlling the way time passes in a story, which is one of the harder things writers have to do. This guide looks at the core principles you need to grasp, as well as at how to move time forward in a story.
Contents of this guide
Part 2 will look at how to use timeshift to move time backwards in a story and create a non-linear structure.
Quick links for this skill
Other guides in the series
The fast-time vs. slow-time distinction
One way to think about the way time passes in a story is the distinction between story-time and reading-time.
Story-time is the time that passes in the actual story – e.g. how much time the characters in the story would experience in the events you describe
Reading-time is the length of time that it takes to read the section of the story in which the story-time is passing
The relationship between these two times is what determines whether a piece of writing is what we refer to as slow-time or fast-time. (These are not technical terms - they’re just a useful way to think about the way time is conveyed in a story.)
There is a spectrum here, of course. Slow-time and fast-time are not binary opposites — you don’t need to pick one or the other.
It’s best to think of the spectrum as being ‘extremely slow-time’ at one end and ‘extremely fast-time’ at the other end, with everything else in between. We’ll look at this more detail later on, but in a simple sense, you can think of these concepts in the following way:
Slow-time means the reading-time is big but the story-time is small (e.g. it takes more time for you to read the story than it would for the events in the story to happen, or at least a similar amount of time).
Fast-time is the opposite – the reading-time is small but the story-time is big (e.g. it takes you less time to read the story, often a lot less, than it does for the events to take place).
This is fairly straightforward, but let’s look at three quick examples to make it completely clear.
Slow-time example
Maurice glanced down at his hands. They were red and clammy, and in the intense light of the waiting room, he could make out the individual hairs on his fingers. They were fine and dark and tangled, creeping up each finger to its wrinkled knuckle.
In this first example we just get Maurice glancing at his hands — this would take a moment, maybe a second or two at most — so the story-time is perhaps 2 seconds. But it takes more than 2 seconds to read these three sentences. So the story-time is less than the reading-time, which makes this very slow-time.
Fast-time example
Maurice phoned a taxi immediately and, when it arrived, he asked to go straight to the airport. The flight to Australia was long and dull, but when he landed in Sidney he knew he’d done the right thing.
In this example, we have a lot of story-time passing. Maurice has to make the phone call for the taxi, wait for it to come, then do that journey, then deal with all the airport stuff, including the waiting, then take a long flight. The story-time here would be close to 24 hours, probably, but the reading-time is very short – it’s just two sentences so takes only a handful of seconds to read. This makes it fast-time - extremely fast, in fact.
Fairly slow-time example
Maurice glanced across the table at David. He was sipping his tea and looking over at the window, where a young family where passing by. Maurice tapped the table slowly, three times, getting David’s attention. “Sorry,” David said. “I was miles away. What were you going to say?”
In this final example, the story-time is still fairly slow, but not quite as slow as in the first example. This is a similar number of words (48 vs 45 in the first example) so the reading-time is about the same, but more story-time passes here – perhaps 10 or 15 seconds. In this example the reading-time and story-time are fairly similar, so it’s fairly slow, and much slower than the second example with the plane flight, but not quite as slow as the first one.
The purpose of this third example is just to illustrate the point made earlier: the distinction between slow-time and fast-time is a spectrum. We can take the same reading-time and convey different amounts of story-time in that reading-time. The more story-time that passes in a given amount of reading-time, the more we move away from slow-time and towards fast-time.
This not an exact science – there aren’t precise points at which a piece of writing becomes slow-time or fast-time, but there is an important concept here for you to get your head around. Can you recognise when your writing is slow-time, when it is fast-time and when it is somewhere in between?
This is important because sometimes writers need slow down story-time to make a story vivid or to help create tension or drama, and sometimes writers need to speed up story-time to convey a lot of plot or to create pace. You need to be able to do this deliberately in your writing – you need to be aware of how slow or fast the time is passing in your story. The rest of this guide will look at ways that you can control this.
How to slow down or speed up time
In order to effectively use slow-time and fast-time in your stories, you need to know how to slow down or speed up the story-time in a piece of writing. Below are a few simple ways to do this.
Some ways to slow down story-time
Include some vivid description of the setting - this practically freezes story-time
Include precise descriptions of a character’s actions – each small movement, each step, etc
Explain a character’s thoughts and feelings in some detail - this slows the story-time down to almost nothing
Include direct speech – this makes the reading-time and the story-time roughly the same
Include some kind of timeshift that goes backwards in time to pause the story-time, at least in the present
Some ways to speed up story-time
List several actions in a single sentence, or a few fairly short sentences, which each move time forward a bit
State a single action or event which takes a long time (e.g. flying to Australia)
Include indirect speech – this allows a longer conversation to be summarised in fewer words
Jump ahead in time — if need be you can then fill the reader in (briefly) on what happened in the intervening period with a timeshift, though this may not be necessary
Specify some kind of specific time interval (e.g. Three hours later…) to jump time forward in a precise way – don’t use this too much, though, as it can be clunky if used multiple times in quick succession
How to convey the passing of time in your writing
In order to use both slow-time and fast-time effectively you need to be able to convey the passing of time in your writing, whether it’s smaller amounts of time or larger amounts of time. You need your reader to understand where in the timeline of your story they are at each point in the narrative. The final section of this guide will outline a few ways that you can do this.
Jumping time forwards in a story
When you want to move time forward in a story in a significant way, cutting from one scene to another, you need to specify the new point in the timeline so the reader understands the jump. This doesn’t have to be done explicitly all the time — you don’t want your story to be full of phrases like “35 seconds later” — but you need to provide some direction for your reader so they can follow the story’s progress through its timeline.
This is something students tend to find difficult to do, but there are two straightforward ways that you can do it.
1. Lead with an adverbial phrase establishing the new time, before saying what happens at the new timeline point in the rest of the sentence. For example:
Several hours later, they arrived at the airport.
The following morning, Peter woke up to find himself feeling no better at all.
On Tuesday, they set off for the jungle.
2. Lead with a subordinate clause establishing the new time, before saying what happens at that new time in the main clause. For example:
When she arrived at the cottage, she got the keys out of the lockbox on the porch and made her way inside.
As the train pulled away, Nate looked over at William and smiled; they were really doing this.
For this method ‘when’ is by far the best conjunction to use. ‘As’ can work too, and there are other possible conjunctions like ‘once’ or ‘while’ which also convey time, but usually you’re best using ‘when’, which is the most broad and versatile in terms of its meaning. For some reason, students tend to shun ‘when’ in their writing — I’ve never understood why that is — but you should embrace it: ‘when’ should be your dear friend in both creative and essay writing.
This is all fairly straightforward, so far, but there is something important that you need to remember when you want to jump time forward in a story: you need to neatly finish the previous event before the time jump. Otherwise it will sound weird.
Consider the following examples.
Poor examples of jumping forward in time
Peter opened the car door and stepped inside. Several hours later he arrived at the cottage.
Sally couldn’t believe her luck and booked the holiday immediately. When she arrived at the cottage, she got the keys out of the lockbox on the porch and made her way inside.
Both of these examples sound clunky because the event in the first sentence is not neatly finished. Peter gets in the car and then arrives at the cottage. That’s a weird jump. Similarly, Sally books the holiday and then suddenly she’s there at the cottage. How did she get there? There’s no closure on the first event in either of these examples.
To fix this we need to do two things:
We need to end the first event more neatly to set up the jump in time
We need to start a new paragraph for the new time – this will help it to feel less clunky
Let’s see how that looks in practice:
Fixed version of example 1
Peter opened the car door and stepped inside. He glanced out of the window one final time to wave at his mum, and then he set off.
Several hours later he arrived at the cottage. Etc.
Fixed version example 2
Sally couldn’t believe her luck and booked the holiday immediately. She spent an hour or two frantically packing and loading her car, and then she set off for her dream country getaway.
When she arrived at the cottage, she got the keys out of the lockbox on the porch and made her way inside. Etc.
You should be able to see that the time jumps in both of these examples feel much less clunky and strange than the original versions.
Jumping time backwards in a story – flashbacks and timeshifts
This is the most complex of the concepts in this part of the guide. There are various rules and guidelines that you need to follow in order to do this successfully. For this reason, we cover it in a separate guide, which you can find here.
Progressing time in a story
The last part of the guide will look at how you convey that time is progressing in a story. This is different to jumping forward in time. Time jumping forward is like a cut in a film, a scene change. This is more like a montage, where we ‘see’ the time passing as it happens.
Imagine you are at Point A in your story timeline and you want to get to Point B, which is later in your timeline. How do you convey the time that’s passed?
Let’s consider three concrete examples:
You want to get from a scene that takes place during registration in your story (Point A) to a scene that takes place at break (Point B) - around 2 hours
You want to get from a scene that takes place at your character’s house (Point A) to a scene that takes place at Lakeside shopping centre (Point B) - around 45 minutes
You want to get from a moment when a character hears a car pull up outside his house (Point A) to the moment the character opens the door (Point B) - around 1 minute
As we have said, you could just jump forward in time, like a cut in a film. It’s registration. BLACK SCREEN. It’s break. This would use the approach we outlined in the section on jumping time forwards.
However, you can also convey the passing of time by saying what happens between the two points in your timeline, and to do this, you’ve got two options, though you could use a mixture of both of them, if you want.
Option 1: Progressing time through a single event — fast-time approach
One way you can get from Point A to Point B in your timeline is by having a single thing happen that takes the required time. This generally works best for fast-time storytelling, or at least fairly fast-time. Here are three examples of this using the situations outlined above.
They rushed to Thurrock on Palvashay’s new motorbike, weaving through the traffic on the A127.
Nate had English and Maths in his two lessons before break; they were both equally boring.
Peter rushed to the window and watched the man get out of the car and walk up the path to his door.
Option 2: Progressing time through a sequence of events — slow-time approach
If you want to take a more slow-time approach to progressing the time between Point A and Point B, you can tell a sequential series of events, with one small thing happening after another to create a more vivid picture. Here’s how this might work for the first part of our third example, with the car pulling up outside the house:
Peter rushed to the window and looked outside. He could see a car pulling up slowly. It stopped just by the gate and the driver got out.
Here the passing of time is conveyed more slowly than in the examples we saw earlier — we only get part way through our one minute of story-time in these three sentences. This is slow-time and it gives us a sense of the time passing as the events play out.
You need to be a bit careful with this approach, though. Sequential storytelling like this is fine for a few sentences, but you can’t keep it up for too long, without adding some variation. Consider this extended version of this example:
Peter rushed to the window and looked outside. He could see a car pulling up slowly. It stopped just by the gate and the driver got out. He glanced around somewhat suspiciously and then opened the gate. He walked down the path to the front door. He wiped his feet on the mat. He knocked twice and Peter opened it. The man smiled.
You should be able to see that this sounds weird. There are just too many events in a row here, without anything to break them up. And the sentence structures and lengths are repetitive.
To make this kind of slow-time sequential storytelling work, you need to break up the events you describe with other things, like description and thoughts, or, if it works in the situation, direct speech.
Here’s a better version of the second example above, with the same sequential events kept mostly identical, but with other things included to break up the sequence a bit. The new parts have been underlined so you can see how they are spread through the sequence of events.
Peter rushed to the window and looked outside. He could see a car pulling up slowly. Why would somebody be visiting today of all days? He didn’t recognise the car at all. It stopped just by the gate and the driver got out. He was a stocky man of about forty, with slightly greying hair and a gruff, surly face. He glanced around somewhat suspiciously and then opened the gate. The sparrows on the lawn scattered in unison, silently fleeing the scene, and the man walked down the path to the front door. He wiped his feet on the mat and knocked twice. “What the hell does he want,” Peter said under his breath as he walked gingerly to the door, opening it just enough to see the man’s face. He smiled.
This example of progressing time through a sequence of events works much better. It keeps the slow-time approach we saw earlier but now it feels more natural — and more vivid. We have the same series of events, in the same sequence, but they are broken up with thoughts, description and speech.
You don’t need to include all three of those things every time, of course (we just included all three so you could get a sense of each of them) but you do need to break up long sequences of events when you are progressing time in this way.
If you want to be a really effective storyteller (or to get high marks in your creative writing), you will need to master both of these methods for progressing time through a story (fast and slow), alongside the two time-jump methods discussed earlier.
Summing up - key things to remember when controlling time in a story
You need to understand the basic distinction between fast-time storytelling and slow-time storytelling, while also understanding that this is a spectrum and that there are lots of points along that spectrum
You need to know when to use fast-time - conveying plot, creating pace, etc - and when you need to use slow-time - creating tension, making a situation vivid, etc
There are various ways you can slow time down in a story, including vivid description, character thoughts and direct speech
There are various ways you can speed time up in a story, including listing, indirect speech and forward timeshifts
To jump time forward in stories you can either use an adverbial phrase or a subordinate clause to specify the new time, but you need to ensure you’ve neatly ended the events before the time jump
‘When’ is the best conjunction to use for specifying the time that things happen in a story
Jumping time backwards in stories is more complex and we have a separate guide for that
If you want to progress time more gradually, without a jump, you can either progress it through a single event (fast-time) or progress it through a sequence of smaller events (slow-time)
If you progress it through a sequence of smaller events, you need to ensure the sequence isn’t too long, and if it is quite long you need to intersperse the sequence with things like description and thought