I was going to write out the blurb for Vigilante, but I remembered as I was starting that Vigilante is currently under re-write, having been chopped into two pieces due to a mis used time skip. This set me to thinking on time skips, and when and how to use them.
In it’s simplest form, a time skip is the little text that pops up on the bottom of your tv screen of ‘ten years later.’ They’re used quite a bit in writing – from one perspective, any time you end one scene and start another that is several hours later, you’ve used one.
I’m mainly focusing this post, though, on more major time skips. In Vigilante as originally written, there was a three year time skip. This time skip didn’t work, and left the story feeling somewhat disjointed. In Children of the Twain alone, in comparison, there are at least two multi-year time skips. There, they work perfectly and help the story flow and move along.
The difference? During the time skip in Vigilante, stuff happened. The major character is in a different place, financially, professionally, and to at least some extent emotionally. The time skip left stuff missing from the book, that shaped the story and that the reader didn’t see. In retrospect, this is a glaringly obvious mistake, but I made it anyway, and now I have a book in pieces on my hard drive.
In Children of the Twain, in comparison, the time skips are over periods of training and rest. They’re time for characters to age and learn, but not dramatically change. Tal’raen at sixteen is not a hugely different person than Tal’raen at twelve. He’s learned a lot, but he hasn’t changed in any unexpected ways, and the reader doesn’t need to see four years of calm, boring, life in a remote estate learning magic.
A time skip should never be used to pass over anything that impacts the characters. If you’re writing a novel over a long period of in-story time, they’re absolutely essential, but the thing to remember is this: a major character should not change off-screen. The core of your story is your characters and their development arcs, and you need to show that arc. If events aren’t important to the story or to the development of the character except in very general terms (like spending four years learning magic away in isolation), quickly summing them up and skipping a few years of story time is not a bad thing.
Writer’s don’t have access to the same montage ability as movies, but a time skip often follows the same logic – we’re going to quickly summarize this chunk of time that, well, just plain isn’t interesting enough to spend much time on.
To summarize? Skip the boring parts, focus on the parts that move your story and change your character. Learn from my mistake and don’t skip the latter. You don’t want a 100,000 word novel sitting around in need of being dismantled and re-assembled somehow.
Trust me.
Namaste,
Glynn Stewart
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