Image (C) Chalabala | Deposit Photos. Dogs definitely understand time when it comes to dinner.

Time in fiction is a skill mostly not taught. It seems simple because we all know time, right? Yet, it’s easy to forget that your characters should have weekdays and weekends, or even seasonal events. It’s easy to forget to add a specific time Marker in every scene. The problem may even be magnified by the description drips and drabs teaching because time is often part of description.

If the time is messed up in a book, the reader will pick up on something wrong. They may not understand what it is, or they could suddenly be knocked out of the book when they realize what happened. I read a book where the characters were stranded in the middle of nowhere and had to walk to help. When they arrived, the writer told us two days had passed, which threw me out of the Story. The writer hadn’t anchored time enough, and I imagined it a lot longer than that. In another book, the writer jammed an impossible number of events into a twenty-four-hour period. She’d clearly lost control of the time in the story.

Start practicing the skill first by putting a time marker at the top of each scene. This includes the month, date, day of the week, and time. It doesn’t have to be precise, like 7:34 a.m. Story Grid discusses this, as well as how long the scene lasts.

What this simple step will do is help identify errors in time logic in your story. While I was working on a series of scenes in Superhero Vs. Superhero, I discovered I had a time logic problem. The character has arrived to eat dinner with the aliens. That’s a time marker. She ends up using her superhero suit and has an hour of suit time, another time marker. But a scene later in the sequence was impacted by that hour, and it was clear to me it didn’t feel like an hour had passed. In this case, removing one scene revealed the problem; I added another scene that used the hour and cleaned up the continuity issues,

Even if you plan to have the time marker in the final draft of the story, make sure you’re firmly anchoring the time in the words of the scene as well. Some readers will pay attention to the time marker and some won’t. Either way, it won’t hurt to anchor it further.

Why you should think about doing time:

Figuring out what time of the year can be a big influence on elements in your story. If it’s July in Washington, DC, the weather is very different than January. If it’s winter, the days are much shorter, so it might be night at 4:30 p.m. In July, there might be sudden thunderstorms; in January, it’s a blizzard. All setting, of course.

Time shows up as an integral part of the pacing of the story. You can use it to build suspense, like the ticking time bomb.

For more reading on the topic:

Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne. This is the only resource I found that discusses the duration of scenes.

Making Time With the Viewpoint Character, The Editor’s Blog. This was the most detailed, showing different ways you could use time.

Managing Day and Time. Also from The Editor’s Blog. There’s a surprising number of ways to do time without actually stating the time. But you’ll need description to do it.

Any discussion on pacing. Jonathan Maberry’s done classes on pacing, discussing compressing the timeline for the story to speed up the pacing.

Dean Wesley Smith also talks briefly about time in Point of View and Novel Structure workshops; probably also his Writing Endings (I haven’t taken that one). One eye opening discovery, since Superhero Vs. Superhero is that first person needs a small time jump at the beginning of scenes. Who knew?