The Mythcreant Podcast 558 – Passing Time in Fiction
Your story follows its protagonist around as they perform feats of derring-do. But what if several years pass between each exciting moment? That’s realistic, but does it make a good story? It’s tough to recount such vast stretches of time in fiction, but this week we’ve got some ideas that might make it a little easier. Plus, we explain why ancient Greek and Roman writers are judging you.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Opening Theme]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris …
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Wait, wait a second. Something isn’t right here. My schedule says we’re recording for only a half an hour. And where is Mike?
Oren: You know, we should probably tell the entire story of how Mike used to be on this podcast. And then Wes used to be on the podcast. And then Bunny was on the podcast, who we hope will be on the podcast again. And how much time do you have? ‘Cause that’s gonna take like, ten hours.
Chris: Whoa! Who are those people? And we’re on episode 558?! What happened? I swear it was just yesterday that we were on episode 50. That’s not right.
Oren: This is a simpler time. Back when we recorded hour long podcasts.
Chris: Oh no. It’s like we started a podcast and then jumped forward until we were seasoned podcasters with one of the oldest podcasts still going ’cause we’re too stubborn to stop.
Oren: That’s a weird thing to think about. This podcast is so old.
Chris: This podcast is so old. I mean, I don’t know what the oldest podcast is. But at the same time, we are definitely up there in oldest podcasts. We have to be.
Oren: We’re definitely older than any of the podcasts I listen to.
Chris: Mm-hmm. So any case. We’re gonna be talking about long stretches of time and covering them in stories. And in podcasts apparently.
Oren: And in podcasts. See, ’cause I—surprising everyone I’m sure—have a bone to pick about this.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: Because I’m reading a book called The Empire of Silence, which is trying to do Name of the Wind, but as sci-fi.
Chris: Why!
Oren: And it’s so boring. I don’t get it.
Chris: That’s interesting. What essential parts of Name of the Wind is it trying to transfer to the sci-fi context? ‘Cause, I don’t know. I get the feeling that the setting is what makes Name of the Wind. Or at least the atmosphere. So what is the point?
Oren: So the essential Name of the Wind-ness that it is using is the idea of a super famous guy who did something bad telling you his memoir.
Chris: Okay.
Oren: Something that you don’t know what it was. It’s implied to be bad, but also cool. But The Name of the Wind series is called The King Killer Chronicle. So presumably he killed a king. We’ll never know now, but we’ll never know because we’ll never do the third book. Yeah. I forget what this series is called. I don’t remember if it’s called “The Emperor Murderer Series” or whatever, but it’s that premise. And like, Name of the Wind feels like it is just trying to tell us the entire life story of this character.
Chris: Aristotle says, don’t do that.
Oren: He says not to. And we have strayed from his ancient wisdom!
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: We are off the path. Aristotle, come back.
Chris: We’ve known that’s a bad idea for a really long time,
Oren: And I’ve noticed that when books try to do this, it’s always really boring and I’m not sure if that’s a requirement? In theory, my head tells me that what you should be able to do is just be like, okay, well we’re telling this part of his life. This is gonna be a little episode. And then that’s gonna be done, and then we’re gonna skip forward. And then we’ll have another little episode. And in theory, those could work independently and not be boring, but they always are.
Chris: Right. I mean, you can have an actual tension arc—and I can talk more about the difficulties and how to make it work. An actual tension arc that lasts through somebody’s whole life or longer.
Oren: Right.
Chris: You can do that. But I think the issue with this kind of Name of the Wind thing is that it’s being done instead of an actual throughline, often.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Or, okay. Does this “Space Name of the Wind” open with something equivalent to the giant demon spider threat that’s actually more interesting than the backstory only to abandon it?
Oren: No, it doesn’t. It’s actually worse in that respect, because it doesn’t have an interesting framing device that it abandons. It starts you right in the memoir with a little aside to tell you this is a memoir being dictated by somebody who did something bad. Both of them go through like, all right, this is his childhood. Now he’s a street urchin ’cause something bad happened. And it’s not exactly the same.
I wouldn’t say this book is copying or plagiarizing Name of the Wind. It’s just clearly heavily inspired by it. But both books have the problem of, there’s not really any tension. We’re just sort of watching things happen. There are maybe one or two moments where something might be tense, but mostly we’re just being told what this guy did for long periods of time. It’s almost all summary.
Chris: Look! Look, folks. Horace says that you should not start your story when Helen of Troy hatches from an egg. That’s just too early.
Oren: [laughing] Just don’t. If you won’t believe Aristotle, surely you’ll listen to Horace. Our good friend, Horace.
Chris: Anyway, but no. It is interesting that they talked about these things so long ago. I think when in Aristotle’s case, there must have been playwrights at the time we were trying to do that, and I do wonder if mythology had an effect on that. Mythology has a lot of origin stories.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And so people, instead of actually having a cohesive plot—if people were trying to be like, “Here, all I have to do is just cover one person’s life or one hero’s deeds, and then automatically we have a plot.” And Aristotle’s like, “No, you need the ‘unity of an action,’” is what he called it.
But I don’t see any reason why it has to be that way. I think in this case, the starting forward in time, it’s like using a flash forward as a hook.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: To try to make up for the fact that starting with just like, okay, well the hero was born and then started to grow up, is just dull.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Which is why before adding a flash forward to your beginning or any other little tricks, you just need to make your beginning good first [chuckles]. So do your best you can to make your beginning good. And then if it’s beneficial, you can think about something like a flash forward if that will help engagement.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But I do feel like in a lot of these cases when writers are trying to add prologues or flash forwards or other things where they’re jumping around at a time in the beginning, that can be happening because they just haven’t put in the effort necessary to make their actual first chapter engaging.
Oren: Right. The classic is the first chapter is boring, so we put a more exciting prologue right before it or something. That’s not ideal ’cause I still have to deal with this boring first chapter you wrote. I just have to deal with it a little later.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: In this case, I am trying to figure out what is the good way to try to write a story that takes place over such a long period of time.
Chris: Right.
Oren: Most of the big series that I read, they cover a surprisingly small amount of time. Sometimes it’s comical. Like The Wheel of Time covers about two and a half years. In fifteen books! And that’s a little much. But like Game of Thrones only covers—the ones that are written anyway—only covers about maybe three or four years, and those are all very, very long.
Now granted they have series bloat with all these extra POV characters that they keep adding. But the longest one I can think of that I thought worked pretty well was Temeraire, which covers about eleven or twelve years in nine books. And that seemed like a lot, and I was hard pressed to figure out how would you cover more time than that in a smaller number of books.
Chris: Yeah. No, you can. I mean, magic school ones are one of the ones that typically cover more time because we’re encompassing a school year.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: The question of ‘how’ gets into different technical issues. I think maybe you should start with ‘why’ [laughs]. Why would we do this?
Oren: ‘Why are’ though? [chuckles]
Chris: I mean there are downsides, right? It’s harder to manage tension. And then there’s disorienting time jumps. And it can cause confusion, all those things. So there are disadvantages. So what is the payoff that we get if we incur those things? You know, one is, I think with the magic school, we’ve just got important events that would realistically take place over a long time.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So we wanna do the first day of school. We also wanna do graduation.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And also school year provides a nice bookend. You know, school year ends, everybody goes home for the summer. Kind of gives it a nice start and end to the story. Some people really wanna show their character growing older.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Maybe that’s the case in this Name of the Wind and ‘Space Name of the Wind.’ We just needed a plot that would work with that.
Oren: Yeah. Well, I mean, they are clearly modeled off of memoirs. So I guess that is the motivation. We’ll go from, you know, childhood to when they did this super famous thing. Hilariously, Name of the Wind—his character when he is telling the story is supposed to be very young, which adds another weird wrinkle to it. I have no idea how old ‘space Kvothe’ is when he’s doing his memoir reciting.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I do think that for even a lot of books, if you wanna show the character growing older … Again, a series gives you a lot more time. And I think what you can do is have each book. Over some events with their own plot and you have a less mature character, grow a little more mature or learn an important lesson about adulthood in that time. And then you skip forward between books when they’re a little older, and then they have another adventure in which they learn another adult lesson.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And if you have a series of books, that’s probably gonna work a little better than having tons of time passed during each book because people expect time to fly between books already.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, that’s basically what Novik does, right? Time generally passes at what you could consider to be real time during a book, and then there’s a year between each book. Which is, you know, about how she covers that much time in nine books.
Chris: Yeah. And I would say if you can tell your story doing that, then you probably should. As opposed to ‘imagine school story,’ which has a specific reason to cover a longer period of time.
You could have a story where you want to show a whole society change. And again, I do think that books that cover several generations or hundreds of years, to the point where they have to change main character, are gonna be working at an engagement penalty. But I also wouldn’t say that we shouldn’t tell those stories, right?
Oren: Yeah. I mean, I get it, right? Like I play Crusader Kings and the idea of a story that covers the entire reign of one of my monarchs, or even my whole family line is like, oh, that sounds cool. But then I’m like, oh, how would I … how would I write that that wouldn’t be boring as hell? [laughs]
Chris: Right. I do think a lot of times if you’re not gonna have a main character, you really should make the story shorter.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: If you wanna keep up, you know, engagement. Now, I don’t know, in some cases maybe people would love your world building so much they’d stick around. But to me part of that feels sad knowing they’d be more engaged if you just had a main character. I guess you could have an immortal main character [chuckles].
Oren: Yeah. Just hanging out for thousands of years. I mean that works.
Chris: I suppose we could do the same thing with the series, but like, have a hundred years pass between each book in the series.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And have your immortal character see how the society changes.
Oren: Yeah, I mean that seems okay. What gets me is that—and maybe this is just me personally, I don’t know. I have a thing where when there’s a big time jump, it weirds me out that either the characters didn’t change and it feels like they should have or they did, and now it feels like I don’t know them anymore. It feels like it’s a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation. Maybe no one else feels that way.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that could be a difficulty. And of course it’s a matter of finding that sweet spot, but surely that will be a little hard.
Oren: Right. I mean, there’s extreme examples, right? Like when The Expanse does a thirty year time jump and everyone is on the same ship, in the same job with the same social dynamics thirty years later, and I am like, mmm—oh. Mmm, no.
Chris: Be careful with that monkey’s paw. ‘Cause you might get Picard where everybody has changed, but they’re all miserable and they have horrible lives, and some of them have died.
Oren: People just seem to really like that idea. It’s like, “Hey guys, we’re doing a legacy sequel thirty years after. All the actors are way older. Well, they obviously should all be sad.” It’s like, shut the—
Chris: Yeah. I don’t think people liked the sad part. I think at least people I’ve talked to who liked Picard, it was because seeing the actors, again, seeing the characters again means so much that they just do not care about the rest of the content. Or it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they will like it anyway. Despite the content being sad.
Oren: The most well received of the Picard seasons seems to have been season three, based on at least the reactions I was seeing. And season three is just one giant nostalgia fest. And, uh, it’s not good. If you tried to tell this story with any other group of characters you would realize how bad it is. But because it’s all the TNG characters we’re like, yeah, we like those guys. They’re doing cool stuff from TNG. Or many cases, not even from TNG, but sort of things we’ve imagined they might have done since TNG.
Chris: I think we should have just stayed with Riker and Troy and had them make pizza for an entire season.
Oren: Heck yeah. I’d watch a season of Riker and Troy making pizza. And we could find out what happened to their daughter instead of having her just randomly disappear later [chuckles].
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. That’s what they should have done. Anyway [laughs]. Yeah. I mean, you could stretch it to the point where … if that’s what your concept supports, right? If you really wanna do, more than anything else, is to show how things change beyond the scope of one person.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Sure. Tell a story you wanna tell. I personally would recommend making it on the shorter side because I think it’s going to be harder to keep audience attention for a longer book. There’s some concepts, in other words, that are just harder to do if you don’t cover a long stretch of time.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Whatever your goal is that you wanna express in the story. But it’s gonna come at a disadvantage. So. ‘How?’
Oren: Yeah. ‘How do now?’ We’ve covered ‘why.’ Now the other part.
Chris: Okay. So the first thing, and—this is, you know, you’re not thinking about this, Oren. I think because it’s basic. But the first thing is to not make the story entirely summary.
Oren: I don’t know. I’m pretty basic. I was thinking about that.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: I’m mostly thinking about that because ‘Space Name of the Wind’ is mostly summary.
Chris: We’ve read a lot of books recently that have too much summary.
Oren: Oh my God …
Chris: Including some Hugo nominated books that have too much summary.
Oren: So much summary! My God.
Chris: Or for me, I just listened to thirty hours of The Mysteries of Adolfo, which is a book from the 1700s. And back then they just had not cracked scene technology yet.
Oren: No, they didn’t know.
Both: [laughter]
Oren: We can’t judge them by the standards of our modern time. We can judge them by the standards of Aristotle’s time though.
Chris: So a lot of these older books just have lots and lots of summary because they were not thinking about that. Whereas generally today, that’s considered a bad practice to have too much summary. So if you’re gonna have a story that takes place over long stretches of time, it’s really easy to … if you’re not thinking about this, which is why I often recommend blocking out scenes when you are outlining.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Because it just gives you time to stop and think about specific events in the story that you can depict happening in real time. Instead of describing the stories as a series of gradual changes that have no specific time and place to them. ‘Cause you’re gonna have to translate it over.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Certainly you can have summary between events, but if fifty percent of the story is summary, that is too far.
Oren: Too much!
Chris: I don’t have a specific number. Right? Certainly the way you write can make summary more or less entertaining if you have a quippy, omniscient voice that makes jokes you can probably get away with more summary, but I don’t know … ten percent. Let’s go with that. I pulled that randomly outta my ass. I have no idea [chuckles]. But the point is that you want to minimize, generally, the percentage of the story that is summary.
Oren: In my head there are kind of two ways I imagine this working. And maybe this is too limiting. There’s one way, which is that you have your initial chapter and then you have a time jump. Which I don’t love, but I did do it in my book. So I can’t throw too many stones, but it was a solution to a difficult problem that I didn’t really have a good way to fix.
Chris: Sure. And there’s lots of story situations in which we don’t, we have to to make the story work.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Especially if we don’t have time to revamp everything. That may not be the ideal way to do things, but are what’s practical for us right now.
Oren: Right. So that’s one way I imagine it. And then the other way that comes to my mind is basically a series of vignettes with time in between them. When I try to imagine other ways of doing it, like the first half of the story is told more or less in real time. And then you have a ten year time jump in the middle. And then the rest of the story takes place ten years later. I don’t know. To me that sounds really weird and disorienting.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: Am I wrong? Am I prejudiced?
Chris: No, I mean, this is interesting because I do think that it’s about setting expectations. And when you have patterns that are for setting expectations, usually regularity is one of the things that helps.
You know, I tell people with their chapters to not vary them too much in length. You have really short chapters. You can have really long chapters, but if you have a couple really long chapters and then you have a chapter that’s like five pages, that’s just weird.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And it’s a little off-putting. And so I think time jumps are one of those things that they automatically take some adjustment from the reader and are a little jarring. But readers can absolutely get used to them if they know what to expect. And if you have some level of regularity—all the stories, they just have one backstory beginning of some kind, or like a flash forward. And then they do one time jump and people kind of know to expect that, especially if there’s a prologue. But then it’s expected that there won’t be another one. Whereas if you get three chapters in and there’s a big time jump, that’s gonna be more unexpected. But if you have a time jump every three chapters …
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Right. But I do think it’s about more than how many words are between. It’s about ‘how does the story support this?’ So, jumping to the tension thing a little bit: so you can have problems that require a really long time to solve. They’re a little bit pressing, but it just takes somebody their entire life to solve the problem. And most of that is pretty dull.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But, I think in many cases, if you have a story that takes place over a really long period of time, it is a bit episodic. That means that there is less tension for the whole through line and more tension for each episode that takes place at the same time period.
So let’s say we have the story opens with Sleeping Beauty style angry fairy, “Oh, you’re gonna die.” And they prophesize your doom in some way. And then you sort of jump forward and then you have an episode where the child encounters the source of doom. “Oh no, I ran into a spinning wheel.”
Oren: [sarcastic] Waaah!
Chris: “I have a conflict versus this spinning wheel.” And then you get away and you know, manage to avoid spinning wheels for five years. Then you have another episode: the spinning wheel now can chase you.
Oren: Oops.
Chris: This is very silly. But the point is that you can have a situation where it’s basically episodic. Something becomes urgent when you see it, which is what you need, okay? Because urgency is the thing you lose when you take too much time. You need some level of time pressure. And so in most cases, even if you have a magic school story over one year, you kind of have to manipulate urgency a little bit more.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So after you do like, a time jump something happens that reestablishes urgency for a period of time which you’re gonna stay in real time for the most part. Another problem occurs that problem is urgent. We get past that child arc, we make a step forward in solving the big throughline. And that immediate problem becomes less urgent and then you can jump forward.
Oren: Right.
Chris: In some cases maybe nothing happens and that’s what establishes it’s not urgent, right?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: It’s like, oh, well this person swore that they were gonna attack and kill me. But you know, it’s been three weeks and they haven’t. So I guess it’s not that urgent. Who knows when this will happen? We jump a year later. Oh, the attacker has finally showed up.
Oren: Yeah. That sounds obvious when we say it. And yet I’m just wondering why so many books I’ve read haven’t done that. Like, the foundation seemed like it was custom made for this premise of every so often there’s a ‘cell in crisis,’ they’re called. And every generation or so we have to deal with it. But they don’t do that. Instead, we time jump and then summarize through a problem. Is it because they don’t know how to do smaller episodes? Is that why?
Chris: Yes.
Both: [chuckling]
Chris: I mean, a lot of authors are just feeling their way through this, right?
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: The actual teaching specific things, not a lot of people are doing it, these specific ingredients for tension. So yeah, I think a lot of people are just feeling it out. Or various levels of intentionality go into different works.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: Certainly the foundation could have had more tension, but it didn’t. But there are countless, countless books that you could say the same about.
Oren: Yeah. And I was thinking about the book. The show has different problems entirely.
Chris: Yeah. The show is its own beast. I don’t even wanna start on whatever that’s trying to do.
Oren: How do we feel about the so-called daisy chain plotting, which is what like, World War Z does?
Chris: Well, that’s basically an anthology. So it’s just episodic, but without a through line basically.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: There’s like a thematic link. If we’re talking about traditional daisy-chain, that’s the thing where you pass an object around that provides some connection. But the actual plots are entirely separate. So it is an anthology.
Oren: Right.
Chris: It’s just a chain of completely separate stories with their own tension, and then it has some sort of thematic link.
So you could do something like that, certainly. I think you can have a long-term problem to connect things a little bit stronger than a daisy-chain. You know, you have a slow moving problem that flares up periodically.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And we deal with a flare up, and then maybe the last flare up we can finally resolve the problem for good.
Oren: Yeah, that would make sense. That’s basically what World War Z does, arguably. Whether it does it well … But you know, the story starts with various vignettes about the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. And then we go through the different phases of the zombie apocalypse and then by the end we’re cleaning up the zombie apocalypse.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: An interesting choice that World War Z makes is that it’s more like the zombie apocalypse is what ties the stories together, but the stories are not really about fixing the zombie apocalypse.
Chris: No, they’re about people’s experiences during the zombie apocalypse.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: We’d have to deal with zombies, but we w
But no, he’s the FDR figure who comes in to, you know, be the wartime president America needs and do a ‘zombie new deal’ and all that stuff.ould get another FDR as president. I’ll take it! [laughs].
Oren: Yeah, we get back FDR. He’s so great compared to what we have now, right? I mean, nevermind the redlining and the internment. I’d still take it. Whatever. We’ll take what we can get.
Chris: But those people aren’t really fixing the problem.
Oren: Yeah, except for the one episode with ‘zombie FDR,’ by which I mean he’s their version of FDR during the zombie apocalypse. Not that he’s an actual zombie. That would also be fun. I’d read that.
Chris: You know, it’s really sad that that sounds like wish fulfillment to me right now.
Oren: Hell yeah!
Chris: Yeah. So yeah, basically that’s it. You kind of reestablish something urgent. And it can be the same problem, but there’s a reason it’s urgent after the dump. We’ve said it many times before but say it again—this is basically when is it acceptable to summarize over versus when it is not?
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So you can summarize it if it follows an expected trend. So character starts at their new job and then turns out they’re decently good at it. Then you can jump forward in time and it will be expected that they will gain more experience. If you jump forward in time and somehow they’re fired, you’re like, wait, that was an unexpected change that did not follow the expected trend. How did that happen? Whereas if you show them at their new job and they’re not doing too well … That one maybe [chuckles]. I don’t know. In that case, getting fired might still feel like too much of a notable event to skip over. But you can also have, you know, a ship does a few battles, wins the battles. We skip forward in time. It’s won five more battles in the meantime.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Those would be notable events on their own, but since you’ve already shown a couple, it’s expected that more will happen. And so then you can skip over them. That’s the expected trend rule. And so what you don’t want is to skip forward in time and something strange and unexpected has happened, and we didn’t get to see how or why or what caused it or led to it. That’s the goal.
Oren: Alright. Well, since we’re almost outta time, I have one more strategy that you can employ if you want to tell a story over a long period of time, is first begin publishing in 1983 and then publish forty-one books up to 2015. And this will allow you to cover quite a bit of time. And also you will be Terry Pratchett.
Both: [laughter]
Chris: Well, I think everybody would just wanna skip to the “be Terry Pratchett” part.
Oren: Alright. Well, I think with that, we will call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this episode helpful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, we have Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
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