The past month or so I've really fallen down in the blogging
department. It's almost unbelievable how
much time is consumed by the recuperating process. Though my surgery went well and I'm healing
pretty quickly considering I had a complete knee replacement, long hours of my
days are consumed by physical therapy, ice treatments, and just plain feeling
tired. I'm not complaining; I know I'm
way ahead of the usual healing curve for this type of surgery, but sometimes I
feel like I've missed a lot.
When I entered the hospital on September 17, almost a month
ago, the days were hot and felt more like August than September. I'm home now and suddenly it's October and I
go around looking for a sweater to wear or an afghan to keep me from
shivering. Time seems to have taken a
giant leap forward when I wasn't watching closely enough. Sometimes I get that same feeling when I'm
reading. There's that whoa! What happened? How did I get from there to here?
moment. Unlike with real life, those
moments leave me frantically thumbing backwards through the book to see what I
missed.
Time transitions including jumps in time are not easy to
manage, but are often necessary to avoid tedious pages with little to do with
the main story taking up space and time.
Getting characters from one point to another or one time to another can
be challenging. In my present work in
progress (due out in February) the story covers a span of ten years and I've
worried a great deal over whether or not readers will be able to follow the
progression of time as I mean for them to do.
Only time and my readers will tell me whether or not I succeeded.
Recently I read two books with significant time jumps. One, by a well known author, left me thumbing
backwards to see if I missed something several times. The other by a friend, who doesn't claim to
be a writer, but who wishes to record several family stories in a novel format
for a Christmas gift moved flawlessly between the present and World War
II. I've no answer to why some writers
struggle with moving between times while others do it almost
instinctively. I just know I like to be
able to keep time in neat compartments when I read. I like to know when the past is the past,
when children are no longer children, when the action jumps ahead a few years,
and when the action is already past.
There are little clues that are helpful in this matter such
as placing a time or date notation at the beginning of chapters, switching to different
fonts to denote the different time periods, placing asterisks at the end of one
scene and the beginning of the next or just skipping a space to alert the
reader to a change in time, place, or point of view. A few well chosen words can also prove
helpful.
I sometimes wonder whether readers or other writers find
books with long time progressions or jumps in time sometimes difficult to
follow. I'd love to discover which books
you think are examples of dealing with this problem poorly or well. I've received both kudos and complaints about
my own books in the area of longish time progressions and would like to know
what works and what doesn't. Though I've never written a book that presents two
or more totally different time periods, I've read a number of them and haven't
found many to my liking. Currently there
are at least two series underway by well-known and well-liked authors that tell
two stories, one contemporary and one historical side-by-side. I wonder what readers think of this method of
storytelling. Please share your views in
the comments section.
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