When I’m having difficulty with something in a work in progress, I get hyper-aware of that issue in any book I’m reading. I’m not talking about big overarching issues like character motivations or plot weaknesses (although, yes, those too). Right now I’m struggling with time and travel distance in my WIP, and the thriller novel I just finished reading, while generally entertaining and engaging, irked me, and then scaled up to outright irritation around that element.
I’m not talking about pacing or rhythm. I’m talking about a steady erosion of the suspension of disbelief because of the way Our Villain zips back and forth to do bad things, over a distance of about two hundred miles, while never seeming to be absent from his “spiritual retreat” in the mountains. Or the way our team of goodguys has a similar issue; one of them drives for hours, over rutted roads, with no cell coverage or working GPS, to find Our Villain’s place, but later in the story, a pair of goodguys drive out to the mountain compound in what seems like half an hour. Not to mention the MC who, when the book opens, has gone up into the mountains for a run, all the way from Los Angeles, the way he does two or three times a week… only it’s two hundred miles from his part of LA.
(I would not have this problem with a book set in Alaska or even some place like Wyoming or Utah, where driving long distances to “town” is expected. This is Los Angeles. Maybe it’s expected there too, but I don’t know that, and it didn’t sit right.)
I’m going to go back to the 1980s for a minute and blame television.
Television is a visual medium. Over decades, TV showrunners figured out that transitions between scenes could be accomplished in a cut. In the 1960s, the MC rode on his horse across a plain and pulled up at the exterior of the next scene. Or the cops parked in front of the apartment building, and we saw them walk up to the lobby. Gradually, these liminal scenes vanished. We’d see the apartment number as the person opened the door. Now, often, the scenes go like this: “Let’s go interview Person B.” [End Scene.] [Next Scene: Sitting in B’s living room:] “Can you tell us how the murdered guy got along with his coworkers?”
This works great for movies, TV and streaming. Now, when there’s a transition in a visual medium, it does double-duty. Two characters have an important talk, or it sets a mood, or it shows off vital scenery, like the forbidding forest or the deadly desert.
Jump cuts work great in printed fiction too, and I’m a huge fan of them. They can really screw up a timeline, though.
In the book I’m discussing, I didn’t find any straight-up timeline glitches. I really don’t think Our Villain is in two places at the same time. What nagged at me was that there were points made about how very present he was at the so-called retreat—what a control freak he was, and so on. We knew he left now and then, but it was also clear how reluctant he was to leave.
Except for that time when he drove into LA and killed that person, then came back. Or that other time when he drove into LA, located a guy who had kidnapped two people for him, but now was hiding them, found them, killed that guy, and hauled two uncooperative kidnapping victims back to his hideaway without any of his guards commenting on him going or coming back. Or, as we discover at the end of the book, all those times he left to go kill random people because he is Our Villain and that was his job description.
I’m calling this a “timing” problem, but it’s a category of continuity. If it takes your MC an hour to go somewhere heading north, then (unless they were lost, stuck in traffic or something you explained) our pattern-seeking brains believe that it should take an hour heading south from that location back to the point of origin.
The best tool to catch these inconsistencies is a good first-reader or a writers group. As the writer, I’m often too close to the work, at least in early drafts, to notice that, for instance, they flew out from Atlanta on Wednesday but got into LAX Tuesday the day before. Even with the time zones, that’s not right. Odds are I will catch that on some reread, but I know my eagle-eyed writers group will.
Another handy tool is a spreadsheet or a table. In my case, I put that together after the first draft. Adding a column for Day/date is really helpful. It may not matter at all what time of year or day of the month the story covers so the “date” may just begin from Day One of the story.
A friend writing a YA fantasy novel where the MC starts a new school actually bought a notebook and set up a day-planner for the MC, so they weren’t going to Spanish class on a Saturday, or algebra twice in one day.
You can just use a calendar, either paper or automated.
In my work in progress, I wrote myself into one corner simply by starting a chapter with, “MC spent the next few days interviewing witnesses…” It can’t be a few days because of what other people are doing in a different part of the story. That’s an easy fix. The more frustrating fix is her partner’s problem. He got sent off to do something in another state. He’s driving. It’s at least a day there and a day back… and she needs to be doing something plot-advancing during the two, or more realistically, three days he’s gone. And yet, I don’t want to slow down the book. Maybe he goes to a state where his commute will be shorter.
This is not a problem most reviewers or readers will call out, because I think it’s a hard one to notice consciously. I think that it grates on people’s nerves without them knowing it. For that reason alone, it’s worth paying attention to.
Have you noticed this in books you’re reading, or in your own work? What’s your fix?