Writing Timeskip Arcs!

Sometimes in books, something so major happened that the story skips ahead for a few months or even a few years in the middle of a story. Or your characters brush their teeth before bed and you don’t see any reason to mention that every night. No ones expecting you to be writing about every single second of every single day for your characters after all. So here’s some information on how to keep them tame and well framed in your story.

When to have them

Rule number one of any time skip is this: You have just made a promise to your reader that they haven’t missed anything important.

There shouldn’t be ANYTHING that happens in the time skip that makes readers go “Aw I wish we could’ve seen that!” or “That sounded important! I’d probably understand it more if I saw it happen.” Time skips are for skipping boring parts only! And they usually happen right after really big events. Often tragic ones. Someone dying, people graduating and moving to different places, or even someone confessing their feelings. Or just because you don’t want to write how many times someone coughed during that hour everyone was standing around not saying anything. I don’t blame you. No one wants to read that either.

There are big skips and small skips. Small skips are like a couple hours to a couple or weeks. So if you do have a time skip on that scale and don’t explain anything, you don’t really have to because people will assume that literally nothing has happened during that time worth mentioning. Or it was summarized before hand what was going to be happening before you even transitioned into the next scene. Larger time skips like months and years you have to give a little more explanation. Because no normal person will believe it’s been months or years in a persons life and nothing has changed or happened during that time, unless they were in a coma or something. Large skips are normally for changes in a big section of a story. Like between books or seasons. It doesn’t have to be a big explanation, but it should be simple and clarify changes that impact the characters. Maybe someone moved or got married. Whatever it is, make sure it belongs in time skip, remover this. “If it’s important, why didn’t I show it? And if it’s not important, why are they talking about it?”

You need to let people IMMEDIATELY know there was a time skip. Put a banner that says “three years later” or something. Or have it be in the very first piece of conversation afterwards. But as soon as you can. This doesn’t mean explain what happened during the time skip all at once though. That’s how we get into info dump territory. You still what to spread it out like you would with any explanation in a book. No ones going to just conveniently ask: “So what have you been up to for the past three years” if they’ve kept in at all during that time skip.

Transitions

These are actually a lot easier than people make them out to be. They’re very similar to scene changes and all that’s needed is for the to fit the tone of what is being written right before it. What I mean when I say that is, you won’t finish a death scene with a flat sentence like “two years ed after that.” That’s boring and bland and makes it sound like whoever’s narrating didn’t really care much about who just bit the dust. But all you need to do is fit it with the narrative.

For example: let’s say your main character and his best friend just got into a huge fight and the friend stormed off. And you want to say that the friend stopped coming to class after that. You don’t just say “Mike stopped coming to class.” Because something like that doesn’t convey how long he’s been gone or anything. If you jump to the next scene with that, the readers will have no idea how long Mike’s been gone.

Now let’s make it into something more like this: “I didn’t see Mike in math class. Or for the rest of the day. After about a week of having no one to cheat off of, I decided it was time to apologize.” It still feels natural and you just had a week while also explaining what happened during that week. The friend is gone because of the fight, and would usually let the MC cheat off their test. But they haven’t been around so the MC is back to being bad at math. You did all that with a few short sentences and not having to flat out say it in boring sentences. Now what I wrote is probably a bit fancier than what you need to explain a transition just happened. But it’s important to give a frame of reference for the reader to know about how much time has ed.

Big and Small

There are two types of time skips. Ones that are short and ones that are long. Shorter ages of time like brushing your teeth or eating a meal don’t really need a specific amount of time because that’s a “who cares?” Type of question. Readers will assume they take just as much time as everyone else to eat food or do basic daily routines so there’s no need to state how long it took. Unless they take abnormally long to do these things and someone points out how weird or annoying it is that they take so long. And if these things are routine that the characters do all the time, then you only need to clarify how long they take once if it’s abnormal and then never need to really mention it after that. These are the skips writers use the most because they’re very easy to blend into writing to time without interrupting the flow.

The bigger deal is months or years of time skip. Transitioning to these is tricky because they’re easy to be jarring. If you don’t do it properly your readers will just go “whoa what? When did five years ?!” You don’t want that. And that’s why you want to use these big skips the least. These transitions are more along the lines of being more blunt. Because your trying to make it noticeable that a lot of time has ed. The opposite of the smaller transitions where you expect time to go by in small intervals. You can get away with saying lines like. “And with that he closed the door. It’s been three years since then.” Or “After a few years, the label faded to the point you couldn’t even read it.” They’re much simpler and upfront. There are also instances where you have a prologue and things are happening centuries later. In that instance, readers are going to expect pretty much everything to be different aside from whatever was important in the prologue. So those will also need to be explained a bit more. (I’ll probably do something on prologues later...)

In reality there isn’t much else to say about times skips. We’ve all seen them. We’ve all seen how they’re used and where they usually are. They’re in pretty much all story telling in some way. I mean, just imagine if in Snow White we had to sit through all those years of her being mistreated as a child before she became a teenager? That would’ve taken forever. And it would’ve been completely unneeded. They’re realistically simple and straightforward and are really there to make sure the story doesn’t drag on. And even though I made a lengthy post about the whole thing, the best advice you can really get is to not over thinking it to much. If it’s not important, then just time skip it!

That concludes the time skip post! I hope you found it helpful. Stay tuned for the next installment and I’ll see you next time fellow adventurers!

#adventureclub