Playing with Time - Putting story transitions to work

Handling time efficiently is a requirement for good writing.

Film and TV scripts compress time. An athlete wriggles into a jersey. Ties a shoe. Slams his locker shut. And the next thing we see is him running onto the field. The illusion of his preparing for the game is created with a few fragments.

Or, in older movies, time moves forward as the hands of a clock run fast or the pages of a calendar are blown off one-by-one, by a wind.

Novels and books have their own transitions, explicit (days later…) and implied (an blank line or ***). Lighting cues may do the job in stage plays.

These approaches lean heavily on conventions at times, and that’s acceptable in the name of clarity. Unless the device is very out of date, like 70s split screens, audiences and readers go along without a second thought. (And, if you have great skill, like the creators of the Fargo TV series, you can even get away with split screens.)

But… once clarity is achieved, it’s worth considering taking things further. In particular, including emotional content is the first place I look. As an example, scraping a name off a glass door was often a way to show the (often unseen) result of a power struggle and introduce a new regime. (Both The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown include this trope.) Recently, I saw a movie where that bit didn’t just show the change in power. The protagonist had presented himself as a nice guy, but his joy at the removal of the name revealed him as someone who could celebrate of the fall of a rival. The raw ambition and lack of empathy on the part of the character disturbed me and changed my attitude toward him.

Time may be shown by characters clearly aging. But such a sequence can also use change in attire to show increasing or decreasing wealth. Or, for a couple, going from holding hands to having physical distance between them lets an audience know their relationship is growing colder.

Before and after shots can extend to landscapes. It’s a common feature in online news stories to show wipe pictures of disasters. Such comparisons show change that is heartbreaking. In a reversal, The Biggest Little Farm presents before and after over and over again in ways that are joyful and life affirming.

Your story's requirements to show the passage of time are filled with opportunities to incorporate emotion, new perspectives, power shifts, and poignancy. Babies are born. People die. We say goodbye to winter by starting spring. People heal. Bakeries open or close.

What can you use to touch people or make a point? Include witnesses, winners, and losers. Find something common, like letting go of a child’s hand for the first day of school. And make the event specific. Imagine one image that tells it all. Or two images (before and after). Echo an earlier moment in the story, and add something.

In film, you can put in a title card that explicitly tells the date and place. And, of course, some prose works do this as well. It gets the job done, and it often adds to the tone. But it’s worth exploring less easy ways to show time that may reveal more about your characters and their stories.