In a new post, C.S. Lakin offers advice for controlling and skewing time in your fiction. “Time sometimes seems choppy, erratic, confusing. It may feel as if it’s going backwards or in circles,” she says. “It all depends on perception.”
Our perception of time can be skewed by multiple factors, such as illness, injury, intoxication, temperature extremes, stress, and trauma. These effects also can be created intentionally. “Someone could expose your character to blasts of sensory data to confuse his mind,” Lakin writes. “Maybe you have a character being experimented on after being abducted by aliens. Maybe your character is having a nirvana experience, or some powerful being has transported him to an altered state of reality.” Even something as mundane as being engrossed in a task can make time more more quickly or slowly.
So, how can you depict this? In the movie Interstellar, the main character’s perception of time is affected by his proximity to a black hole, until he seems to be time traveling. “The key to successfully pulling it off lies in showing believable perception on the part of the POV character,” Lakin says.
In When Sparrows Fall, author Meg Moseley skews time by having her protagonist fade in and out of sleep due to a concussion. “Moseley uses short, clipped phrases to help give the feel of a glimpse or impression of memory,” Lakin notes. “Moseley could have used full sentences and had [her protagonist] Miranda recall all these things in more of a continuous flashback but instead chose to use this technique to give the feel she wanted in this scene.”
In Memento, another Christopher Nolan film, the protagonist’s short-term memory loss constricts his sense of time. “Since he can only recall short passages of time, aside from his long-term memories, the scenes are choppy and short, and cut off in the middle of what is happening,” Lakin writes. “His character, Leonard Shelby, has to tattoo hints on his body and leave himself notes and Polaroid snapshots in order to help him solve this murder mystery that he seems to be involved in but can’t remember.”
