On Writing: Timeskips

Even if you’re not writing for TV, sometimes it is a good idea to cut to the chase.

Stories are a compressed simulation of reality. There’s not enough room to cover everything your characters would be doing. Nor would we want you to as readers. I mean, think about your average day. Who wants to dwell on the fact that you pried yourself out of bed, put on clothes that won’t get you arrested, and dragged yourself to the bathroom? Unless any or all of that are unusual for your character, we don’t need to know about them. You can just timeskip from when the character crashed into bed too late after researching last night, to them peering blearily into the steamy depths of their morning coffee.

Timeskips aren’t cheating, any more than “cut to the chase” is cheating in an action scene. They’re a tacit agreement with your reader; not all of life is exciting, let’s assume the boring bits and downtime of characters-grabbing-lunch-and-maybe-naps happened, and get into the interesting stuff instead.

Note, this only works if both writer and reader are acting in good faith. The reader must be willing to accept that nothing important to the story happened in that timeskip. And the writer must not cheat.

Seriously. Don’t do it. I’ve read bits in various genres, written by people who thought they were being clever; timeskipping a day, a week, years sometimes, just so the main character can walk straight into a meticulously set up Evil Plan of his enemies. A plan the hero – and the reader – never saw coming.

This is wrong, on so many levels. You can fool your hero. You can bury important details in a list of trivial observations. You can have your hero wake up to a frantic phone call, everything is on fire, get out-!

But you must never make a fool of your reader.

Reading should be a joy and a pleasure, an escape from the reality we know. Storytelling is a partnership between reader and writer; why would you ever cheat your partner?

Now, to be clear, timeskips are absolutely fair when we see the Chosen Hero as a baby, then jump ahead to the teenager/whatever age hero, who’s about to find out his hometown is doomed indeed. In this case it’s fair because the reader already knows the Evil Overlord will pull a stunt like this. After all, the reason you hide a Chosen One in the first place is because the Evil Overlord is hellbent on finding and destroying them.

It’s still good to foreshadow on both sides of the timeskip, though. A villainous “Find him!” on one side; a sense of something Ominous on the other. The birds are too quiet. There are rumors of monsters where monsters have never been. Strangers in hooded cloaks are asking questions. You know the drill.

Sure, things can happen during timeskips. Anything can happen. But the reader needs to know they happened. Timeskips let you cover important bits without boring anyone with extraneous details; so make sure the readers get those bits! For example, if your heroes have to wiretap a mob boss for evidence to make sure they bring the entire outfit down… tension! Sneaking! Absolute use of hacking and subterfuge skills!

…Cut to a week later with the head of your investigators downing the last bitter black dregs in the squad’s coffeepot, trying not to keel over on his desk as he listens to yet another smarmy politician give the vaguest assurances he can that the Boss will get sufficient bang for his campaign contributions, again–

And then! The phone rings, and it’s someone else, the call that could break this wide open-!

Now that’s a good timeskip. 😉