3 “Telling” Ways to Convey Time Passing in Your Novel

Don’t lose your readers. Just tell them what time it is.

The passage of time seems intuitive. It just happens, right? (Like, whether you want it to or not. Time and tide wait for no man, etc.)

Here’s the thing, though. If you don’t tell your readers that time is passing in your novel . . .

. . . they won’t know.

It seems wild, I know. It feels like time passing should be obvious. But I promise you, it’s not.

Luckily, conveying the passage of time to your readers is simple (and it doesn’t take a lot of words to do it!). And in this episode, I’ll tell you exactly how it’s done.

You’ll learn:

• Why you need to both show and tell time passing in your story
• 2 ways your readers understand that time is passing
• 3 techniques to “tell” your readers time is passing
• And more!

This is one of those elements of storytelling that feels tiny, inconsequential, like your readers will catch on without you needing to think too hard about it.

But trust me, it makes a big difference. I’ve read so many manuscripts that are missing any indicators of time passing. And they make me as a reader feel completely lost.

Don’t lose your readers. Just tell them what time it is.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Ep. 70: Why You Must Show Time Passing in Your Novel

Transcript

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this strategy of just telling us how much time has passed is heavy on the intellectual, knowing and light on the emotional feeling. It's often paired with other showing indicators of the passage of time to create that emotion alongside the knowledge. But sometimes we just need to know how much time has passed. So just tell us and move on. Welcome to your next draft. This is episode 70, one of your next draft. Can you believe it? I know that 71 is not some specific momentous number. It's not episode a thousand or a hundred, or even episode 75. But 71 episodes still feels like a lot of episodes to me. I mean, I started this podcast in November of 2022. And since then I have produced 71 episodes of your next draft. That is 28 hours of content. If you listen to the entire podcast from start to finish right now, In that time, I have shifted from weekly episodes to bi-weekly episodes, which while I know it was a disappointing move for many of you listeners on my end, it has really helped free up more time so that I can work with more writers on their stories. One-on-one. So I'm really enjoying this biweekly rhythm, and I really appreciate you sticking with me for biweekly episodes. That said it's been a couple of weeks since the last episode. And it's time to get back on the podcast and talk editing again. I promise all of this preamble really is relevant to our topic today. And I'm going to show you how in just a minute. But before we dive into novel editing, I want to give a quick shout out to a new feature here on the podcast. You can now send me a text message. Here's how to do it. Go into the show notes for any episode, scroll down to the bottom and you'll find a link that says, send me a text message. Tap that link when you're on a mobile device and it will open up a text message that will have some numbers already. Pre-populated in the text message field. And if you type after those numbers and hit, send. I'll receive a text message. A couple of things to note. If you decide to text me when you tap that link to send me a message, it will. Pre-populate the text field with some numbers, not just in the phone number line, but also in the text message itself. Don't delete those numbers or I won't receive your text message. Those numbers. Tell my podcast, host which podcasts the text should go to. So if you leave them in, then it will come to me. And if you take them out, it will go to no one. The second thing to note is this is one way texting. I won't see your phone number and there's no way for me to text you back, but if you send me a particularly cool thought, you might get a shout out here on the podcast. This is a cool new feature that was just launched by my podcast host. And I thought I'd turn it on and give it a try. It's a quick and easy way to send me your thoughts about an episode. I have no idea how it'll go or whether it'll be a good fit for this podcast, if it ends up not being very helpful to you or to me, I'll turn it off. But if you love it and you use it, I'll keep it. And speaking of getting shout outs here on the podcast, there's one more thing that I would really appreciate. If you're enjoying your next draft and you're listening on an apple device, would you be willing to leave me a rating and review in apple podcasts? I read every single review that comes through. And I love, love, love to see what you're thinking about the show. Plus reviews really do help new listeners discover the podcast. They tell other writers that this is worth listening to so that this podcast can help more writers, edit great books. So it's a win, win, win all around. And I won't just talk about shout outs. I would love to actually shout someone out. This is a recent review from rhizome stolen, who writes? I discovered this podcast searching on Google while stuck in my writing process. I write picture books, but the information here is so unbelievably helpful, succinct and inspiring. Thank you for creating this. Thank you rhizome stolen for listening to the podcast and for your lovely words, I really appreciate it. And that covers all of our preamble today. Before we get into our editing topic To recap, you can now send me a text message if you like, and if you haven't yet left a rating and review in apple podcasts, it would make my day. If you did that now. And now. It's about time to talk about time. More specifically, it is time to talk about how to show the passage of time in your novel. In the last episode of the podcast, episode 70, we talked about why it's so important to indicate the passage of time in your story. Here's a quick recap. First it's crucial to establish the setting of your story in both time and space right away. If you don't, your story will be ungrounded and your reader won't know when or where they are. Next it's crucial to indicate the passage of time throughout your story. If you don't, your reader will not feel time passing. It may be clear in your imagination. The time is passing, but your reader won't pick up on it unless you intentionally weave in clues to mark the passage of time. Without those clues, the reader will experience the whole story happening in a rush, a blur, like it's all happening right now in real time. And all the events take roughly the same amount of time that it takes for your reader to actually read the book. Now, if your story really does take place in that amount of time. And the narrative is pretty much a minute by minute blow by blow account of it. Then not rushed feeling that your reader has isn't necessarily the worst thing. I would still recommend including some indicators of time just to allow your reader to reorient and recalibrate every now and then, but they're rushed feeling. Isn't an inaccurate experience of the story. your characters are probably feeling a rushed intensity to. But especially if your story takes place over a period of time, that's longer than a few hours, which is the case for most novels. Then you'll definitely need to indicate time passing so that the reader can feel that longer expanse of time in the same way that your characters do. We want your novel to allow your readers to experience the story the same way as your characters do. And part of that is feeling time passing as it goes by. And finally marking time is a great way to create tension in your story. We talked about a couple of ways that you can create tension. You might have backwards looking tension where we see how much time has passed since something happened in the past. Or you might have forward-looking tension where we see how much time is left until something happens in the future. So there you go. That's your quick recap of the last episode of the podcast. If you haven't listened to that episode, I did just cover most of the points that you'll find in it, but I would still recommend heading back to listen to it. After you finish this episode. You can find that@alicesaidlow.com slash 70. And of course that link is in the show notes as well. Now, what we did not talk about in the last episode is this. How do you actually do this? How do you indicate time passing in your novel? How do you convey time passing to your readers so that they feel it as deeply as your characters do. Well, there are a lot of techniques that you can use to indicate the passage of time. And that's a good thing because different techniques have different effects on the reader and you can use multiple techniques to impact your reader on several levels at once. Some techniques will trigger an intellectual knowing which is helpful because it will allow your reader to consciously knowingly orient themselves within the story. And that's important and valuable. But more than intellectual knowing we want to create within the reader, an emotional experiencial feeling of time passing. And some techniques will do this. They'll create the feeling within the reader of time passing. Maybe even without the reader consciously recognizing it. They're just in the flow of the story and you're giving them cues that ping their subconscious and make them feel time. Pass. You might recall that in my last episode, I started off with a really long spiel about how it's now may, and I'm going for all of these lovely spring walks as the weather warms up though, to be quite honest, the temperature here in Georgia is lovely. The humidity is a lot less lovely. The 75 degree Fahrenheit days, bring me a lot of joy. The 60% humidity brings me a lot less joy. So I'm enjoying my spring walks while I can. And I'm letting them acclimate me to our upcoming toasty summer heat and soggy humidity, which is definitely on the horizon. All that to say. When I opened my calendar and the date says May 21st, 2024. I intellectually know that it is may. And when I step outside and I feel the warm sun and I breathe the thick humidity and I feel a lovely, cool breeze. Thank goodness for that breeze. I feel that it is may. There's something I want you to notice about these indicators of time that I'm experiencing right now. That intellectual knowing is triggered by observing the fact of time passing. We have measured the days and weeks, and months and years, and we call this month may, and I can confirm that data by checking a calendar. The subconscious feeling is triggered by experiencing the effects of time passing. As the earth rotates around the sun, the world goes through a series of changes. The effects of time passing are the warmer weather. The longer days, the higher humidity, the flowers blooming, the birds singing. These are not direct measurements of time itself, but the impact that time passing has on the world. This maps pretty neatly actually on the idea of showing versus telling. You create intellectual knowing in the reader by telling them the facts of measuring time. You create experiential feeling in the reader by showing them the effects that time passing has on the world, the characters and the story. Every novel needs its own balance of showing and telling both showing and telling are essential to engage your readers in your story. And so you'll probably use both telling and showing techniques to convey the passage of time in your novel. You'll probably trigger both your reader's intellectual knowledge and their emotional experiential feeling. You'll probably both measure time directly and describe the effects of time passing. This is a both and situation, neither telling nor showing is better or worse. Your story needs both. And the techniques that I'm going to share with you will convey both. I have a total of seven techniques in store for you. I'm going to share them in order from most telling to most showing. Uh, warn you now today we will cover just the telling techniques. We'll save the showing techniques for the next episode, So right now we'll cover three techniques to convey the passage of time that are squarely in the telling category. These are techniques that trigger your readers, intellectual, knowing, and do not tap into their experiential feeling. Then in the next episode, we'll cover four more techniques. I have two techniques that are kind of a bridge between telling and showing and two techniques that are fully in the showing category. So get excited for those. For now let's dig into three telling techniques to convey the passage of time in your novel. First up, we're going to start super on the nose, use numbers or dates to mark your chapters. This is a very clear and direct way of communicating the passage of time to your reader. You are literally titling your chapters with a countdown of time. This technique does not fit every novel, but many novels use it very effectively. One such novel is funny story by Emily Henry. It's Emily Henry's newest romcom, and it just came out last month. So I won't spoil it for you. But I will read you some of the chapter headings. Chapter one. Wednesday May 1st 108 days until I can leave. Chapter two. Back in April before I knew I needed to leave. Chapter three. Saturday May 18th 91 days until I can leave. And it continues like this all the way through the entire novel, counting down the dates and the days until Daphne, the protagonist can leave. Another novel that does, this is looking for Alaska by John Green. Here are some of the chapter headings. 136 days before. 128 days before. 126 days before. And then a little bit later. One day before. The last day. And then a really big event happens and the chapter heading switched from before to after. The day after. Two days after. And so on. Both looking for Alaska and funny story explicitly foreground time passing by literally counting it in the chapter. Headings. If you're ever lost in the timeline, just keep reading until you get to a chapter break and then you can recalibrate. Notice too, how they're creating tension with these headings both forward and backward looking. In funny story where wondering what's going to happen in 108 days when Daphne can leave, why does she need to leave? And where is she going to go? And in looking for Alaska, we're wondering 136 days before, what. As the countdown ticks down into double and then single digits, it feels more and more ominous. And then the really big thing happens midway through the book. And we shift to counting how many days have passed since that happened. And it's bittersweet to see the distance between us and that big event stretch longer and longer to leave that big event in the past for first one day and then a few days and eventually 136 days. So these are really effective narrative devices for these stories. They're not essential for every novel, by any means, but they work really well for these books. One thing that I do want to note here is think about how heavily this strategy triggers your intellectual, knowing and notice how it probably doesn't trigger any feeling at all. 136 days is very clear data. It's an objective fact, a precise measurements of time. But it doesn't orient us in the feeling of the world and the characters in the story at the moment of 136 days before we don't have an intuitive experiencial subconscious sense of where we are in time and how the days that are passing feel. In fact, we're probably going to forget the number 1 36 until we get to the next chapter 1 28. And think, well, I know the countdown is shrinking, so probably the previous chapter happened more than 128 days before. In order to know that eight days have passed, which is more than a week. I have to do math. I have to pause my reading to do a quick calculation. And asking your readers to do a lot of math in the middle of your book is not a way to convey to them the feeling of time passing the way that your characters are experiencing it. Unless your characters are also literally doing a lot of math, then we can feel the mental challenge of doing math with them. But again, that's not the feeling of the passage of time. It's the feeling of doing math. I also want to mention one other narrative device that lends itself really nicely to marking the chapters with dates like this. You might decide to write your novel as though it is a journal or a diary, your protagonist is recording their life in a journal. And the book that we're reading is that journal. And then real life when people journal about their lives like this, they typically date each entry. So journal style novels tend to be written as a series of dated journal entries. A couple of novels written in this style are Bridget Jones's diary by Helen fielding and the confessions of Georgia Nicholson series by Louise Renison. I'm honestly not sure you can talk about journal style novels without mentioning Bridget Jones's diary. Anyway, that's it for our first telling strategy to convey the passage of time. Mark your chapters with numbers or dates. Use your chapter headings to literally tell your reader when each chapter takes place. Now, like I said, that first strategy won't work for every story. And if it doesn't fit your novel, no need to force it. We have several more strategies you can use. The second strategy is one that I suspect you'll find in just about every novel. It is not at all story specific. It's a wonderful fit all tool here it is. Literally say how much time has passed. Truly. For real. Just tell us. You might say. Suzanne went to sleep. The next morning, she. Or we say our goodbyes and I watch him walk away until he turns the corner and disappears. Two weeks later. Or three months passed without any word from him. The next morning. Two weeks later. Three months past. In all those examples, I am directly stating the amount of time that's passed when the story picks up again, we know exactly where we are in time. This technique is a great one to use when you're starting a scene and orienting the reader to where we are in the story. Now, it's also really useful in transitions between one scene and the next, and in summary paragraphs, the compressed time to move us quickly from one important moment to another, that comes a while later. And since every novel is going to have scenes and therefore transitions between those scenes. This is a technique that you'll see in most novels. Here's an example of this kind of summary transition that literally tells us how much time has passed. This comes from the last graduate by Naomi Novik. Hauling Orion up to the library and shoving him into a dark corner was my latest attempt to actually get him to do his remedial alchemy assignment, Which was absolutely going to disintegrate him before the end of the month, along with several innocent bystanders and possibly me, if he didn't buckle down to do it. I'd started making him show me his progress every evening at dinner. And since there hadn't been any in the week and a half, since the last time he'd nearly gotten me disintegrated. I dragged him out of bed at first bell, this fine Saturday morning and marched him upstairs after breakfast. Did you catch it? It's been a week and a half since the last time that, uh, Ryan nearly got L disintegrated. Also by the way today is Saturday, Although mentioning that is jumping ahead a little bit in terms of our list of techniques. Again, this strategy of just telling us how much time has passed is heavy on the intellectual, knowing and light on the emotional feeling. It's often paired with other showing indicators of the passage of time to create that emotion alongside the knowledge. And that's something that we'll get into more in the next episode, when I share those showing techniques with you. But sometimes we just need to know how much time has passed. So just tell us and move on. And the third telling technique. Is in a similar vein. Literally tell us the date within the text of the story. This doesn't have to be extremely precise. You might say. On Friday, I skipped the bus. Or for months, I didn't hear from him. Then in early November I found a letter in the mailbox. You can use this in the same kinds of places where you could literally say how much time has passed. It's great for orienting a reader at the start of a scene, transitioning between scenes or compressing time to summarize events, which I mentioning that like the third thing in a list, but compressing time to summarize events tends to be a tool for accomplishing the other two things. Many scenes start with a compressed time summary of events, and often the way that scenes transition from one to the next will be with the compressed time summary. Anyway, here's an example of literally saying the date. This comes from tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabrielle's Evan, which if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know, this is a book that I just rave about. Here's the passage. By the middle of January, she still hadn't replied. And he began to worry that his email hadn't been received. He decided to send another. a page later, this has followed up with. Another week passed and she still hadn't replied Harvard's reading period was over. Sam had finished all his exams and the new term was about to begin. Note that another week past falls under the second technique, literally telling us how much time has passed. And that final sentence about Harvard's reading period relates to another technique. But that's one of the showing strategies that we'll cover in the next episode. So I won't say anything more about it here. What I really want you to see right now is that first-line from that first excerpt I gave you. By the middle of January. It's orienting us very early in the chapter to exactly where we stand in time so we can follow along as time continues to pass throughout the scene. Like the previous two strategies. This is a telling strategy one that's based on intellectual. Knowing rather than emotional feeling, this alone will not make your readers feel time passing in your story. Although it will help them orient themselves whenever they lose track of the timeline. That said I've put this strategy third in this list because I'm ordering these from the most telling to the most showing. And we tend to have more emotional associations with these specific dates than we do numbers. If I say November, I bet you get a certain idea in your mind of what November is like. If I say Friday, I bet you have an emotional reaction. That's very different than if I said Monday. These are names that we have for time. And we have a lot more lived experience with them and emotions about them than we do about the concept of 136 days, 136 days basically conveys a lot of days, unless you do math to figure out how many months, and then you kind of map those onto a calendar. And now you have an emotion about the names of the months that you're missing, but 136 days is just. A significant chunk of the year. We also tend to notice these dates more when they're woven into the context of the story, rather than listed in the chapter headings, which are easy to skim without taking in the information. Saturday May 18th 91 days until I can leave. Is nice information to know. But it's outside of the context that gives it meaning. On Saturday I slept in is the same day, but within a story context that makes it stick in our minds a little bit more. This is one of the reasons why, even if you do choose to title your chapters with numbers or dates, That alone is not enough to make your readers feel the passing of time and your story You'll need to add more techniques, both telling and showing to ground your readers in the story and make them feel like they're living it at the same speed that your characters are. And this brings us to the end of the telling techniques. We have covered three strategies, one. Use numbers or dates to mark your chapters. Too. Literally say how much time has passed. And three. Literally say the date. These might feel too on the nose, but they really, really aren't. And when they're used strategically, they can help your readers feel grounded and oriented within the story. Like they've got a handle on what's going on. Plus, you're going to pair them with the showing techniques. I'll share with you in the next episode. So if you're feeling like you want something a little more subtle, Don't worry. That's coming too. Now, remember how I spent an age and a half at the beginning of this episode, talking about how cool it is that this is episode 71. And we're on a biweekly podcast schedule, which means it's been a couple of weeks since you last heard from me. And also I'm really enjoying the spring days in may. All of those are telling techniques to mark the passage of time. I looked for every number that I could think of to quantify time passing here on the podcast, like the 28 hours that it would take you to listen to this entire podcast from start to finish. I promised it was relevant. It was a little clunky and it won't be winning any literary awards or possibly podcasting awards either, but it was relevant. Now it's your turn to put these telling techniques to use. And I have two assignments for you. The first one is to pick up a book that you love. Read a few chapters and look very carefully for any of the three techniques that I've mentioned here. Where does the author literally tell you when the story takes place or how much time is passing? How often do they mention it in what contexts is it in the openings of scenes transitions between scenes time, compressing summary or something else? And then your second task is to pick up your work in progress and read a few chapters. I'd say. I read at least three chapters. So that enough happens that you might run into some time passing. Where do you tell your readers when the story takes place or how much time is passing? How often do you mention it? And in what contexts. Are there places where, you know, the time has passed. But there are no indicators on the page to share that information with your readers. And if so, well now, you know what you can add. And that is everything that I have for you today. I'll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode where we will dig into all the showing strategies. They are my favorites, and I can't wait to share them with you. In the meantime, I encourage you to pay attention, not only to your reading, but also to all the signals in your life that convey to you the passage of time in reality in real time. How do you know the time is passing? What do you notice? If you feel so inspired, send me a text message about this episode and if you're enjoying the podcast, I would be so grateful if you head over to apple podcasts And leave a rating and review. That's all for now. Until next time. Happy editing.