I was re-reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone recently to get a feel for the way J.K. Rowling passes an entire year in a fairly short book that feels content packed, and I noticed something very common which I hadn't previously put any thought to.
With respect to the passage of time, the book's voice changes drastically here and there. For many pages it follows the second-to-second real-time actions of the character, e.g. a passage describing a conversation or a duel.
But at other times the narrator zooms out and passes hours in a sentence, like so:
"Hermione didn't turn up for the next class and wasn't seen all afternoon."
Maybe this seems simple, or obvious, but I think it's a tiny piece of brilliance, and something that all good writers can do and frequently do do but which does not necessarily come easily to new writers and which maybe many people don't think about.
I see this happen with days, weeks, months, even years. And it isn't trivial to just drop it in there. In fact I've found it's very easy to interrupt the flow of your writing by shifting the rate of time passage in anything less than the smoothest manner.
So the question is: how can you cleanly shift time scales and avoid making a somewhat jarring break in temporal continuity? How can you go from following a character second-to-second to briefly relating what the character did over the afternoon, the summer, the rest of his forties? Tips/Exercises for practice are always good, if anyone knows any clever ones.
Answer
"how to cleanly change time scale and avoid making a somewhat jarring break in temporal continuity?"
Gradually.
You are allowed to suddenly shift speed of passage of time only at * * * section breaks.
The speed of passage of time between paragraphs must be gradual, at least one paragraph per speed.
- Paragraph of second-by-second,
- paragraph of few minutes,
- paragraph of an hour,
- paragraph of several hours.
You may compress this process into a single paragraph of speed shift, but you must alliterate that speed shift, literally, expressly.
Let's shift from seconds to hours in span of three paragraphs.
Everything was lost. Gasping hard, he wiped sweat off his forehead with his sleeve, rested his back against the wall, and collapsed to the floor. The message buzzed in his head, repeated over and over. There was nothing left, no reason to move.
His breath calmed down to quiet sobs, as he held his head with both hands, expecting the search to find him any minute now. Rapid steps thudded in the distance. Sounds of dripping water filled the moments of silence.
Numb to the surroundings, unmoving, he awaited the inevitable. Distant alarms would break him out of stupor now and then. Dimming of corridor lights signified start of artificial evening, but the search continued through the night, gradually closing in.
And here I shift from second-by-second to years, within span of two paragraphs, but they give time passage literally.
Everything was lost. Gasping hard, he wiped sweat off his forehead with his sleeve, rested his back against the wall, and collapsed to the floor. The message buzzed in his head, repeated over and over. There was nothing left, no reason to move. Minutes changed to hours as he sat motionlessly, and hours passed, distant screams of alarms coming and turning back to silence, while he sat holding his head with both hands, numb to the surroundings.
He didn't even flinch when they came, took him away, locked in jail. The questioning, the trial, it all passed in a blur. It was only three years into serving his sentence, when...
Of course that's one of the "rules that exist to be broken". If you have a good reason to rapidly shift gears, do so. "He remained still over the next three seconds. Then he continued to remain still for another two centuries."
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