On July 15, 2023, Kasie and Rex took on time travel as a storytelling choice. Here are the show notes:

Theme for the day

Time Travel Novels

Agenda

• Why people write time travel
• Rules around time travel
• How to write your own time travel story

Link to Podcast

Segment 1

Rex is back from vacay. Renewed, refreshed, ready to hit the ground running? But he didn’t have a topic idea so I hijacked the show for a time travel discussion. I’ll admit it’s a Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) from-the-vault inspired topic.

The song is Timeless and it’s on Taylor’s recently released re-recorded album Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) there’s a great story behind her re-recording the music, BTW, we can chat about that if we want. But this song was one she’d imagined for the album and cut way-back-when and so with the re-record she’s added it in. She said later it was inspired by Caroline and Klaus, characters in The Vampire Diaries, so appropriate I’d be into it, right? 

The theme of the song is that no matter when they met, they would have had an epic love – we would have been timeless.

• 1944 – crowded street, you’re headed off to fight in the war; I would have read your love letters every night and prayed you’d be comin’ home
• 1500s – off in a foreign land and I was forced to marry another man, you still would have been mine, we would have been timeless

So what is the artist’s fascination with time? Why do we imagine visiting other eras? What’s the appeal?

Here’s a Goodreads list of 266 books with “time” in the title.

And here’s a list of Time Travel books.

What we know to be true is that time moves forward, exclusively. So writers can try to imagine what happens if we re-live, re-do things that have already happened, but we cannot un-do them. Or can we? 

Is time travel possible? Kind of. Science says (link) theoretically, one could bend the spacetime and create a curvature in which travel is possible. I dunno. Read the link. But space and time are not absolute values, so the ability to manipulate them is theoretically real.

Okay, so enter the writers. What would it be like? 

Segments 2 & 3

So this link says there are four types:

1. Seeing the future – information travels, visions of the future, prophecies
   1. Inevitable – prophecies that cannot be prevented
   2. Preventable – things can change if different choices are made now
2. Traveling to the future – meh. It’s not that special, right? We’ll get there eventually.
3. Traveling to the past – touristy jaunts that use the fish-out-of-water trope to engage a modern reader in older societies (i.e. Outlander)
   1. Changing the world – almost always a villainous plot because “good guys” understand the ramifications of butterfly-effect-type changes
   2. Immutable timelines – inevitable conclusions, somewhat fatalistic
4. Time loops – reliving the same day (or whatever) over and over, with the expectation that some small (or big) change will eventually break the stalemate – when we get it “right”

Are time travel stories cautionary tales? Why or why not?

Segment 4

I think there are two main types:

1. Consequences
2. No Consequences

And the thing is, “no consequences” means the character can change and grow, but the events of history – recorded history – are inevitable.

What are the rules of your time travel experience? Are there consequences to the travel? To being where you’re not meant to be? Why is the “first version” the “right version”?

In Avengers: Infinity War, we’re told time will heal itself from whatever errors we create. This could be true. That’s the premise explored in Yesterday. What if something never happened or someone never existed? The Beatles never happened – so what? Life seems to be fine anyway, only a little bit less.

We’ll use this Writer’s Digest post for the “how to”:

• Choose your model carefully – see the 1-4 above.
• Decide how important time travel is to your story – is it the center? Why or why not?
• Keep in mind what your character knows and what he doesn’t
• Avoid, “As you know, Bob,” dialogue – characters don’t deliver exposition in everyday conversation

Do’s and Don’ts from this link:

• No matter what the character does in the past, he cannot cease to exist – traveling to the past takes him out of the timestream and removes him from the effects of history
• If you back in time, you can make changes that destroy your own society, so it’s a closely guarded ability/skill/capability
• If you go far enough back, your own timeline won’t be affected at all, the world is too big and time rights itself

If you go back in time, you can’t make any significant changes, it’s just not possible.