What are literary techniques for showing the passage of time in novels?

Question

I'm braindead when it comes to remembering how this is done effectivle in novels. I'm like character A goes to work at 8am. But has a plot moment at 12pm. How do I smoothly cut from 8am to 12pm? Perhaps it's okay just to skip time with a sentence, but any misnomers? Thanks in advance for answers.

Answer 1

You can start a new chapter.

You can use skip down two lines, type *** and skip two more lines.

You can write a "bridge" - something to tie the two together.

Or often you can just write through it -- especially if it's just a small jump like a couple hours.

For instance.

As usual, I arrived at my desk promptly at 8 am. The top of the desk was already cluttered with work. When I next looked up, it was noon -- time for lunch with my best friend Mary.

or just

As usual, I arrived at my desk promptly at 8 am. The top of the desk was already cluttered with work. At noon, I went to lunch with my best friend Mary.

Just watch out for words that are time markers if you are writing in the past tense. For instance, you cannot say

Yesterday, I arrived at my desk ...

because the book is being narrated from the perspective of being told in retrospect - after the entire events of the book have transpired. It may be being told 2 years later. Hence "yesterday" is the day before the narrator is relating the story - not the day before the girl went to work. You would have to say

The day before, I went to work ... or

A day earlier, I went to work...

See? Time marker words get confusing. Avoid today, yesterday, tomorrow, ago (as in "an hour ago") etc.

Pax - C

Answer 2

There are several ways to do it. You can actually do like some of the action/adventure novelists do: in italics to the left they put in the location then the time of day; if you referenced the fact that the character arrived at work at a specific time, you can drop down two to three spaces at the end of that scene and then say "At twelve noon, Harry received a very strange phone call......" or whatever.

The other technique which I have seen some very famous authors use is the drop down two spaces then insert a line with 4 asterisks centered in a row with one space between each, then double space again after that. It denotes that you are either shifting forward in time or changing locations.

I don't think there is any hard, fast rule.

Answer 3

I don't use time to exact scale.

Like--for example--in the beginning of my Price of Freedom novel, there is not time-frame from which to reference.

No ability to say: "Okay. It's 12PM. Time for lunch."

I judged the time-frame depending what they were *doing*.

So in the opening chapter, it was early evening--around six or sevenish; in the middle of December; and dinner was going to be served later.

But I didn't have a clock to mark the proper passage of time.

The differentials between using such time incantations is not to use them at all. Just concentrate on the storyline overall.

Allow the characters to go through their motions, allow a certain amount of time to pass--and then call it what you will: Be it 6 at night, 2:30 in the morning, or 1:27 in the afternoon.

But if you try and mark time minute to minute, hour by hour (like 24 does on TV), it's going to drive your readers batty. :0)

Answer 4

character A just returned from lunch..the reader knows it is around noon without you having to say it.

character A has to leave the office because he has a 12:30 appointment.. etc etc

Answer 5

Choose only 2 or 3 scence . dont go into details otherwise its artificial. Okay, click on SETTING IN FICTION/SHORT STORY on net URL and know how it is done.