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Writing Time Travel Stories

Hi Readers!

So, I’ve got a confession to make; for a sci-fi nerd, time travel stories really irritate me. Now don’t get me wrong, I love watching Back to The Future as much as the next person, and The Voyage Home (the one with the whales) and First Contact (the one with the Borg) are my favourite Star Trek films, i.e. THE TIME TRAVEL ONES! But my problem is that whenever you start to analyse ANY time travel story, it starts to unravel. I mean, if Marty had failed to get his parents together, then he would have never been born, which means he never would have gone back in time to ruin his parents’ relationship in the first place, which means he would have been born and then gone back in time to ruin his parents’ relationship… It makes my head hurt... Which is why, when I started writing sci-fi stories, I vowed to never write a time travel story. So, of course, my book contains two time travel stories. (Talking to Lobsters, available at Amazon here)

So, if time travel stories offend me so much, then why did I write two and put them into my shiny new short story collection? Well, to be honest, the answer is mostly because I’m a captive to the the ideas which pop into my brain. Ideas are precious, and I hate to squander them when they appear. In fact, I tend to put any story ideas I have into the notes app on my phone, no matter where I am in the world, because I don’t want to miss that one great idea which turns into the best story I’ve ever written. So, if my brain invents a time travel story, I keep a note of it (yes, it does feel like my brain operates as a separate entity from the rest of me). 

The other reason that there are two time travel stories in Talking to Lobsters, is that I really liked the characters that my brain invented to star in them. In Painting The Future, the main characters are a family which comprises of an artist, a starship Captain from the far future, and their adopted daughter. I enjoyed bringing the family together through the story and working out what their relationship to each other would be like. In fact, I enjoyed this aspect of writing Painting The Future so much, that I’m currently working on turning it into a full novel.

The other story which features time travel in Talking to Lobsters is the one which the book takes its name from. The characters in this story include a bored junior administrator who ends up turning her life around and inventing time travel, a sentient lobster, and a Prime Minister who just loves to swear. Again, I wanted  to spend more time with these characters, so I decided to write the story even though time travel was a central feature.

Now that I’d decided to sacrifice all my principals and write a time travel story, I had some big decisions to make. As nobody really knows how time travel would actually work, I guessed it didn’t matter what rules I chose to implement in my story, as long as I was clear about what they were and was consistent about how I applied them.

For Painting The Future, I took the easy option and applied Avengers: Endgame type time travel; making it so that any changes made to the past would result in a branching time line that wouldn’t affect the future the characters had come from. This meant that I could then mess around with the past as much as I liked and so I filled the new timeline with masses of future technology completely consequence free! It was a lot of fun to write!

For the story Talking to Lobsters, I knew before I started writing that the story would revolve around a time loop where the main character was informed about the future at the beginning of the story, and then she had to set about stopping a cataclysm from occurring. I have to hold my hands up and accept that I definitely didn’t make the time travel even remotely work in this story. If the world was destroyed in the first loop, then how did anyone go back in time to warn the next loop that Bad Things would happen? Also, once the alien plot had been foiled, what was the point in sending the lobster back to warn her past self other than to keep the loop going, but then the loop seems to be infinite and there was no first lobster to start it, aaaaaaaagggggggghhhhhh! I think that I decided part way through writing this story that it was OK to enjoy the ride and spending time with the characters even if the time travel didn’t really make sense. In many ways, this has allowed me to make peace with time travel stories as a whole, and I’m hopeful that the next time I read or watch a story based around time travel, I’ll be able to feel empathy for the writers and enjoy the story more. Except for you, Doctor Who: Flux, you were just a mess...


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