Skip to main content

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...


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Really Don’t Like Proof-Reading And Editing My Own Work!

As you might have guessed from the fact that I write a blog about writing, I really love writing! But you know what I don’t love? PROOFREADING AND EDITING! When I’m writing, it’s like my brain is on fire; the story is pouring out of me and I’m struggling to get it on the page as fast as I can  imagine it. But then you finish writing, and you have to go through your hastily scribbled mess and fix it up; make sure it’s logically consistent, that the prose flows nicely, and that there are no typos. The whole time I’m doing this, my brain is aching to just get on and write the next story, or to go and see what cake I have in the house; anything but actually concentrate on the thing I’m supposed to be doing. But proof reading and editing are important, right? Well, yes, I admit that they are important. As I said earlier, my first draft is usually a bit of a mess, and without any proofreading, I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting other people see my work. But I do think that the importanc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Some Book Reviews I've Written!

Hi all! Below is a reposting of some book reviews I wrote for my Goodreads page. I hope they're useful! Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (5/5 stars) I've got to be honest from the get-go: Gideon the Ninth is amazing! This is the best book I've read in YEARS! The main characters are all so perfectly crafted, and you love them all, even if the titular Gideon is, in the words of author Tamsyn Muir 'a dickhead'. The writing just leaps off the page and never gets in the way of the story it's trying to tell. It's written with such sharp humour, too, that I was often caught laughing out loud on the bus. I would kill to be able to write like that! The universe that the story takes place within is incredibly original; I've only ever read stories where necromancy is featured as 'that thing you NEVER do', until, of course, somebody goes and does it, with catastrophic consequences. In the world of Gideon, however, necromancy is the only magic game in town, an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Representation And Writing Queer Characters

When I came out, I went from every sci-fi/fantasy book I read containing a whole bunch of versions of the person I thought I was/was trying to be, to not seeing myself anywhere, whether that was in books, films, or on TV.  There are beginning to be some great examples of trans/non-binary representation out there in the world of speculative fiction, including the Once & Future series by Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy, and Nicole Maines’ stint on Super Girl as Dreamer, but the trans/enby community is so diverse that we’ve got a long way to go, before we can all see ourselves reflected in the stories we love.  As a lesbian trans woman who is early in her transition and hasn’t had voice training, I certainly haven’t ever seen someone like me in a sci-fi or fantasy story, but perhaps more importantly, there is a real dearth of trans masc peeps, trans BIPOC peeps, disabled trans peeps, neurodivergent trans peeps, and all non-binary peeps out there (not an exhaustive list) at...
Post a Comment
Read more