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

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping Your Plot Consistent

So, I know that in a previous blog post I whined about how inconsistent and nonsensical writers’ plots can be in modern fiction, but if writing my first novel has taught me anything, it’s that keeping consistency within your plot is hard! (#hypocrite) Because I’m writing in a science fiction/fantasy world, I’ve got a lot to set up such as a magical system that feels logical and rules of time travel that don’t just feel silly. If I was sensible, I would’ve made notes on all that stuff before I put pen to paper (well, fingers to keys…), but I’m not that sensible!  I also set my story across several decades of the main character’s life, which means I should’ve made notes about which chapter is set in what year. Did I do that either? No I didn’t! The result was that while writing the second half of the book, I started to doubt the things which I thought were true about my story. My brain would get confused about different types of portal conjuring magic, or whether a particular charact...

What Stories Mean to Me

This blog almost didn’t get written. I’m currently sat on a seat in Crewe train station. It’s an exceedingly hot August afternoon, and I’ve been given the gift of half an hour to work on my blog; which is a rare and pleasant treat. Yet, I found myself not wanting to write my blog, because I’m in the middle of Gideon The Ninth by Tamsin Muir and its extraordinary! The characters are real, living people, the writing just bursts off the page in a way that I would kill to be able to achieve, and the world that the author has built is so vivid and detailed that it almost feels like you could reach out and touch it. As a result, I was sorely tempted to delve into my bag and fish out the book, to ignore this post and to enjoy half an hour in the company of my new friends. In the end, I was strong, I resisted, and I began writing, because it seemed like the sensible grown-up thing to do. But I love that the scribblings of ink between two flimsy covers can be that powerful, they almost derail...

Novel or Novella: Does Size Matter?

Throughout 2017 and 2018, I worked on a translation of the French sci-fi book ‘Un Roman dans la planète Mars’ by André Laurie (A Story of the Planet Mars, available to buy on Amazon at this link here ). It is an old novella, first published in 1895, that had long ceased to be within copyright. My hope was that if I could translate a book which was out of copyright, I could then look for a specialist publisher who might be interested in putting it out. Then, I would have a genuine bona-fide published book out in the world, and I thought that this might be enough of a proven portfolio of work to allow me to convince publishers to let me translate their contemporary French works.  However, the response I got from every publisher was exactly the same: ‘The book is too short, so it’s not worth us putting it out by itself. Novellas just don’t sell very well, particularly ones as niche as this.’ I did convince one publisher to let me translate another one of Laurie’s works which could the...