Mind the Gap: Getting Time and Space Cues on the Page
Play along with me here.
Imagine.
—You’re walking down a quiet beach, soaking in the sun’s warmth. The waiter asks you what you’d like to drink.
—You finish off a delicious dessert you definitely didn’t have room for, but it tasted so good. Your stomach’s grumbling.
These sentences are…awkward, yes? WHY are they awkward?
There’s a gap in the information. Key context is missing.
In the first example, you jump from the quiet beach to a restaurant. How did that happen? (Missing context: Space cue)
And in the second example, you go from being stuffed to being starving in the space of a half a sentence. When did that happen? (Missing context: Time Cue).
These are silly, over-the top-examples. But leaving time and space cues off the page is something I see often in the manuscripts I work on. And it’s just as jarring in a well-written scene as it is in these silly examples. A character, let’s call her Jane, is standing by a door, and suddenly is standing beside a window. Or Jane is staring at a cute guy across the room, then is suddenly talking to him.
Why This Happens
Most of the time, this is a classic case of author’s burden of knowledge, which is short for “you know everything about your story and you forgot the reader is coming in cold.” When you write, you can see the scene playing out in your head, and you know that your character crossed the room from the door to the window. You just forgot to get that movement on the page. Or you know that the cute boy walked up to Jane. You just got too excited and cut straight to dialogue. And now there’s a gap in information.
Sometimes, writers have taken the Elmore Leonard advice to cut all the parts people don’t read a little too far and are leaving all those ‘boring logistics’ off the page intentionally. It’s true no one wants to read footstep-by-footstep choreography of your characters crossing a room, or a breakdown of every minute that goes by between dinner and breakfast. But your readers do need enough time and space cues so they can follow the action of the story without getting lost or annoyed.
Time Cues
You need to show time passing. If you leave time cues off the page, by accident or by design, your reader won’t experience time moving. The story feels like it’s happening all at the same time. Each plot event piles on top of the last one. And while there may be situations in which this is the effect the writer is going for, the vast majority of the time it is not.
There are many ways to get time cues on the page. “The next day,” “a few hours later,” “a year had passed since I last saw her,” are just a few.
You can also time stamp your chapters. You can stick to date and year, like Chapter 1, August 6, 1919; Chapter 2, October 29, 1919; Chapter 3, January 3, 1920 to show time passing. You can also get creative here. You can count down to something: 107 Days Till Graduation. Or count up from something: 72 Hours Since the Break-up.
You can also make the reader feel time passing: The sun’s shadows grew; The days grew cold; Summer passed into fall; The snow had melted…
While time cues have the very practical job of cueing the reader to how much time has passed, they also have the very exciting job of helping you create and maintain tension on the page. Ticking clocks rely on a sense of time. Jane has three months to get her act together before she’s kicked out of her apartment. This ticking clock amps up both conflict and curiosity – will Jane pull it off? A ticking clock can act in reverse. Jane’s waiting on a job offer she was told she’d hear about within a few days. Now it’s been a week. Tension is rising on the page. Time stamps can be fun to play with here. 10 Days to Go. Till what?? What will happen in 10 days? You’ll have to read the book to find out.
Bottom line: you want your readers to experience time passing alongside the character. Time grounds them in the story and gives you an opportunity to bring tension to the page.
Space Cues
You also need to show your characters moving through the setting of your story, whether they’re walking into a room or walking out, moving from sitting to standing, or crossing the room. The practical reason for this is that it’s disorienting to readers when they can’t follow a character’s movements, or when other characters suddenly appear in a scene with no explanation of how they got there. Readers get lost and confused. You’ve probably had this experience before, where you think, wait a minute – how did we get here? Then you back up, try to find what you missed, but you didn’t miss anything. Jane jumped from lying on her couch watching Netflix to downing a tequila with her friend John at the corner bar.
You don’t have to choreograph Jane’s every movement, getting off the couch, pulling her coat and shoes on, pulling her apartment door open, pulling her apartment door closed, locking it, walking down the hall to the elevator, pressing the Down button…you get the point. All you have to do is: Jane dragged herself off the couch and down to the corner bar where John had a tequila waiting for her. There. You’ve moved her through space.
If writing space cues bores you (a common complaint I get from writers), look at them as opportunities to character build and worldbuild. Does she move quickly, excited to join John at the bar? Or does she move slowly, an introvert who wanted to stay in but John’s dragging her out? How Jane moves through space can reveal her character to readers. Does she trip over piles of junk on her way to the door? Or is she careful to fluff the pillows so everything is perfect before she walks out the door? In this case, your space cues are doing double-duty. They’re character building (she’s messy/she’s neat) AND they’re worldbuilding (revealing a messy/neat setting)
Space cues can also do some tension work for you. A setting can be imbued with tension: Jane hunched against all the eyes on her as she crossed the room; Jane bit back a cry as she limped the length of the long hallway; the candles flickered as Jane passed the table.
Bottom line: you want your readers to move through space and setting alongside the characters. It keeps them oriented in the story. And it gives you opportunities to character build, worldbuild and introduce some tension in the setting.
If You’re Still Doubting Me…
I’ve had writers argue with me 100 ways to Sunday that they shouldn’t have to write time and space cues. They swear up and down that their favorite authors don’t write this stuff. So why should they? I always give these writers an assignment – grab a favorite book, one you consider a mentor text, pick a chapter or two, and look specifically for time and space cues. Without fail, the writer comes back humbled. The time and space cues are all over the place.
The thing about context is that it can be hard to spot. It sneaks quietly onto the page while we’re actively following the action and drama of the plot. That’s how we can get to the end of a great book and honestly believe there were no time and space cues. They were there, we just took them in passively. We sensed the movement of time and in space, more that actively noticed it. But it was there all along.
Be a Good Guide
Your story exists in a time and a place. When readers feel grounded in that time and place, they can stay in the flow of the story. When time and space goes missing, it’s like having the ground fall out from under you. Anytime you kick readers out of the flow of the story, you risk that they won’t come back.
Always remember – the reader is not in your head. They don’t know what you know. Your job is to guide them through the story, not write whatever you want and expect them to try to keep up with you. Be a good guide, and they’ll follow you anywhere.
Till next time…
Happy writing,
Erin
