Time skips

In both of my books, the part of the story I had the most trouble executing was the time skip. They were challenging because I had set up tension and couldn't resolve it until certain conditions some distance in the timeline were met. This was the result of me not really knowing what I was doing and/or being a poor outliner. Regardless, winding up my characters and leaving them in the lurch did not sit well with me, and I felt like I couldn't just cut to the resolution without giving readers narrative whiplash.

For Tendrils to the Moon, I tried to mitigate the problem with filler content, showing the colonists' progress in building a communal lunar habitat. The downside is you can cut many of the scenes from chapters 8 and 9 and you wouldn't hurt continuity.

I handled the problem better with Seeds of Calamity, employing pharmaceuticals as a plot device to make time whip past for the hero. This also involved some structural reworking of the second act that set me back over a month. I have no regrets, though, because it paid off. Despite a huge 5-week gap bookended by events that span mere days, the story doesn't slow down at all.

David V Stewart used a time dilation device in The Water of Awakening, where the heroine enters a sort of magical realm where time outside passes very quickly. This allows for the people and places she encountered on her journey to be quite advanced in their respective conflicts as she's headed home. Time dilation is also used to great effect in Interstellar, where the hero's proximity to a black hole creates a situation where he and his kids are practically the same age. The scene where he watches them grow up in a series of video diaries is a tearjerker.

I recently finished reading Seveneves, which involves a whopping 5,000-year time skip. I liked this book a lot, but this time skip I believe is impossible to pull off. None of the characters or plot tension carry over from the book's first two acts. There are strong narrative connections to what happened before, but they serve less the story than Neal Stephenson's worldbuilding exercise. There's a bagful of kernels of a whole 'nother book in that third act, which is a shame because it would have made a terrific duology, with the first two acts standing on their own. Putting it all in one book may have been a business decision, not an artistic one.

Good time skip execution synchronizes with the human experience and focuses on what stands out from characters' routines. The difference between any given hour or month is arbitrary, but days, weeks, and years have an inherent structure. A day in the field looks different than a day at the office. A week in the mountains looks different than a week at home. A year in Okinawa looks different than a year stateside. If a plot has enough interesting beats, it'll condense the mundane, and the reader won't even notice the stretches where nothing's happening.

Among the many things the Harry Potter books do really well, this is one of them. Can you imagine what those books would look like if JK Rowling hadn't skipped over days, weeks, or sometimes months in the course of a year at Hogwarts? It would have bored children to tears.

In a fictional space setting, which I've used twice now, you can throw out most human experience of time. It does not apply. Outlining may be more important to pace out the building of tension because the environment imposes an entirely different set of constraints.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.