Time and Word Count

Time is a tricky thing, especially in writing.

Even in real life, time seems to move more slowly for someone who is bored, but flicks past in an eyeblink if someone is absorbed or fascinated. This can leave writers in a bit of a pickle—they want the reader to know that their protagonist spent two weeks searching for the misplaced information, but they don’t want to bore the reader by describing one useless attempt after another. The obvious solution is the time-skip: “Two weeks later, Sarah still hadn’t found the letter…”

The first difficulty with this solution is that Sarah—and all of the other characters in the story—had a bunch of experiences in those two weeks, and most of those experiences had nothing to do with the missing letter/information. Even Sarah is unlikely to have spent every waking minute in the hunt. Essentially, the writer is saying that, for two weeks, the story didn’t move forward in any way that was important enough to show. The second difficulty is that “two weeks later” is only three words, which are easy to miss if one is reading fast, and which don’t give the reader a feel for the passage of time.

I once got whacked over the head by this problem. I covered one full day of story-time in one chapter. The first paragraph summarized most of the day: “Even though they got an early start after breaking camp, the walk to the castle took almost all day. The first thing they saw when they arrived…” The entire rest of the chapter covered a major argument, which took maybe half an hour of story-time, followed by a paragraph summarizing dinner and heading off to quarters. I realized this was a problem when I got comments indicating that several readers (one of them an editor) were under the impression that the walk to the castle had taken about fifteen minutes, and the argument had occupied most of the day.

Why did this happen? Well, writing is missing a bunch of the cues people use in real life to judge how long things take—sounds, changing light, changes in weather, increasing hunger, etc. Saying that the light changed, the character got hungry, and so on, just doesn’t have the same impact. What writing has instead is the combination of word count and event density, which can be used in several ways to give the reader more of a sense of time passing at whatever speed the writer wants to convey.

In my case, my beta-readers picked up on the fact that the chapter covered an entire day (the characters got up in the first paragraph and went to bed in the last one), but they got their feel for time passing from the number of words and the density of events. One paragraph covered getting up and walking all day—not very many words, and obviously not much happened (and what happened wasn’t unusual or important). The argument took six pages, which introduced three new characters, provided a lot of story-important information, and did major character development on three central characters, plus minor character development on a bunch of others. Heading off to quarters was, again, one paragraph in which hardly anything that happened was unusual or important.

My readers were judging the passage of time by how much happened, how important the events were, how much detail there was, and how many words it took to present it all. The walk to the castle and getting to quarters took very few words and not much happened, so subconsciously they assumed it didn’t take as much time as the argument, which was full of new and important information described in full detail. The argument felt as if it took longer than fifteen minutes because lots of things happened, they were important to the story, and they took multiple pages to describe.

What I did to fix it was, first of all, add another paragraph about the walk. Well, most of it was the main character worrying about what would happen at the end of it (which paid off immediately when the argument started). It didn’t end up being very many words, but there were enough to signal “Yes, it was a long, boring walk” in a way I hoped readers would pick up on. Then I added a couple of lines of dialog to the argument—people who’d been walking complaining about blisters, how hungry they are after all that walking, etc. Not much, but enough to remind readers that the characters walked all day, even if nothing important happened on the road. The result was that my readers were no longer confused about how long things took.

Basically, I added a few words about what happened during the time-skip, to remind readers that a) the skip happened, and b) they really weren’t interested in seeing a blow-by-blow description. This kind of thing needs a light touch; too much, and it starts feeling like the reader missed out on something important.

Poul Anderson makes deliberate use of the relationship between word count and event density in Tau Zero, in order to illustrate the way time dilation on the spaceship is “speeding up” the lives of the people on board when seen from an outside perspective. Each chapter covers more time than the one before it, both from the perspective of the characters and from the perspective of the universe the ship is moving through. By the penultimate chapter, billions of years are passing outside the ship, and over a year passes on board, compared to the couple of hours that go by in Chapter One. (I don’t remember where I read Anderson’s explanation of this technique and how he came up with it, but it’s very effective.)