Writing fundamentals: four tips about controlling time (+ a writing exercise)
When should you speed up, slow down, or skip time? How can you do it?
Controlling time isn’t just for roguish Gallifreyans with impeccable tailoring, it’s an essential skill for writers too. In this post, we’re going to look at:
Pacing and sensory detail
Transitions
Sensing time passing
Flashbacks
+ a writing exercise - Slower, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
1. Pacing and sensory detail
Reading is typically a linear activity and in that respect it matches our everyday perception of time.
Except, of course, we don’t experience all times as equal: when we are bored time can drag, when we are absorbed in a hobby time seemingly ceases to exist, and, when something momentous is about to happen, time can freeze.
Particularly in moments or either crisis or reflection, we notice every detail around us in a way that we typically wouldn’t. Here’s an example based on a true story (i.e. me) :
I’ve only locked myself out of my house once. My left hand rested on the cold metal of the door handle. Moving on autopilot, each muscle in my arm gently tensed, pulling the door shut, while an alarm inside my head screamed STOP.
It was autumn, and the chilled air tasted of fallen leaves, but it wasn’t cold enough to trigger the blood retreating inside my body: that was fear, flooding my organs, preparing me for the moment when I clinched the stupidity. The door was not shut yet, but part of me knew I wasn’t going to stop closing it in time.
Nearby, the traffic hummed as if nothing important was happening, birds sang with no care, but the sound of the latch, clicking into place, drowned all ambiance.
My right hand, which usually held my door key, was curled into a fist. There was no key inside. I could feel it was empty, the pads of my fingers wrapped into the palm. And yet, one by one, I unfurled each one, hoping a key would be hidden behind the next.
However, I could have written the same event like this:
I watched my arm pulling the door shut, as if I were an observer viewing a tiny personal cataclysm. The door’s latch clicked into place and I knew my right hand, which usually held the key, was empty. I’d locked myself out.
Both descriptions cover the same event, but the approach and impact on the reader is very different.
In the first description, time is radically slowed: sensory detail is added to the scene to give a sense of time slowing. It mentions the temperature, the seasonal air, the sounds of traffic and birdsong, and the internal sensation of blood drawing away from the skin. This attention to detail replicates how we often feel in crucial moments in our lives. I know this is a good representation of what I felt when this happened!
The second description drops almost all the sensory detail and focuses instead on the meaning of the event. The short, punchy sentence at the end (“I’d locked myself out”) drives home the intellectual awareness of what has happened, ensuring readers haven’t missed the crucial point of the short paragraph.
That sentence also uses short words without any fancy terms to make the realisation feel more visceral and keep the pace up. Instead of that sentence, I could have written:
In that moment, it became unquestionably clear that I no longer possessed the means to re-enter my abode.
It says the same thing, but it’s definitely less punchy. Such flowery language changes how we perceive the narrator, and how we understand their emotional response to the event. So, use sensory detail to slow or speed up the description to embody the protagonist’s experience.
Why might we choose fast or slow pacing?
In the first (slower and more sensory) option, we create anticipation and suspense: the reader can tell something is about to happen, and adding the sensory detail makes the event feel more embodied.
Like adding fireworks to a party, adding sensory detail makes the event more eventful!
If there is an important event in the story, we want to make sure the reader is right there with the character, living it with them.
However, you wouldn’t want this for every moment. Perhaps locking themselves out is just one point in a list of problems that escalate through the day. If we’re working up to news that the character will have to sacrifice themselves to an elder god, perhaps we don’t want to slow down for the ‘I locked myself out’ moment and instead we need to move on the bigger problems.
Slower pacing, typically with detailed descriptions of actions or sensory detail, has pros and cons.
Pros:
Gives time to develop nuance and complex consideration of an event: introspection, contemplation, and thematic exploration can all happen in these points of downtime
Emotional processing: you have time to really dig into the resonance of an event in both physical and psychological ways. If there has been a big scene beforehand, it can be good to allow characters a moment to unpack the impact for them
Building atmosphere: slowing things down gives us time to make a scene feel more calm and still or, the opposite, it can build dread and suspense as the reader urgently awaits the next big thing.
Cons:
Losing reader engagement: if the slow pacing isn’t serving the character’s development, there’s a risk it could become boring, tiring, or skippable. To many skippable scenes and people might skip the whole story!
Plot drag: readers want to know what happens next. If the slow pacing slips from being ‘suspenseful’ to ‘dawdling’ then the energy of the story will slacken
Genre considerations: if you’re writing a thriller, you’ll only have a few moments of slow-paced processing before editors start telling you too trim the scenes. In a literary drama about rural life, your editors and readers are likely to have a much higher tolerance (and even desire) for plenty of slow-paced descriptions and contemplations
Page count! Yes, the cost of paper is actually a part of how publishable your work is going to be. If you create a 130k masterpiece of slow-paced scenes, editors may want to strip 50k words to create a tighter and pacier book partly due to the cost of printing. It’s harsh, but it’s part of commercial publishing.
So, there are some great reasons to add slower scenes but, like all tools, use time dilation sparingly and with strong intentionality.
In other words, decide what is momentous for your character, and control the pacing (the time spent on that moment) to reflect that importance.
2. Transitions
One of my favourite authors is William Gibson (affiliate link). Long-time readers from pre-Substack days may even remember I wrote my PhD thesis about his books. He’s spoken about how, when he began writing, he didn’t know how to make his characters move. He could write about places, he could write conversations, he could describe technology, but making a character walk across a room never felt natural to him.
For me, being bold with the use of transitions is a key skill in controlling the flow of time and pace of a piece of writing.
Let’s look at an example.
She sipped her coffee. Outside, the morning sunlight glistened on frosty leaves. The winter’s chill had come early that year. Chaffinches and robins hopped and pecked at the ground, searching for anything to help them survive the winter. It was the day she would fire eight members of her ten-person team. It was a day she had been dreading for the last six months, as she watched her company’s finances dive into the red.
Coffee gone, she washed the cup, placed it inverted on the draining board, and began the laborious task of dressing for the cold bicycle ride to the office, adding layers of thermal clothing that, she knew, would make her a sweaty mess by the time she arrived.
Her fingers shook as she tied the laces. It wasn’t the coffee making them tremble, it was the knowledge of what was coming, the weight of her mismanagement that would hit the lives of her employees — her friends — and destroy their lives only two months before Christmas.
Did you notice the transition from the kitchen to the hallway? She’s drying her cup and suddenly she’s putting on winter clothing. Readers are so accustomed to filling in gaps these transitions are almost invisible.
It could have gone like this:
Coffee gone, she washed the cup, placed it inverted on the draining board, and left the kitchen. The hallway, where she stored her coat and boots, was on the left. The vintage door, rescued from a demolition site, squeaked on its hinges as she passed through. She began the laborious task of dressing for the cold bicycle ride to the office.
But would that have been better? Probably not. The vintage door is perhaps a sign of her character, but it would need to work as part of a broader portrait, otherwise it’s simply adding needless detail.
Avoid detail that doesn’t add to character or plot development.
In this scene, we’ve not got very far. Do we have anything meaningful happening? Our character has gone from a melancholy state of mind to a shaking and fearful state. There is character change, so this scene is successful, but does it need to linger so long?
Perhaps this could be rewritten to cut forwards faster:
She sipped her coffee. Outside, the morning sunlight glistened on frosty leaves. The winter’s chill had come early that year. Chaffinches and robins hopped and pecked at the ground, searching for anything to help them survive the winter. It was the day she would fire eight members of her ten-person team. It was a day she had been dreading for the last six months.
—
The office was empty when she arrived. Her desk presented a view of the front door. She straightened her keyboard, fingers lingering over it, not daring to log in, knowing that it would reveal yesterday’s finance spreadsheet, drilling home in red text the action she must take.
This is much faster, and gets to the crux of the day’s events. We’ve lost her washing up her coffee cup, but who really cares?
Begin scenes late and cut early…
This is one of the most important pieces of writing advice I’ve read, and I try to apply it to all of my work - only begin the scene when the crucial thoughts and actions have begun, and cut once the main reaction has happened, i.e. change has occurred. Keep the reader racing along with your characters as the events pull them deeper into facing their own need to change. If you’re editing your work, ask ‘can I start later? Can I cut sooner?’
… and skip the travelling
You don’t need to describe the scenery outside the car window. Buying a train ticket isn’t important. The bicycle ride isn’t likely to bring character growth.
Unless something important (character or plot development) happens on a journey, skip it. Just cut to the next scene. Your readers won’t mind.
How do you do this? Simply give the reader a clue where they are, and move on. Trust them, they’ll keep up!
3. Sensing time passing
Want to avoid writing ‘Later that day’ all the time?
You can do this by blending a few signs of time passing into your scene description.
Here are a few options:
Chiming of a clock (grandfather, church bells, or seconds ticking)
Newscast (evening news, breakfast news)
Daylight/moonlight - but avoid describing sunsets - there is no new way to do this!
Seasonal change (cold air, summer breeze, frozen lakes, spring flowers)
Food (drinks going cold, drinks or food growing mould, takeout boxes piling up, flies around a plate, ants around a picnic)
Weathering (paint cracking, grass growing between paving slabs)
Physical symptoms (aching from holding one position, limbs going numb, knees hurting more than in a younger time, lines around the eyes/mouth/forehead, thinner skin, feeling the cold more)
Psychological signs (weariness from having to maintain attention, maturity of decision making compared to previous times)
Cultural signs (gramophones to CDs to Spotify, deep CRT televisions becoming flat screen LCDs, I Love Lucy v.s Friends v.s Brooklyn Nine Nine)
In this list, there’s a range of signs you can use to cover minutes passing or whole generations.
There’s nothing wrong with an occasional ‘The slog through the sticky mud took them all afternoon’, but doing this too often becomes repetitive. Try using more external or internal signs of time passing instead.
4. Flashbacks
I started this piece talking about how time feels linear, but there are moments in our lives where we are thrown from the present into the past.
In the novel I’m currently seeking an agent for, a trigger sentence brings memories flooding back into the character’s mind. In that scene, I decided to be very unambiguous starting it, after the scene break, with ‘She is seven’ and then, after the flashback concludes, with ‘Nearly thirty years later’. I could be more subtle, but there is more important plot development going on - skipping the sensory detail maintains a faster pace and keeps the reader engaged.
Some editors hate flashback scenes and may request the information is wrapped more smoothly into the present of the story’s action, e.g.
The exhaustion burned through him. His legs felt like lead weights, like in the final stretch of the marathon he’d run for charity, but now his life depended on keeping moving.
If we wanted to slow things down we could write a flashback to that marathon, perhaps to contrast the mood of celebration compared to this moment of life-threatening seriousness, but we would need a damn good reason to take our reader away from the danger.
Flashbacks need to answer a burning question from your reader: what do I need to know from the past to understand this moment in the present?
If a flashback is the most effective way on conveying a character’s present, then add it in, with clear markers for the reader to understand the time-period switch, but otherwise keep it as a short in-text recollection.
If you go for a flashback, I encourage you to keep it short, otherwise readers can forget where they were in the present…
Unless you want to confuse your reader! Like all creative advice, you can break the rules when you’ve got a good reason, just always be purposeful.
5. A writing exercise - Slower, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Want to stretch your descriptive powers? Here’s brief moment of a story:
The bar’s door slammed open. Clint strode into the room and headed straight for me. Collecting a bottle as he passed a table, he swung it for my head. Black stars exploded in my vision and I hit the floor like a sack of sodden grain.
What if we wanted to build anticipation before the impact? Or develop the emotional resonance?
Take those three sentences and elongate the moment. Try adding:
Sensory detail:
What does Clint look like, what does the bar smell like, is there music playing, do we see tiny details of his hand as it swings towards us?
Are we hot, cold, drunk, sober, or even high, and how might this manifest in our perception of the attack?)
Psychological detail:
Are we shocked to see Clint, saddened, or even happy?
Do we care about being hit by the bottle - perhaps we feel we deserve it? Or does it terrify us?
Atmosphere and context:
Is the bar empty or are there others around?
What time of day is it?
What era are we in, and how might that be reflected in the sights and sounds of the bar? Is there news or sports on a television, holograms dancing in a corner, or a jazz musician playing on a smoky stage to an audience of three sleeping drunkards?
Aftermath:
How does the world react to what has happened? Does the bar explode into chaos or does everyone ignore this everyday occurrence?
If there’s a bartender, how do they express their reaction and can we see it from the floor, or do we only hear a scream or a shotgun cocking?
How do we feel about Clint after he’s hit us? Do we think about anything as we’re falling towards the floor? Do we examine the grain of wooden planks, or pick peanut shells from our cheek?
Notice how much you can write about only a few seconds.
Save your work, then try something else — pare it down to the essentials:
Cut out anything extra and keep the most essential details to convey the tone you want for the scene.
Try to pare it down to one paragraph, conveying the attack and some of the detail you added.
Now, compare where we started, what you expanded into, and what you kept when you shrank it down.
You’ll probably see you’ve changed the language style, you might have a preference for certain types of sensory detail, and you probably added a much stronger tone to the scene - such as comedy, action, or interpersonal drama.
By looking at the choices, you can learn more about your own writing voice, and you’ll have experimented with controlling time — great Scott!
If you enjoyed this post, you might like my previous writing tips essay about character motivations:
Writing fundamentals: External and internal character motivations
Welcome to The Inciting Incident, where I share original short (mostly horror) stories, writing craft essays, and more. Today I’m writing about character motivations. What they are, why they matter, and how they make your writing better. Character motivations
Thanks for reading - I’ll be back next week with something fun.
In the meantime, fancy a checking out my merch?
I hope you enjoyed this post about controlling time in your writing. Let me know in the comments below if you’ve any questions about writing that you’d like my thoughts on!
Until next time, be kind to yourself and others,
Mata xxx