As I said last time, I'm going to talk some more about time travel. Because I love it. What does this have to do with upcoming Camp NaNo? Probably nothing. And that's okay.
Here's my experience with time travel. I've written two time travel stories. I think. I can only thing of two. I have Unknown Soldier (first written as a short story in 2008, then as a screenplay in 2011), and A Matter of Time (my first NaNo from 2010).
Unknown Soldier was pretty straightforward. It was a loop. Essentially, our protagonist heard a story about a mysterious guy who did a heroic thing. This inspires him to try to be heroic. He volunteers for an experimental program to test, you guessed it, a time machine. The machine spits him out some fifty years prior, where he finds himself doing a heroic thing. The heroic thing. And so he provides the inspiration for his past/future self. And around and around it goes.
It was the sort of time travel where all of this happens, because it all happened before. Because it always happens. It's probably not going to break the universe. And it had a great explanation of how time travel was supposed to work, which simultaneously makes all the sense and zero sense.
"In layman's terms, time and matter as we know it is rushing forward, constantly. The past is dragged along behind us. If you step out of the flow of time, and then back in, you'll be somewhere behind where you started, in the past."
A Matter of Time was, well, a bit more all over the place. I just had to skim through it to remember how it went. So, there was a time machine. And at some points in time, there were more than one of a time machine. The machine first appears in the very beginning, when it's used by a Morlock to travel from the distant future to August of 1888, where he starts killing prostitutes in the East End of London. As you do.
Now, it's not until three months and twenty eight chapters later that the machine is actually built and tested. The main characters don't get around to having time travel adventures until page 94 out of 129. And then… something something, the machine is locked up for safe keeping, until the year 9863, when it's uncovered by a Morlock… et cetera, et cetera.
What all this means is that at some point in time, there were two time machines. The freshly built one, and the one that had been sitting around for eight thousand years. And while I managed to keep track of the brand new one, I have honestly no idea what happened to the other one. Like I said, I skimmed the story, so I might have missed an important scene where they find it and send it to the year 5 Billion. Or I might have forgotten all about it. I couldn't tell you. There was a lot of bullshit in that story I skipped over.
Time travel can get tricky. Even if you manage to avoid paradox or becoming your own grandpa, you still run the risk of confusing the hell out of your audience, and yourself. Let me give you some advice. Make diagrams, or charts, or timelines, to keep all of this straight and track of where and when everyone and everything is. (What? They're in a crypt? Why)
But all this nonsense makes me want to write another time travel story. Because I do love diagrams and charts and timelines. I'm not going to, right now at least, because I've got a revision to do. But maybe after that.
How do you feel about time travel? What do you like to see in a time travel story?
I'll see you Wednesday.
Title Source: Breaking Benjamin - Bury Me Alive
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