Thoughts about time skips

[Worthy39]

I've been considering writing a time skip in my story to get through some boring stuff, and I was curious how much time everyone else thought a good time skip should get through.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

Depends on the story and how it is handled.

 

[Worthy39]

Depends on the story and how it is handled.

I'm still debating. It's a bit generic, but at the moment I'm leaning towards a situation where the protagonist loses a big battle because he wasn't well enough trained, and ends up going off to train with some mentor characters, then comes back eventually. I wouldn't skip over the entire thing, but I'd definitely significantly compress it to just one or two chapters.

 

[Zagaroth]

What ever the time skip needs to be.

My biggest time skip was about three months, because they were settled in for the winter.

My next serial is going to have a fair number of time skips involved.

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

Use time-skips because your story needs to, not because someone else's rules are affecting your work.

For example, a story of mine has a six-year time-skip, because I need six years to pass for something to happen. Another story has a three-month time skip, because nothing much has happened between the last event and the next one.

 

[Arkus86]

Really depends on the context. In some situations or stories, a week can be considered long time skip. In others, several months or years might be just long enough instead.

 

[RainyLiquid]

Why time skip when you can time jog?

 

[l8rose]

I chose months but depends on the story and where things are at. I always skip things that can be summed up in two sentences that the readers don't need to see. Like, in SfAL, the reader does not need to know every second of a travel that would take months. So everything gets summed up in a "characters did this as they travelled" paragraph before moving back into the stuff that actually impacts the narrative.

I think the longest time skip I had was 200,000 years (give or take a few hundred) because there was no way in hell I was going to write a character randomly walking down an endless hallway for eons (even if I did forget to write that she hadn't realized she hadn't eaten in that timeframe but hey, nothing's perfect). Readers didn't need to know how endlessly bored the main character was for those 200,000 years. Only that she was stuck and eventually got out due to outside interference.

 

[Tempokai]

Time skip basically a skill that you use once in a while and that takes resources to execute properly to increase pacing of the story. Those resources are immersion, expectations, and detail. It also is in telling category, so if the story before was all show and suddenly time skip, it breaks the immersion. There are constraints in which the time skip works the best, if it's justified, if it's logical, if it's emotionally true afterwards.

Justification is your reason to make time skip. Self explanatory so far. The reason "why" this timeskip exists will be judged by the reader, even if that time skip is small. The bigger the timeskip is, the less it will be justified, because people change a lot in years than in days. For example: a year timeskip because of training montage feels different than 10 years training montage, even in if narrative wise they're the same montage session. If you make it 10 years, you don't just make MC punch better, you make MC capable of crushing boulders with a single finger, aka managing expectations through the inner logic of the story, logos.

Justified time skip is logos (here's why time was skipped) + ethos (here's what you expect out of it) mostly. Emotional aspect is after you've made your case to the reader, and show off the changed connections between the people, which is detail. Time skip compresses detail to the point where it only can be told through telling if you want the maximum detail shoved down as possible on what happened between that time period. It feeds off of the context of what happened before the time skip and expectations that leads to the time skip.

How those previous connections are established constrain what will happen logically in the future, so if the reader is already invested and roots for the characters, it's often negligible until you break your own logic. Those breaks of logic scrutinized the most after the time skips, so think accordingly.

It's not the matter of an arbitrary number, it's the matter of "if that number you've putting out there makes sense to the reader". Often, writers forget that time skip breaks or makes the story and it's a skill you can overspend without realizing. I can list a few where arc ended + timeskip broke the story for me specifically, like Souma, Bleach, and Tree of Aeons (don't ask). That's all.

 

[Eldoria]

My novel has a forward and backward storyline (flashbacks). Flashback can be viewed as timeskips if we use the past as the starting point of the conflict. The past takes place approximately 7-10 years ago. The main story begins 7 years after the apocalyptic world.
Why does the main story begin 7 years after the apocalyptic world? Because my female protagonist gave birth and cared for her little daughter during that time.

 

[LiteraryWho]

This is absolutely not a question to resolved with a survey or some kind of literary rule. Any given story is likely to contain dozens of time skips of all manners of lengths, varying from hours, to hundreds of years, to literally until the end of time (eg. The Last Question).

 

[Bartun]

The entirety of my story happens in a period of 3 days, so my 'time skips' are measured in hours.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Unless one of the following happens:
1) You hate your readers so much that you have to show them EVERYTHING, even bathroom breaks, embarrassing moments, etc., plus endless scenes of walking, sitting and standing,
2) your story takes place in "real time" so every sentence is a race against the clock,

There WILL be time skips - sometimes merely seconds, sometimes days, weeks, months, maybe even years. Whatever the narrative needs to keep on track without losing readers. You just have to learn how to manage them.
Or you do it all in one take and end up with the "Rope" (one of Hitchcock's least successful films) of novels.

 

[BearlyAlive]

Skip whatever is uninteresting. As long as you don't inflate the time skips like in cultivation novels everything is alright.

"After 42069666420420420 trillions of years in secluded cultuvation Dum Phak was now on the 15457346th step of the upper lower middle of the wu-da-phuk-eiban-cares-realm" just doesn't sound good no matter how you write it...

 

[CodeCrisis]

Depends on the time skip. I, personally, have written time skips from a minimum of a few hours, to even multiple years. It's wholly depends as to why, and when the time skip takes place.

 

[RepresentingCaution]

It depends on the subject matter. Most stories about children or motherhood skip the toddler years. They're not so much boring as they are traumatizing. The mother is basically making sure the child doesn't unalive anyone, including the child, while the child develops motor skills and impulse control.

 

[TASTYLEADPAINT]

I dont mind time skips if nothing happens during that period or the MC goes on training arc 1 or 2 chapters showing them working then a skip is fine imo. We really dont need to see all that

 

[PancakesWitch]

I'm still debating. It's a bit generic, but at the moment I'm leaning towards a situation where the protagonist loses a big battle because he wasn't well enough trained, and ends up going off to train with some mentor characters, then comes back eventually. I wouldn't skip over the entire thing, but I'd definitely significantly compress it to just one or two chapters.

the best way to handle this is by doing several small timeskips, a big one that shows he's already powerful would make it feel weird, do three small timeskips showing his constant progress as he learns new things and also gets to know the people that's teaching him

 

[Prince_Azmiran_Myrian]

Time skips are versatile and variable, but instead of focusing on the time skip itself, instead focus on the context requiring it.

 

[Cookiez_N_Potionz]

In a dragon story of mine theres a 1 year time skip every 5 chapters.