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Past, present, paradox: writing about time travel, crafting a believable time travel story requires careful consideration of the logic at play. let's crack the temporal code on traveling through time in fiction.

Graphic depicting time in three-dimensional space.

Time travel in fiction can open your story to infinite possibilities. Ever wondered what it would be like if somebody taught the Romans how to make a nuclear bomb? Do you need to retcon an event in your story? Time travel!

It may seem simple for your time-traveling characters to hop in Tony’s Terrific Temporal Transport and whiz through time, but there are many hurdles to overcome when writing about time travel.

Chief among these is dealing with time travel paradoxes, so let’s look at those, discuss how you can write convincing time travel stories, and explore how some popular stories handle it.

The Problem With Time Travel

Consider an ordinary day in your life. It follows a sequence of events where one thing leads to another. This is called causality , the concept that everything that happens results from events that happened before it. The problem with time travel in fiction, especially travel to the past, is that it often breaks the rules of causality.

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This can lead to time travel paradoxes and unforeseen results , including:

Continuity paradoxes: The act of time travel renders itself impossible.
Closed causal loop paradoxes: Traveling to the past creates a condition where an idea, object, or person has no identifiable origin and exists in a closed loop in time that repeats infinitely.
The butterfly effect: Even the smallest action can have massive consequences.

With all that in mind, let’s embark on a journey through time and explore these further!

Grandfather Paradox

This thought experiment posits the idea of somebody traveling back in time and killing their grandfather before their parents were born. Because the grandfather never has children, the time traveler—his grandchild—cannot exist.

However, if the time traveler never existed, they couldn’t kill their grandfather, so he would go on to have children and grandchildren. One of those grandchildren is the time traveler, though, who might go back in time and kill their grandfather. If that seems confusing, it’s okay—it’s supposed to be.

The bottom line is that if somebody travels to the past and changes something that prevents them from ever traveling to the past, they have broken the timeline's continuity.

Polchinski’s Paradox

American theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski removed human intervention from the time travel equation.

Imagine a billiard ball travels into a wormhole, tunnels through time in a closed loop, and emerges from the same wormhole just in time to knock its past self away.

Doing so prevents it from ever entering the wormhole and traveling through time, to begin with. However, if it does not travel back in time, it cannot emerge to knock itself out of the way, giving it a clear path to travel back in time.

Bootstrap Paradox

The Bootstrap Paradox is the first closed causal loop paradox we will explore. This presents a situation where an object, idea, or person traveling to the past creates the conditions for their existence, leading to it having no identifiable origin in the timeline.

Imagine sending the schematics for your time machine to your past self, from which you create a time machine. Where did the knowledge of how to create the time machine begin?

Predestination Paradox

The most nihilistic of paradoxes explores the idea that nothing we do matters, no matter what. Events are predetermined to still occur regardless of when and where you travel in time.

Suppose you time travel to the past to talk Alexander the Great out of invading Persia, but he hadn’t even considered this until you mentioned it. By traveling to the past to prevent Alexander’s conquest, you caused it.

Butterfly Effec t

Less of a paradox and more an exploration of unintended consequences, the butterfly effect explores the idea that any action can have sweeping repercussions, no matter how small.

In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered that adding tiny changes to computer-based meteorological models resulted in unpredictable changes far from the origin point. In traveling back in time, we don’t know what effect even minor changes might have on the timeline.

How to Write Convincing Time Travel Stories

Time travel can be pretty complex at the best of times, but that doesn't mean writing about it has to be a challenge. Here are a few practical tips to craft narratives that crack the temporal code.

Miniature woman looks amazed at life-sized pocket watch.

Ask Yourself, "Why Time Travel?"

If your story has time travel, to begin with, it likely plays a pretty significant role in the narrative. Define the purpose that time travel has in your story by asking yourself questions like:

How and why is time travel possible in your setting?
What does it mean for your story and your characters?
What are your characters meant to use time travel for?
Is the actual practice of time travel different from its intent?

If you can't be clear about time travel's purpose in your story, how can you convincingly write about it? To get crafty with time, you first need to master its relevant mechanics.

Keep a Record of Everything

You're asking your reader to potentially make several mental leaps when time travel is involved in a story, so it's imperative to have all of your details sorted. Do the work of planning out dates and events ahead of time by creating a time map for yourself—like a mindmap, but for a timeline.

You'll be able to keep a birds-eye view of the narrative at all times, be more strategic about moving the order of events around, and ensure that you never miss a detail. You may even want to have multiple versions—a strictly linear timeline and a more loosely structured time map where you draw connections between events and in the order they appear in the narrative.

In Campfire, you can do both with the Timeline Module —create as many Timelines as you want by using the Page feature in the element. You can also connect your Timeline(s) to a custom calendar from the Calendar Module for extra fun with time wonkiness in your world.

If a new idea pops up while writing, don't stress! You'll have your handy time map already laid out so you can easily see if a new scene or chapter makes sense, as well as where it will best fit into the narrative.

Never Forget Causality

I mentioned this concept earlier in the article, but it should be reiterated: The most important rule of time travel is that every action results in a consequence. Remember cause and effect : an action is taken (your character time travels to the past), and causes an effect, the consequence (the timeline is forever changed).

"Consequence" doesn't have to be a negative thing, either, even though the word has that connotation. The resulting consequence of a given action could be a positive effect, too.

Regardless, seek to maintain causality so you don't confuse your readers (or yourself, for that matter). Establishing clear rules for how time travel works in your setting and sticking to them will help you keep your time logic consistent and avoid running into narrative dead ends or plot holes.

Tips & Tricks For the Time-Traveling Author

Now that we’ve examined several obstacles you can encounter when writing about time travel, let’s see how you can either avoid them or exploit them. That’s right! Even time travel paradoxes present opportunities for superb storytelling.

Man in surreal scene with wooden sign post pointing in three directions: past, present, and future.

Focus on the Future

Fortunately, all the named paradoxes here involve the past, so the easy way to avoid them is to not go there! Thanks to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, you don’t even have to invent a clever way to travel instead to the future.

An aspect of Einstein's theory is time dilation , in which the faster an object moves through space, the slower it moves through time. With this, you need only zip around at near the speed of light for a few weeks or months, and when you come back to Earth, years or centuries will have gone by.

Create a Multiverse

A popular trope in science fiction today, and a theory gaining popularity among theoretical quantum physicists, is the multiverse concept. According to multiverse theory, whenever an event occurs, every possible outcome of the event happens simultaneously, splitting the universe into parallels that each contain differing outcomes.

Since all these realities exist, perhaps changing the past is simply a way for time travelers to travel between realities, shifting their perspective to a timeline where things occurred differently than in their original reality.

Get Creative With Consequences

Instead of avoiding paradoxes, maybe you want them to occur. Leading to some fascinating stories, this can be approached in a variety of ways. Perhaps you want to examine the unintended consequences of the butterfly effect, create a time-traveling police force that enforces the laws of time travel, or simply break time itself and revel in the chaos that ensues.

Just be sure to remember the action-consequence rule and keep your timeline handy for easy reference—especially if you're toying around with multiple timelines!

Best Time Travel Stories

What follows are what I think are some of the best time travel stories. As you will see, the first two fall victim to time travel paradoxes, while the other two do a great job of exploring various elements we’ve discussed.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

The corporation Cyberdyne Systems has remnants of the Terminator from the first movie, which they use to create an artificial intelligence system called Skynet. Skynet then actually creates the terminators and sends one back in time. Thus, it gives humanity the technology to create itself in a classic example of a bootstrap paradox.

Back to the Future

In this film, Marty McFly travels to the past and inadvertently interrupts the event where his parents first meet. This causes a chain of events where Marty’s parents never get married and have children, threatening to erase Marty and his siblings from the timeline.

Some argue that the McFly offspring ceasing to exist is a great exploration of the consequences of time travel. However, they would never have been at risk had Marty not been in the past to impede their parents’ romance. And if he ceases to exist, he’ll never go back and get in the way, thus creating a grandfather paradox.

War of the Twins

In this second volume of the Dragonlance Legends trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the mage Raistlin Majere travels into the past, kills a wizard named Fistandantilus in a battle for power, and assumes his identity. Throughout the book, Raistlin unwittingly follows the historical fate of Fistandantilus, in a wonderful exploration of the predestination paradox.

It’s hard to talk about time travel in fiction these days without mentioning Loki. The show explores two suggestions from my list above: the multiverse and policing the timeline. In this series, varying outcomes of events lead to branching timelines, creating a multiverse of possibilities. However, an agency called the Time Variance Authority exists to prevent this from happening, and they set out to eliminate any branches separate from what they consider the Sacred Timeline.

Bon Voyage!

I hope this exploration of time travel leaves you prepared to tackle these obstacles and opportunities that naturally present themselves when playing around with time.

Just knowing about the complexities of time travel and the paradoxes it can bring about is the best way to avoid trouble and create innovative storytelling moments. So, dust off your DeLorean, polish your paradox-proof plot, and get ready to write your adventure through the ages!

Learn more about making a timeline with Campfire in the dedicated Timeline Module tutorial . And be sure to check out the other plotting and planning articles and videos here on Learn, for advice on how to plan your very own time travel adventures!

Kimberly Van Ginkel

Author and avid reader. I love sharing interesting research and promoting other authors.

9 Rules for Writing Time Travel

I’m a sucker for time travel stories. I’ll read any book or short story, watch any movie or TV show, if it has a time travel element. I can’t get enough.

As a connoisseur of the art form – and as a novelist myself – I’ve developed these story-building tips for writing time travel

1. Give us the Shock & Awe

Writers are always told to start each story in media res , so it’s tempting to skip over the typical set-up scenes. With a time travel story, however, it’s best to introduce us to the characters before learn that time manipulation is possible. Why? Because if we watch them travel for the first time, we get to experience it with them.

Sure, we’ve seen hundred variations of this already, where the character who knows time travel doesn’t exist gradually comes to accept that it is real. It may be hard to find a fresh take. On the other hand, mastering the 4th dimension is a mind-blowing concept, so it ought to take a while to process.

The original draft of Groundhog’s Day opened with Phil Connors already trapped in his loop of repeating days. Had they filmed that version, we’d have been robbed of all the great build-up scenes where the tiny details of Phil’s day start to build, hinting at him that something is very, very wrong.

We’d have skipped past the catalyst of the story and the audience would be struggling to keep up.

Picture Marty McFly walking through 1955’s Hill Valley for the first time in Back to the Future . He has already been told that Doc invented time travel. The writers might have had him immediately accept that fact and jump straight toward some decisive action to change his predicament. Instead, they allowed him a little time for confusion, a period of denial, which also gave us time to look around with him and spot the changes in the town. With every new person or building he sees, we feel his sense of awe growing, taking in the enormity of where he is and what has happened to him. These few moments immerse us in the world with him.

It’s worth mentioning that in Palm Springs , Nyles has been repeating this day for years, but this works because we, the audience, get to watch the other main character, Sarah, enter the time loop for the first time.

This is the magic of a time travel story. Think of it as your “Dorothy opens the door to Oz” moment. Don’t rush it. This is often the most captivating scene of any time travel story.

2. Pick Your Method

Every time travel story has to have something that functions as the device, portal, or catalyst to time travel.

In H.G. Well’s The Time Machine , it was a literal machine that the hero climbed into, and that set the standard for decades of time travel stories. Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories employ hover-motorcycles that can jump through time. Doc Brown used a Delorean. Time Travelling with a Hamster (a very funny middle-grade book) uses a metal washtub wired to an old Mac computer.

Just like the wardrobe leading to Narnia, portals are a specific location that allows you to pass between times. In Stephen King’s 11.22.63 the portal is simply a staircase that they refer to as “the rabbit hole.” Star Trek TNG often utilizes worm holes for its time jumps.

Sometimes there is nothing mechanical involved, nothing that would give our characters any control of their destination. Any number of stories involve a character getting a concussion or struck on the head and waking up in another time. In The Time-Traveller’s Wife , Henry has a chromosome disorder that randomly catapults him through time; before each occurrence, he can feel the sensation of an impending jump.

3. Anything goes, as long as you explain it.

The important thing is to show the audience what your method looks like so that we know what to watch for during the story. Even if the character doesn’t know what caused it, if we witnessed him falling asleep and waking up in a different time, we have a framework for the story. We don’t know how the person will get home, but we realize something similar will have to happen to return them to their own time.

No matter what means you use to allow your characters to time travel, the important thing is to show the audience how it happened – at least, as much as your characters know – then give us the rules that govern it .

Doc Brown explains how to set the target date, load the plutonium, and get the car going 88 mph to trigger the time jump. When we see Marty doing exactly those steps a few minutes later, we know before he does that he’s about to travel to 1955. It also sets up the rules for bringing him back home.

In The Edge of Tomorrow , we learn that it’s the blood of the “Alphas” that allows the hero to loop through time. Therefore, if he gets a blood transfusion he will lose the ability. Until then, every time he dies the day resets. All of this is explained to him in the first act of the story, and is repeated again so the audience knows the rules and the way to end it.

It’s OK to keep the explanation brief, and even to leave out critical information, if that’s what your plot requires. But when you skip the explanation altogether, you’ll leave your audience wondering. You don’t want them to be distracted throughout the story, looking for clues that you haven’t dropped, as they try to understand how the hero is going to get back home.

4. Create Your Own Rules

Can the characters change the past? If so, can they make changes to their own future? How does the cause/effect work? There are a million permutations to this, and the most wondrous thing about his genre is that since time travel doesn’t really exist, your logic can never be wrong . How freeing is that?

The only thing your audience will expect is that you stay consistent with whatever version of time travel you set up initially.

Some of the most common time travel tropes are:

“I know what I’m doing.” – the time-traveller knows both the original time line and the new version because he is immune to the effects of the change – see Jodi Taylor’s Chonicles of St. Mary’s series.
“I used to know what was going on.” – as soon as the hero interacts with the time line, he is changing the past, including his own memories – see Looper , Quantum Leap (Sam and Al’s memories of events differ after a major change, as Sam is remembering only the original time line. For example: Watergate.)
“There is no cause and effect.” – anything the traveller does are events that always existed. The past changes him as he changes the past, so there are no alternate time lines. – See The Time-Traveller’s Wife .
“Nothing is able to change.” – the time-traveller is forbidden from making changes (not just a rule, but a law of physics) so they are viewing the past only. Alternately, they can make only minor changes that have no lasting effects. – See To Say Nothing of the Dog .
“I’m only looking” – our heroes cannot move through time, but they can send technology that allows them to see the future or past – See Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus .
“Time corrects itself.” – attempts at major changes are thwarted as the universe finds its own ways of staying on track. – See Night Watch (Sam’s mentor is killed when he visits the past and he is forced to take the man’s place, thereby making himself a major influence in his own young life.)
“Everything changes.” – any large-scale disruptions in the time stream will completely disrupt everything “downstream” from that event. See Anderson’s Time Patrol series (These time cops base their operations a million years B.C. so that if anything upsets the time stream, their patrol can still exist to fix it.)

Know which type of story you are writing and stay true to the cause/effect rules you have created.

If your character goes back in time, confident that the past cannot be changed, then kills his own grandfather and blinks himself out of existence, both you and the audience are now in quite a pickle. This character who no longer exists was never there to kill the grandpa. Oops. You’ve introduced a paradox that is going to hurt everyone’s brain unless you have an amazing trick up your sleeve to get us out of it.

Paradoxes suck for everyone. Give your readers an expected structure and then stick to it so that we’re not left arguing with the screen that, “that makes no sense!”

5. Or Give Yourself an “Out” to Break the Rules

Because it’s difficult to write time travel without flirting with paradoxes, some writers give themselves a work-around — a way of breaking their own rules in a way that feels as though it’s still consistent.

You can cheat.

Avengers: Endgame is a brilliant movie. It’s so good, in fact, that it gets a pass on blatantly breaking its own rules about time travel constraints. The Hulk gives a short lecture explaining why they can’t change the past, they then go on to twist time in ways that make no sense against the structure of time travel in this movie (remember the scene where AntMan is turned into a baby, then an old man, then himself again in what appears to be seconds for him?). But all these discrepancies get glossed over by explaining that the Quantum Realm is mysterious. Ah, Quantum Realm, the magical spackle for filling in plot holes.

You can play dumb.

Ever notice how the main character in these stories is rarely ever the brilliant scientist who developed time travel? Not only is it easier to relate to an everyman character, it saves us all from having to understand the science. You can have your extremely smart person introduce it and explain the rules, then let your hero accept it on faith without thoroughly understanding it.

I love this method because it gives you, the author, the freedom to include as much or as little science as you want to. Gloss over as much as you want to and have the scientist say, “Just push this button” and you can forge ahead with your plot. It’s enough for the audience to know that someone in this world understands it all.

You can yell “Hey, look over there!”

One of my favorite “nevermind my rules” moments is from Grand Tour: A Disaster in Time . Our hero, Ben, has jumped through time to break himself out of prison. The viewer immediately has to wonder how the universe will reconcile this, as Ben has now changed his past and there are suddenly two of him living in town. The writer must have felt trapped in a corner as well, because he threw in this beautiful bit of dialogue:

Original Ben: “How can we both be in the same place at the same time?”

Time-Travelling Ben: “(Forget) the physics, Ben! By the time you figure out whether it’s possible or not, we’re gonna be dead. Twice!”

Easy as that! The paradox doesn’t really matter because we’re now diving back into the action.

Which brings me to:

6. Keep the Clock Ticking

When you have time at your command, why panic, right? Why rush anything?

Because stories need tension. And a great way to add tension is to give your hero a ticking clock. As the wise Rufus once said (in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure ), “No matter what you do, no matter where you go … the clock in San Dimas is always running.” They had only 24 hours to get to their history exam, despite being able to hop through time.

A less silly example is King’s 11.22.63 , where his time portal leads him to the year 1958. In order to prevent the JFK assassination, Jake must spend 5 years in the past. Because of that time commitment, the idea of doing it more than once becomes nearly impossible. Thus, in the countdown to November 22nd, his time is as short as everyone else’s. The time portal can’t help him anymore. And the tension is every bit as high as if he had never discovered time travel.

7. Flip the Script to Make it Difficult

We are rooting for people, not gods of time. It’s cool that they have this wonderful ability, but your story is more gripping if something happens to make them unable to use it. We want them to be able to suffer setbacks, something they can’t easily undo.

Perhaps there is something inherent in your rules of time travel that will constrain the hero. In the Time Patrol stories, one unbreakable rule is that a traveller can never visit the same time twice. So if they make a mistake, they can’t return to that same time to undo it. In About Time , Tim can travel at will to any day within his own lifetime. Just as he’s getting used to this ability, he discovers that changing anything that happened before his children were born will cause them not to exist.

Sudden reversals are even better. In Time Bandits , our heroes have a map of every time portal in world history … so, of course, they lose the map!

8. Choose a Global Background, Then Make it Personal

Give in to the temptation to choose huge moments in world history. Why not? That’s the lure of time travel — the great question of “Where would you visit if you could go anywhere at any time?”

The birth of Christ? The signing of the Declaration of Independence? Woodstock? Pompeii? The assassination of Lincoln? The birth of Rock & Roll?

The history books are open to you. Pick something awesome.

But here’s the thing – as cool as all of those are, the best time travel books are the ones that focus on people . The bigger your background event, the more important it is to show it through the eyes of the people living there.

Connie Willis set The Doomsday Book in the middle of the Black Plague. Instead of showing the cities, she sent her hero to live with a small family out in the safety (uh-oh) of the country. She also created a 2-book series, Blackout and All Clear , set during the blitzkreig of London. Her plucky historians mix with civilians and military personnel, forging relationships that make us care about the fate of those individuals.

King’s 11.22.63 is ostensibly about the JFK assassination, but the characters our hero meets along the way are so wonderful that, to be honest, I wanted the hero to give up on trying to save Kennedy and settle into his fake life in the ’60s.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series stretches from the Jacobite Uprising in Scotland through the American Revolution. We see wonderful scenery, experience famous events, and encounter great figures from history. But no one reads those books just for the historical details. The heart of that story is the romance of Claire and Jamie.

Remember that time-travel is a means of telling your story, not the entire story itself. Make your characters matter .

9. Be Unique

Time travel has been the source of some of the most creative sci-fi works ever made. Keep twisting it to create your own rules and your own wonderful stories.

Remember that it does not have to be linear time travel. Though most of the stories I’ve mentioned involve a person being displaced from his own time, there are other permutations to explore.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe involved a bubble existing outside of space-time so that elite diners could watch the death of the universe while enjoying cocktails.

Groundhog’s Day introduced such a charming notion of 24-hour time loops that it created a whole sub-genre, including the comedic horror film Happy Death Day .

And The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything allows its main character to stretch time, living an entire hour in the space between seconds. This gives him the superpower of incredible speed, as viewed by other people. Since we’re living in the time gaps with him, it makes for an intriguing notion of time travel.

One last thought … if you are looking for inspiration for a new type of time travel story, I recommend the book Einstein’s Dreams , a quick read with beautiful vignettes that illustrate different time theories.

5 Unique Tips To Write A Time Travel Story

Writing time travel fiction.

What about time travel keeps us coming back to it in our stories? Some of the earliest time travel stories we know are hundreds of years old. Despite all our technological advancements, we continue to write stories about it and a time travel story. One or more characters either deliberately or accidentally gained the ability to travel into the past or future. Within such a story, they may be able to travel at will, or there are limits on how and when they will travel.

There are three main types of time travel stories that you’ll see today. The first type is preserving the status quo. The second is changing the status quo. The third type is time travel tourism. Preserving the status quo means that the hero needs to ensure that a particular action either does or does not occur. The next one, changing the status quo, is where specific past or present actions must be changed to prevent an undesirable outcome.

First and foremost, time travel gives you the power of what if something had happened differently or hadn’t happened. You can attempt to answer these questions by telling a time travel story. It completely contradicts our world, where we can’t change the past or see the future. We can’t press a reset button and try again. I’m fully supportive of people who want to tell these time travel stories as long as it serves their message. So, stay with me if you want to learn more.

How to write a time travel story?

Time travel stories allow the heroes to fix everything in the present with little to no consequences. It leads to lazy stories resolved with a time machine where everything returns to normal. Every decision we make in the real world has lasting consequences and cannot be undone. Despite this, it’s still important to push for change and improvement.

We’re going to talk about writing stories about time travel. These can be tricky because there are so many things to consider, and all-time paradoxes will drive you nuts. But I want to give you 5 tips that’ll simplify the process and help you decide whether you want to write a story about time travel and how you should execute such a story. Let’s travel!

1. Ask yourself

If you are writing about time travel, you need to ask yourself the question Why? Why are you writing about time travel? Often you don’t necessarily need to incorporate time travel elements into your story instead of writing a story about someone going to the past. Maybe you want to write about historical fiction.

Maybe you want to write a story that’s set back there, and you don’t need anybody from the present day in that setting. Or if you’re writing about somebody going to the future, you’re better off writing a story about a future society or the apocalypse.

Often, writers don’t want to write about time travel so much as they want to write about different periods or different futures. So keep that in mind. If you ever are in the situation where you think you have a good idea for a time travel story, ask yourself:

Is the time travel necessary?
What are the characters going to learn from the story?
Why are they going back or forward in time?
What is the purpose of all this?

2. Make decisions and device matter

Timeline is one of my favorite time travel novels for various reasons. At the story’s beginning, a team of archaeologists describes a significant battle. Once the time travel story starts unfolding, the macro details of the battle remain largely unchanged. However, the characters were able to use their future knowledge to nudge the past ever so slightly to make the story worth reading. That’s how to write an incredible time travel story, even when the details were already written in stone.

Also, the time travel vehicle or device matters. One major discrepancy between the book (Timeline) and the movie is that the book gave intention to the date and location that was being traveled to in the past.

On the other hand, in the movie, the scientists accidentally open up a wormhole to a random point in history. Then they recruited archaeologists who happened to be studying the castle that was nearby where the wormhole opened. It made the time travel mechanic of the story largely an accident in which the archaeologists happened to arrive shortly before the pivotal battle they were researching.

If the characters can go to any time or place, there should be a reason why they end up at a specific point, even if it isn’t known to the characters at that time. ‘Doctor Who’ does a wonderful job with this, where the TARDIS, the mechanism that they travel through time and space, is sentient and sends the doctor into harm’s way on an episodic basis.

3. Set a goal and give lessons

Characters who make time jumps there they’re going to learn some lessons. Maybe they go to the past and learn to appreciate the future more. Or they go to the future and learn to change themselves before the world becomes a worse place. When you start writing a time travel story. So, set an individual goal to achieve and give some lessons or experience while the characters are on their mission.

Readers don’t like stories where characters know what will happen to them. There was a critically acclaimed space opera, which I never enjoyed for various reasons, but the primary one was that the character knew their future.

All sense of drama about the character surviving was removed when the tension was automatically diffused for every trial. In the early part of the Harry Potter series, I understand why the characters couldn’t use time travel as they might mistake it for the work of an evil wizard. That makes sense. However, once they learned about time travel, they should have used it to their advantage.

4. Establish time travel rules

Another essential thing to remember is to establish the rules of time travel in your story. Who is capable of time travel? How many people can use time travel? Is there a specific device you need, or is there a magic spell? What are the consequences of using time travel? What if they get stuck in time? Can they get stuck in time?

All those different questions need to be asked and answered by the writer before you get into the storytelling. If you don’t understand the rules of time travel in your story, your readers will see through it. They’re going to see it as a fake story they’re not going to get into. You want to sell the idea, and you need to stick to the rules if you do that.

If something happened to a time traveler in the past, then it would have already happened. So when they return to the present and go home and go to sleep, there shouldn’t be a shift in time around them after a given, unspecified, inconsistent amount of time has passed. The biggest thing I’ll say about time travel rules is that they need to remain consistent.

There are plenty of time travel stories that selectively apply. Whatever their self-contained rules are set, the plot can continue and then ignore them whenever it doesn’t affect the plot. Failing to think about the what fully or why of time travel or applying it unravels these stories.

5. Focus on the primary trope

How seriously do you want to take time travel in your story? It’s fine if you want to write a story about time travel and its fun and lighthearted trope. Also, it doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of how it works. For instance, the story Groundhog Day is about Bill Murray reliving the same day over and over again until he finally becomes a better person. They never explain how time travel works in that story or why it exists. But nobody complains about that because it’s a great story.

However, if you are writing a much more serious and scientific story, you will want to do your research and get your details correct because those types of audiences will be much more critical of you. It’ll take them right out of the story if you get anything wrong.

Types Of Time Travel Stories (Tropes/Prompts)

Once you establish your story rules, you must decide what type of time travel story you will write. There are hundreds of time travel tropes, but none are more important than the message of your story. It’s important to consider setting limits on time travel or what it costs the hero. What could potentially stop you from being able to time travel? Maintain these limits throughout your stories.

Finding the balance between complete freedom and structure in your story is a good idea. Your story may be better served with a degree of logic added. So, it’s essential to consider the sociological implications of time travel in your world and how they affect your characters and the world you’ve built. Here are 4 types of time travel stories/tropes you can use in your story.

Travel to the past.
Travel to the future.
Present is invaded.
Time travel gimmicks.

Travel to past

The most common one is the story where someone from the present goes back in time to the past. If you are writing this type of story, you’re writing a historical fiction story with a sci-fi twist because you include that time travel.

To write a great historical fiction story, you must research the period you’re writing about. You need to be very knowledgeable about it. What was the technology and the world in general? What kind of expectations did they have for the future? What were the social customs? If you are writing a story about the past, you should find a way to get your readers invested in that time period. One of the best ways to do it is to get the details right and get a good feel for this story world.

Try to present life as it was so your readers could truly appreciate it. One major thing to be aware of when writing stories about characters who go to the past is the butterfly effect. If you have a time traveler who goes to the past, every change they make to this world will have consequences for the future.

If you do have people going into the past, remember that if they kill someone or prevent someone from being killed, that will have consequences in the future. So keep that in mind.

Travel to future

The next type of time travel story is one where characters go from the present into the future, and they may go into the future for various reasons. Maybe they go from the inferno of it because they invented the time machine that can take them into the future. Or, they might have to go to the future to stop some future evil from occurring.

Typically, those stories can get a little foolish because you have to ask yourself some questions. If they must go into the future to stop evil from happening, why don’t they take precautions now? Or why don’t they wait for the future to come to them?

So if you are looking at this type of story, ask yourself: Is it necessary for future time travel to happen? Aside from time travel stories, your main characters go into the past or future.

Present is invaded

Your characters stay in the present, and another character, usually a villain, comes to the present, either from the future or the past, and starts causing problems. The best example of this is Terminator one, an eighties movie that takes place during the eighties. But the main conflict arises because a machine comes from the future to kill Sarah Connor in the present. There isn’t much worldbuilding early on, and we can instantly empathize with Sarah Connor. It’s another technique you can keep in your arsenal.

If you are thinking about time travel stories, be aware that you do have to do the proper worldbuilding for the future or the past, even if you’re bringing one or two characters into that present.

Time travel gimmick

The fourth and final type of time travel story is one where there is a time travel gimmick involved. For instance, in the movie Groundhog Day, the gimmick is that Bill Murray’s character repeats the same day repeatedly until he becomes a better person.

Another example would be the video game, The Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask. It is about a fantasy world about to be destroyed in three days when the moon crashes into Earth. However, the main character can play the ocarina to go back in time three days and repeat the process until he can finally solve the problem.

We can tell stories based on a world that exists in a hypothetical parallel universe to our own, one that could technically exist. It adds a degree of commitment missing from most time travel stories. Every decision your characters make last within the world that they’re in. Even if they leave that world, the decisions are still there. Also, some people need to live with the consequences of those actions.

When writing a story, sharing your work with a group of people you trust for feedback is essential. It can be beneficial for others to read your work because they can give you ideas for improvement that you had never even considered. So, I encourage you to create a group of people you trust where you can share your stories and ultimately be creative.

What is your all-time favorite time travel story? Let me know in the comments section below.

Learn more from books:

17 Time Travel Romance Books

10 Post Apocalyptic Romance

10 Medieval Romance Novels

15 Historical Romance Books

More writing tips:

10 Tips To Write Male Characters

10 Tips To Write A Woman Character

10 Tips For Naming Characters In A Book

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Susan Matteucci
Dec 22, 2022

Tips and Tricks to Writing Time Travel Into Your Story

Time travel and time manipulation is a very common conflict in science fiction, fantasy, and even more action-based genres of fiction. However, despite it being so common, it is possibly one of the hardest supernatural qualities to write effectively into a story.

Time travel can be very confusing, and you can lose your readers if you are not careful about how you approach it. Not only that, but since time travel has been done so many times, authors may feel the need to be original in their works which can cause even more confusion.

However, writing time travel can be fun and easy if you know what you’re dealing with! When writing a story with any sort of time manipulation, make sure you first answer the question: what are the rules of time travel in my story? Once you’ve asked this, there are common writing tips that can help you write these rules effectively into your story.

Rules of Time Travel

Before we worry about what your characters understand, let’s focus on you, the writer. Before writing a story with time travel, we want to make sure that you understand exactly the type of time travel you are writing (there are many different kinds!).

But what exactly is a rule of time travel? Well, since you’re the one writing the story, the rules are what you make them. However, there are common types of time travel that writers tend to fall into, whether they are trying or not.

The Different Types of Time Travel:

When discussing time travel, there are four categories to choose from:

Traveling back in time

Traveling forward in time

The gift of foresight

Of course, within each of these categories, there are many subcategories and creative possibilities. But looking only at the broad strokes, every time travel story has one of these.

In choosing which type of time travel to include, it’s important to consider what you want from your story. A story of time loops, like Groundhog Day , usually focuses on the character development of the person in the loop. Meanwhile foresight and traveling forward usually deal with morality. And traveling to the past is a great way to discuss free will. It’s all about what you want.

There are so many options with time travel. The important thing is to find the type of time travel that fits your story best, create rules for it, and stick to those rules . This leads us to the first tip in writing time travel:

Consistency

These rules are just for you. You don’t necessarily need to tell your readers about them. There’s no need for some sort of exposition explanation (although if you want to, feel free). But deciding what time travel can and can’t do in your story will stop plot holes from forming. Keeping your time travel consistent is important.

For example, let’s look at Supernatural . Supernatural is great at giving us examples of what not to do.

In season 4 of Supernatural , Dean Winchester is sent back in time to when his parents were his age. Dean attempts to kill a demon that will kill his mother in the future. At the end, he fails and ultimately causes the events that will happen (classic unchangeable past time travel rules). Castiel tells him that it is impossible to change the present by traveling to the past.

We then jump to season five. Anna, a runaway angel, goes back in time to kill Sam and Dean’s parents before they can have Sam. Castiel and the brothers become worried about this. But why? If we can’t alter the past, then what’s the problem? Even if Anna doesn’t realize her goals are futile, why would Castiel be concerned?

Backstory :

This leads us to our next point. After you decide your own time travel rules, you have to consider how much each character knows about these rules . If you have decided that a seer has unchangeable visions, and they know this, then that character should never try to change their fate.

The time travel rule of Twelve Monkeys is that you cannot change the past. However, the movie only has a plot because the main character doesn’t know this. He believes he can change the past until the very end when he realizes his goal is fruitless.

However, the Prisoner of Azkaban has the same rules of time travel and Dumbledore and Hermione both know they can’t change the past. There is still conflict in the book because that is not their goal.

If a character has a backstory where they studied time travel for years, and has traveled hundreds of times before, they shouldn’t be shocked by the rules of time travel. Withholding the information from your characters can create interesting conflict, but make sure each character understands a plausible amount.

Show, Don’t Tell:

Having your characters have a long conversation about time travel can be fun to write, but it’s important to remember that the best way to ensure your audience understands time travel is to show characters traveling through time .

As long as you stick to your rules, your time travel will eventually make sense to your audience. And, when it comes to time travel, you’d be surprised just how long your readers will be okay with being in the dark.

In Avengers: Endgame , Hulk/Bruce Banner goes on a long explanation about how time travel works in this universe. They bring up Hot Tub Time Machine and Back to the Future . But in the end, did anyone in the audience completely understand what that time travel was about from the Hulk’s rant? From what I can gather, no.

About the Author: Susan Matteucci is an author, editor, and reader currently finishing up her BFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College. She has two publish short stories and hopefully has many more on the way. She has a passion for Sci-Fi, particularly time travel, and fantasy. It is her belief that straying from the realistic is the best way to comment on society.

The Rules of Time Travel for Fiction Writers

Time travel is a staple of great fiction—when it’s done right. When it’s done wrong, you’re turning wormholes into plot holes instead. Here’s how to get a handle on the mechanics of time travel for fiction.

Doing Fictional Research

Start off by researching tales of fictional time travel and go through all the short stories, books, and movies you can get your hands on. Feel free to take your own notes on the story while you do this. If there’s a time paradox, ask yourself which—and why . Excellent examples from film are 12 Monkeys , The Butterfly Effect , Project Almanac and Back to the Future . (There are plenty more, including Hot Tub Time Machine .) Good books include The Time Traveller’s Wife , The Time Machine and 22/11/63 .

Family Guy’s Back to the Multiverse does a good job at explaining what’s called the multiverse theory, where people aren’t just traveling through time, but skipping through alternate realities as they do so—here, the “rules” of the universe can be a little different, like the point where Family Guy’s Brian and Stewie find themselves going through a Disney-like alternate reality where there’s, well, a lot of singing.

Sounding “Sciency” the Right Way

We all remember the “flux capacitor” from Back to the Future . You’ll have to choose a method of time travel first. You can be creative: The most obvious solution is a time-machine—but remember to ask whether the time machine stays in one place (as in 22/11/63 ), travels with the time traveler (like Back to the Future or Family Guy ) or is simply really weird—in Butterfly Effect , the protagonist has to be reading from his diary to jump in time.

Explaining Paradoxes

Paradoxes occur when things contradict each other; time travel paradoxes are plenty, and often part of the fun when writing it. Just don’t lose track . What counts in one chapter, has to count in another chapter—and if ripples can be felt throughout your storyline because of a character’s reckless time traveling, make sure these ripples in time continuously make sense.

The Grandfather Paradox is a popular example and one best illustrated by Back to the Future . If you go back in time to kill your grandfather, do you effectively kill your father—and thusly yourself? The Hitler Paradox is another example: If you go back in time to kill Hitler, then Hitler doesn’t exist—and you wouldn’t need to kill Hitler in the first place. That’s pretty damned trippy, don’t you think?

The Predestination Paradox is something I’d like to illustrate with a scene from The Matrix , where Neo meets the Oracle; she warns him to look out for the vase. When he asks ‘what vase?’, he knocks it over. This, simply, is when your past self is the very cause of needing to travel back in the first place. This creates an endless loop (hence this also being referred to as a closed causal loop ) of travel.

The Bootstrap Paradox happens when something is sent back (often to the traveler themselves), negating the need for its creation in the first place. Astronomy Trek explains the Bootstrap Paradox in terms of George Lucas going back and giving himself the finished scripts. (Yes, we really had to think about that one, too.)

Taking Notes & Mapping Timelines

Obsessive note-taking is always advised for writing fiction, down to the last little plot detail. Outline beforehand, and have an outline of where your story is going to go. This is the secret to many great authors you’ve likely picked up this week, and there are very few authors who can just pull a plot twist out of nowhere.

When writing time travel, your outlines might have to become a little more focused on timelines and consequences. Create a mind map however you like, even if you have to clothespin some twine across your office and start hanging up notes.

Real Studies in Time Travel (and Real Life Oddities)

Don’t discount real science when writing science fiction . A recent computer simulation managed to come up with a possible solution to the grandfather paradox and even more recent studies have shown that, at least in terms of mathematical theory, time travel is entirely possible . In 2014, scientists studied the behavior of photons beamed through time.

Real-life oddities have also popped up from time to time: John Titor notably posted on internet forums in the early 2000s, claiming that he was a time traveler from the year 2036 who came with the purpose of warning mankind. In 2006, a man called Håkan Nordkvis claimed that he had found a worm-hole through to meet his 72-year old self under his sink—yes, that does remind us just a little of Being John Malkovich , but somehow still not as weird…

About the author

Alex j coyne.

Alex J Coyne is an author, freelance journalist and language practitioner. He has written for international publications and blogs, been featured on radio and appeared in NB Publishers’ Skrik op die Lyf, an Afrikaans horror collection. Visit his website and get in touch at http://alexcoyneofficial.wordpress.com.

22/11/63 was so bad I could barely read it. I gave up on it. The book was written for a reason but it seems sure to me at least it wasn’t to investigate time-travel. Time-travel is a conceit, simple as that – an often dumb idea made somehow interesting whatever paradox it comes up against or overcomes or attempts to overcome.

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The Definitive Writer’s Guide to Time Travel (historical fiction tips and tricks)

Any writer can travel in time (it’s true), but to do it well takes effort…and a plan. Here is your complete plan to write convincing historical fiction or non-fiction.

Jenna Coleman did it. You can, too.

Jenna played the role of The Doctor’s companion , first as Oswin Oswald, then as Clara Oswin Oswald and finally flying off in the Tardis as Clara Oswald for three seasons.

After all that time travel to shake her up, you’d think she would be eager to plant her feet firmly in her own time. But, no, she went straight back to the mid 1800s, playing Queen Victoria in Victoria .

Writers often find that themselves zipping back and forth through time just to complete one novel.

Ghostwriters get even worse jet lag. They often live in multiple time zones, all at once. They might be working simultaneously on a romance novel set in early San Francisco, a drama unfolding in the court of Alexander the Great and a sci fi adventure at some unknown date in a dystopian future.

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Any writer can travel in time, but to do it well takes effort. Future travel is easy. We all know we’ll wear fish in our ears and scramble our particles in transporter beams.

Getting the past right in historical fiction is a little more challenging. Here is a good starter guide to getting the past right. Of course, it’s just a guide. Every book is different.

Time Travel Tips for Writers

Work with timelines

You should have at least two timelines before you even start writing. The first timeline, which is probably most obvious, is the timeline of the story you are writing about.

You might create several timelines for this, covering the protagonist, the antagonist and perhaps a few of the other main characters. You might even set out their events on two sides of a single line.

The second timeline should be a history line. It should include all major external events that could impact the story. For instance, you might want to include the start and end of World War II, even if the story is not war-related. It should also include all lesser events that are close to the story.

Time is a lot like space. You need to know where a story takes place and the major physical or visual aspects of the setting. You need also to know the time aspects of the setting.

With the two timelines in hand, you can cross reference the two. Make sure your story fits well into the historical timeline, and make adjustments if it does not.

If you plan to outsource your writing, you will save yourself a lot of frustration by getting this done before hiring a ghostwriter .

Technology and style of the day

No, they did not have flush toilets in the court of Kublai Khan. How will you deal with that? Technology touches everything. While transportation and communications might be obvious, simple home implements – such as flush toilets – can really color your story.

If someone drops by unexpectedly in colonial America, you can’t have the host just put a kettle on. They first have to load the stove up with wood.

As important as is the functionality of things in a different era, the appearance of those things makes a difference, too. Here are some questions to ask:

What would this person be wearing in this era? More specifically, it’s important to figure out what the person would be wearing in various situations, just as we have different outfits for different situations.

What about architecture and home décor? How did things look in the garden (were there gardens?) and in the various rooms? Your story might come before plastic was invented or before wall paper was in style, for example.

Vocabulary of the day

As soon as you have dialogue in historical fiction, you have language to contend with. How did people speak in those days.

If you go far enough back in time, you won’t be able to be totally authentic. After all, what type of English did the ancient Greeks speak? Even if you go back to Shakespeare’s time, the English of the day would make tough reading for us. Much better to use modern English vocabulary with some tweaks that give our modern minds a sense of days gone by.

Just as today, there were curses and there was slang in almost every era. Interjecting this more colorful language, where it would have been appropriate, gives your manuscript an air of authenticity. But be careful, because not all slang will be understood and not all curses will seem very sharp to today’s reader.

And that’s another thing to get right – social norms. Throughout history, the pendulum has swung between repressive and libertine. Make sure your manuscript reflects where the pendulum was at that time in history.

Time Travel Research Guide for Writers

If getting historical fiction right seems like a daunting task, there’s a reason. It is a daunting task. In fact, it might be a writer’s most daunting task.

There is a lot of information to seek that we just take for granted in our own time. And the information is not readily available. There are no year-by-year lists one can run to.

But there are places to turn:

Museums: There are history museums and there are art museums. Photos and paintings give us some idea of how the upper classes dressed, how they wore their hair, etc. Village museums give a glimpse of how ordinary people lived at a certain time.

Books: Many old novels describe the surroundings, and sometimes pictures give an idea of what people and their abodes looked like. Novels from the era can also give you a good idea how to color your dialogue.

Documentaries: Whenever a film is available, make a point to watch. It will give you a feel for how things might have been. Keep an open mind, though, because it will be mostly an educated guess.

Internet: Of course, the Internet is full of information and images.

Academics: If you are lucky enough to find an academic willing to work with you on historical accuracy, you have it made. Academics can provide input in advance, then “proofread” for historical accuracy.

Enthusiasts: Less reliable than academics, historical enthusiasts can also be helpful. You’ll find plenty of Civil War enthusiasts, but likely fewer with knowledge of 17 th century Finland.

Time travel is fun. And it’s even more fun if you are a writer or a singer in Hamilton . Or a Tardis passenger. Since Broadway is a long shot and blue boxes are in short supply these days, you might as well time travel as a writer.

David Leonhardt is President of The Happy Guy Marketing, a published author, a "Distinguished Toastmaster", a former consumer advocate, a social media addict and experienced with media relations and government reports.

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How to Write a Time Travel Story Without Paradoxes

The concept of time travel has long been a popular theme in fiction and film. Traveling back in time to alter the course of history is an alluring idea that has enthralled not just fiction writers but scientists as well. Yet, if you've ever seen or read a time travel story, you're aware that time travel is a tricky concept to grasp. It might be challenging to stay faithful to your worldbuilding concepts while simultaneously incorporating suitable temporal paradoxes.

For this reason, we will explore different paradoxes and go through various tips to help you write a time travel story without the risk of paradoxes.

Where does the idea of time travel come from?

Traveling across time is a shared universal dream. But where did the fascination with time travel begin, and why does the concept appeal to so many people? The lure of time travel has deeper origins. Appearing in some of our oldest stories , it is woven into the very fabric of our language and imagines a world without constraints of time and space. Its roots may be traced back to ancient tales of time travel found in numerous civilizations throughout the world, giving the notion its distinct characteristics derived from different cultures.

We come across time travel stories in ancient cultures throughout the world , although we cannot claim to know where the concept originally came from and who pioneered it. However, we can observe that the genre rose to prominence in the nineteenth century. From this time period comes Charles Dickens' classic novella A Christmas Carol , in which Ebenezer Scrooge travels both ahead and backwards in time. Around the same period, H.G. Wells popularized time travel in literature with his timeless novel The Time Machine , which featured the concept of a "time machine," which featured a vehicle that could travel purposefully and selectively in time. Inspired by this emblematic icon, many beloved time-travel stories published after this have incorporated some form of the time machine. Such is the famous TARDIS in the long-running BBC classic series Doctor Who , a blue box that can transcend time and space. Doctor who interestingly explores time travel paradoxes, with time paradoxes taking a center stage for many of its episodes.

Time travel paradoxes

There are many logical contradictions when it comes to time travel. Here are some of the major paradoxes:

Bootstrap paradox

The Bootstrap Paradox is a theoretical paradox of time travel that arises when an object transported back in time becomes locked within an unending cause-effect loop. This occurs as the travel in time takes place as a response to a specific event.

Consistency paradox

Consistency Paradoxes , such as the Grandfather Paradox , or the Hitler paradox , a type of timeline mismatch that arises from the prospect of changing the past. These paradoxes change history in such a way that time travel into the past, which caused such action in the first place, is no longer possible. To simply illustrate the paradox, in the film The Time Machine , a protagonist builds a time machine to travel back in time in order to save his fiancé from death. Her rescue, on the other hand, would lead to a future in which the machine never existed since her death was the direct motivation for its creation. But then, how is it you can go back and save your fiancé if her death hasn't given you the push to create the time machine? It results in a paradox. The timeline is no longer self-consistent.

Butterfly effect

The Butterfly Effect is based on Chaos Theory , which states that seemingly minor changes may have massive cascade responses over extended periods of time and that even minor changes can fundamentally reshape history. The name "Butterfly Effect" originates from Ray Bradbury's short tale " A Sound of Thunder ," in which a character in prehistoric times walks on a butterfly, causing massive changes in the future.

How to avoid these paradoxes

The self-healing hypothesis.

Writers seeking to escape the paradoxes of time travel have devised a variety of inventive methods for presenting a more consistent picture of reality. The self-healing hypothesis is one of the most basic solutions to any time travel paradox, implying that no matter what is changed in the timeline, the principles of quantum physics will self-correct to prevent a contradiction from arising and sustain the existing flow .

Because events would adapt themselves, a paradox would not occur. So, changing the past will trigger another alternative chain reaction that will keep the present unaltered. This effectively states that the likelihood of a paradox arising in any given circumstance is zero. The self-healing hypothesis simply indicates that no matter what a traveler has done in the past, the end outcome is the same in terms of global conditions. This does not rule out the possibility of changing the past, but it does eliminate the prospect of minor changes having the power to generate massive ones. Most crucially, as an author, you are not obligated to describe the particular events that repair time. It is enough to affirm that they take place and ensure that your event sequences and their conclusion are consistent.

Time traveling monitor

Another way to avoid temporal paradox would be creating the time traveling monitor that would follow the timeline protection hypothesis , which posits that any attempt to create a paradox would fail to owe to a probability distortion. The monitor would adjust the probability in order to avert any damaging events occurring, which would also give you free rein to come up with creative scenarios. Nonetheless, to prevent an impossible event from taking place, the universe must favor an improbable event occurring.

Balancing the timeline

The paradoxes themselves are intertwined and they can as well occur simultaneously. No one knows if a real-life paradox would result in a large-scale timeline alteration, or if the closed-loop is kind of automatically self-correcting since everything works out equally in the end. Going back to the Consistency Paradox, yet another approach to avoid it is to acknowledge, regretfully, that you can't and shouldn't attempt to change the past. That is unless you can rule out any chance of a bad domino effect as a result of your activities. In this manner, you can attempt to alter the past while keeping the chronology intact. This means following up the time-change event with another change that balances out the activities and ensures that the outcome remains the same despite the intervention.

The notion of a time loop is one of the most prevalent strategies to get away with time travel in science fiction. You may travel through time here, but any changes you make are predetermined. For example, suppose you were pushed out of the way of a car one day. You return to your timeline from the future and realize that that person was in reality you.

Paradoxes are avoided with this method of time travel, but everything is predetermined. If you wish to prevent a tragic incident from occurring in your past, there's nothing you can do since even if you could, it would still happen in the time loop. Whatever you did, the key events would just re-calibrate around you. This could be the solution for the Grandfather Paradox — that would mean that the event propelling you back in time would happen regardless of your actions, providing your younger self with the incentive to go back and stop it. To put it another way, a time traveler could make adjustments, but the original conclusion would still occur — perhaps not exactly as it did in the initial timeline, but near enough.

Parallel universe

There is also another possibility: creating a parallel universe . The future or past you visit might become a parallel reality. Consider it as a huge fortress where you may construct or demolish as many castles as you like, but it has no bearing on your primal stronghold. When you travel back in time, the future is gone, it never happened, and the universe will evolve anew, even if you do nothing to influence it. It does not affect the future you experienced, but it does affect the future of the reset world. That can entail creating a scenario in which the protagonists travel to the past and discover themselves in a parallel world or multiverse, with no change to their original chronology.

Countless science fiction stories have examined the conundrum of what would happen if you could travel back in time and do something that would jeopardize the future. Please note that you are free to make your own rules for it. This is your work of fiction. The universe will be as you will design it in your story. If the paradoxes do not exist in your story, then you may make up your own rules around it. You can as well bypass the rules your worldbuilding has established if you have a valid cause for doing so and if this is what your writing demands.

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Time Travel Short Stories: Examples Online

The short stories on this page all contain some form of time travel, including time loops. Some of them contain time machines or other technologies that makes the trip possible; in other stories the jump in time doesn’t have an obvious explanation. They don’t all involve obvious trips to the past or future. Sometimes, the story simply contains an element that is out of place in time. See also:

Short Stories About Time Travel

“caveat time traveler” by gregory benford.

The narrator spots the man from the past immediately. The visitor identifies himself. He’s surprised to find he’s not the first visitor from the past. He wants to take something back to prove he made it.

“Caveat Time Travel” can be read in the preview of The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF.

“Absolutely Inflexible” by Robert Silverberg

A time traveler in a spacesuit sits in Mahler’s office. He’s informed that he’ll be sent to the Moon, where all visitors from the past have to go. The man tries to get out of it, but Mahler explains why no exceptions are possible.

“Absolutely Inflexible” can be read in the preview of Time and Time Again : Sixteen Trips in Time.

“Yesterday Was Monday” by Theodore Sturgeon

When Harry Wright wakes up on Wednesday morning he realizes that yesterday was Monday. Somehow there is a gap. He notices that his environment doesn’t quite seem complete.

“Yesterday Was Monday” can be read in the preview of The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

“Death Ship” by Richard Matheson

The crew of a spaceship is collecting samples from various planets to determine their suitability for human habitation. While nearing a new planet, Mason spots a metallic flash. The crew speculates that it might be a ship. Captain Ross orders a landing to check it out.

“Death Ship” can be read in the preview of The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

“The Third Level” by Jack Finney

The narrator has been to the third level of Grand Central Station, even though everyone else believes there are only two. He’s just an ordinary guy and doesn’t know why he discovered this unknown level. He relates how it happened.

“The Third Level” can be read in the preview of About Time: 12 Short Stories.

“A Touch of Petulance” by Ray Bradbury

Jonathan Hughes met his fate in the form of an old man while he rode the train home from work. He noticed the old man’s newspaper looked more modern than his own. There was a story on the front page about a murdered woman—his wife. His mind raced.

This story can be read in the preview of Killer, Come Back To Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury.

“Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving

Rip Van Winkle is lazy at home but helpful to, and well-liked by, his neighbors. He’s out in the mountains one day to get away from things. With night approaching, he starts for home but meets up with a group of men. He has something to drink and goes to sleep, which changes everything.

This story can be read in the preview of The Big Book of Classic Fantasy .

“Twilight” by John W. Campbell

Jim picks up a hitch-hiker, Ares, who says he’s a scientist from the year 3059. He says he traveled millions of years into the future, but came back to the wrong year. Life in 3059 is trouble free, with machines taking care of everything. Future Earth is in trouble, with all life extinct, except for humans and plants.

This is the second story in the preview of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Vol 1 . (49% into preview)

“The Man Who Walked Home” by James Tiptree, Jr.

An accident at the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Facility decimated the Earth’s population and severely damaged the biosphere and surface. Decades later, a huge flat creature emerges from the crater at the explosion site and promptly disappeared. There are other sightings in the years that follow.

This story can be read in the preview of the anthology Timegates . (18% into preview)

“An Assassin in Time” by S. A. Asthana

Navy Seal Jessica Kravitz recovers from the effects of the time jump. She’s done it before, but there are always side-effects. She’s on a highly classified, very important, and expensive mission. Previous jumps have familiarized her with the grounds. This time, she should be able to reach her target.

This story can be read in the preview of AT THE EDGES: Short Science Fiction, Thriller and Horror Stories . (17% in)

“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang

Fuwaad, a fabric merchant, appears before the Caliph to recount a remarkable story. While looking for a gift, he entered a large shop with a new owner. It had a marvelous assortment of offerings, all made by the owner or under his direction. Fuwaad is led into the back where he’s shown a small hoop that manipulates time. He also has a larger gateway that people can walk through. The owner tells Fuwaad the stories of a few who did just that.

This story is on the longer side but doesn’t feel like it. Most of “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” can be read in the Amazon preview of Exhalation: Stories .

“Time Locker” by Harry Kuttner

Gallegher is a scientist—drunken, erratic and brilliant. He invents things but pays them little attention after. His acquaintance Vanning, an unscrupulous lawyer, has made use of some of these inventions, including a neuro-gun that he rents out. During a visit he sees a locker that is bigger inside than out. Fascinated with the item’s possibilities, he offers to purchase it.

Some of “Time Locker” can be read in the preview of The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

Time Travel Short Stories, Cont’d

“All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein

A young man explains to a bartender that he was born a girl. He (she) gave birth to a child and there were complications. The doctors noticed he (she) was a hermaphrodite and performed an emergency sex-change operation.

A lot of this story can be read in the preview of “ All You Zombies—”: Five Classic Stories .

“The Hundred-Light-Year Diary” by Greg Egan

The narrator meets his future wife, Alison, for lunch exactly when he knew he would. His diary told him. Everyone alive is allotted a hundred words a day to send back to themselves.

Most of this story can be read in the preview of Axiomatic . (Select Kindle first then Preview, 57% in)

“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov

Arnold Potterley, a Professor of Ancient History, wants to use the chronoscope—the ability to view a scene from the past—for his research on Carthage. The government maintains strict control over its use, and his request is denied. Frustrated, Potterley embarks on a plan to get around this restriction, which is professionally risky.

Some of this story can be read in the preview of The Complete Stories, Vol 1 . (6% in)

“Signal Moon” by Kate Quinn

Working with the Royal Naval Service, Lily Baines intercepts radio communications to enemy vessels for decoding. One night, everything changes when she picks up an impossible message—a plea for help from another time.

Preview of “Signal Moon”

“Journey to the Seed” by Alejo Carpentier

An old man wanders around a demolition site, muttering a string of incomprehensible phrases. The roof has been removed and, by evening, most of the house is down. When the site is deserted, the old man waves his walking stick over a pile of discarded tiles. They fly back and cover the floor. The house continues to rebuild. Inside, Don Marcial lies on his deathbed.

“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury

In the future, a company offers guided hunting safaris into the past to kill dinosaurs. Extreme care is taken to ensure nothing happens that could alter the present.

Read “A Sound of Thunder” (PDF Pg. 3)

“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” by Stephen King

Carol and Bill, married twenty-five years, are on their second honeymoon, driving to their destination. Carol experiences déjà vu; voices and images keep coming to her mind. Their drive comes to an end and she finds herself at an earlier point in their trip.

“The Clock That Went Backward” by Edward Page Mitchell

The narrator recounts the discovery surrounding a clock left to his cousin Harry by his Aunt Gertrude. As young boys they witnessed a strange event. Late one night Aunt Gertrude wound the clock, put her face to the dial, and then kissed and caressed it. The hands were moving backward. She fell to the floor when it stopped.

Read “The Clock That Went Backward”

“Soldier (Soldier from Tomorrow)” by Harlan Ellison

Qarlo, a soldier, is fighting in the Great War VII. He doesn’t expect to be able to go back. The odds are against it. Qarlo anticipates the Regimenter’s order and gets warped off the battlefield. He’s not sure where he is but his instincts kick in.

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester

Henry Hassel comes home to find his wife in the arms of another man. He could get his revenge immediately but he has a more intellectual plan. He gets a revolver and builds a time machine. He goes into the past.

“Cosmic Corkscrew” by Michael A. Burstein

The narrator is sent back to 1938 to make a copy of a rejected story by an unnamed writer. Unknown to Dr. Scheihagen, the narrator adjusts his arrival to three days earlier. He wants to make contact with the writer.

“Time’s Arrow” by Arthur C. Clarke

Barton and Davis, geologists, are assisting Professor Fowler with an excavation. The professor receives an invitation to visit a nearby research facility. Barton and Davis are curious to know what goes on there. The professor says he will fill them in, but after his visit he says he’s been asked not to talk about it. Henderson, from the research facility, returns the visit. Something he says starts the geologists speculating about a device that could see into the past.

“The Final Days” by David Langford

Harman and Ferris, presidential candidates, are participating in a televised debate. Ferris is struggling to connect with the audience while Harman relishes the attention. The technician signals Harman that there are fourteen watchers. His confidence increases.

Read “The Final Days”

“Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim

When Hwang is in a time he likes he tries to stay awake. Hwang jumps ahead in time when he sleeps. It could only be a few days; it could be years.

Read “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters”

“Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale

Two traveling salesmen, a father and son, get broke down on a desert road. They sit by the car and talk about how hard it is to make a living. The father tells his son about an unusual experience he had on the same road years ago.

Read “Fish Night”

“The Fox and the Forest” by Ray Bradbury

William and Susan Travis have gone to Mexico in 1938. They’re enjoying a local celebration. William assures Susan that they’re safe—they have traveler’s checks to last a lifetime, and he’s confident they won’t be found. Susan notices a conspicuous man in a café looking at them. She thinks he could be a Searcher, but William says he’s nobody.

“A Statue for Father” by Isaac Asimov

The narrator tells the story of his father, a theoretical physicist who researched time travel. He’s celebrated now, but it was a difficult climb. When time travel research fell out of favor, the dean forced him out. He continued the research independently with his son. Eventually, they succeed in holding a window open long enough for the son to reach in. He brings back some dinosaur eggs.

“The Pendulum” by Ray Bradbury

Layeville has been swinging in a massive glass pendulum for a long time. The people call him The Prisoner of Time. It’s his punishment for his crime. He had constructed a time machine and invited thirty of the world’s preeminent scientists to attend the unveiling.

Read The Pendulum

“Who’s Cribbing?” by Jack Lewis

A writer has his manuscript returned by a publisher. The story he submitted was published years before—he obviously plagiarized it. They warn him against doing this again. The writer has never heard of the author who first wrote the story and claims it’s an original work.

“Who’s Cribbing” is in Time Machines: The Best Time Travel Stories Ever Written.

I’ll keep adding short stories about time travel and time machines as I find more.

Not Your Usual Time Travel Story Ideas (2024)

Looking for unusual time travel story ideas and writing prompts? You’ve come to the right place!

Read on for ideas like a world where time flows differently in different regions, a person with an ability to travel in their dreams, and more!

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S tory ideas

Picture prompts

The time travel trope.

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Related posts: Tragic Love Story Ideas (2023) The Most Enticing Forbidden Love Story Ideas (Updated in 2023) 40+ Sad Backstory Ideas for Your Character (2023) 17+ Enticing Soulmate Story Ideas (2023)

Time Travel Story Ideas & Writing Prompts

Time travel has long been a captivating concept in storytelling, transporting us to narratives of endless possibilities. Now, let’s explore some unique and unconventional story ideas!

Please note that the genders in these prompts and story ideas are just placeholders and do not mean to enforce any hurtful stereotypes nor offend anyone.

Story ideas

From unexpected time travelers to unconventional methods of traversing through time, embark on a thrilling, time-bending adventure with these exciting ideas.

Lost Time A group of explorers stumbles upon an alien-made, time-traveling elevator that can transport them to different moments within their own lifetime, at the cost of reduced longevity.
Reversed A scientist makes a mistake in their time travel machine, which sends them spiraling into an alternate reality where time operates in reverse.
Past and Future Memories In a post apocalyptic world, a person finds that they can jump into the past as well as potential future memories of others. Then, they navigate through different people’s experiences in the hope of finding a way to undo the effect of the apocalypse.
Time is Money In a world where time flows differently in different regions, a society formed where time travelers exist and time itself can be a commodity. (Originally appeared in my post The Most Mesmerizing Fantasy World Ideas (2023) )
Chronicler of Lost History A person wakes up every day in a different time period, with no control over when or where they’ll end up next. As they try to find out why, they realize that their purpose is to witness and document crucial moments in history that have been erased from collective memory.
Time-Traveling Detective In a time when time travel is possible, a time-traveling detective agency specializes in solving crimes and incidents that occur across different points in time.
Network of Selves There’s a new invention that allows people to split their consciousness into multiple timelines, creating a network of parallel selves.
Tour Across Time Time travel is a regulated industry, and a tour guide accidentally takes a group of tourists to a time period that never existed, causing a ripple effect that alters the course of history.
Time-Traveling Companion There’s a peculiar type of animals that have the innate ability to traverse time. Once they form a unique bond with a human, the bond will allow that human to time travel along with said animal.

The Time Capsule After unearthing a long-forgotten time capsule, a tight-knit group of friends is transported back to their younger selves. (A similar concept appeared in my post Beyond the Mundane: Captivating Slice of Life Story Ideas (2023) )
The Time Thief A physicist accidentally creates a device that allows them to move between parallel universes. They exploit this power to commit crimes across dimensions, staying one step ahead of authorities.
The Reversed Time Traveler A time traveler’s machine malfunctions, causing them to experience life in reverse. Frustrated by their reversed existence, they seek to disrupt the flow of time itself.
Cheering Through Time An alien with the ability to explore different time periods gets stranded on earth and befriends a cheerleader. But as the two jump between time periods, they unwittingly start a chain of event that might spell catastrophe for both of their home planets.
Happy Days Specific emotional triggers can create a quantum leap, launching individuals through time to a moment in the past or future when a similar emotional event occurred.

Here are some time travel picture prompts, because a picture speaks a thousand words! What kind of time travel prompt or story jumps out at you when looking at the picture prompts below?

The concept of time travel has fascinated storytellers for generations, offering endless possibilities and narrative intrigue, allowing writers to explore the complexities of cause and effect, challenge the boundaries of linear time, and delve into the profound impact of altering the past or glimpsing into the future.

In time travel stories, protagonists often find themselves in paradoxes and moral dilemmas as they attempt to correct past mistakes, change the course of history, or prevent catastrophic events where the smallest alteration can have far-reaching repercussions.

Time travel narratives also provide a fertile ground for exploring themes of identity, self-discovery, and the relentless march of time, prompting characters and readers alike to ponder the nature of free will and the fragility of existence.

If you need more story ideas and prompts, please browse our Story Ideas & Writing Prompts category!

Have any question or feedback? Feel free to contact me here . Until next time!

Crime Thriller Story Ideas That Captivate Us (Updated in 2024)

Tragic Love Story Ideas We’re Rooting For (Updated in 2024)

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So You Want To / Write a Time-Travel Story

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So You Want To Write a Science Fiction Story - Time-Travel stories are often a Sub-Genre of Science Fiction (and for that reason, this guide, may also be useful to you), but if you are not inclined towards science or physics, and what draws you to this type of story is the kinds of strange adventures you can explore, perhaps you may want to look into some Fantasy, Science Fantasy or even Urban Fantasy concepts, after all, magic can cause users to time-travel in some stories. But, if you’re playing with Soft Sci-Fi, or Science Fantasy, a lot of what I have to say here is much more loosely applicable, as Soft Sci-Fi often plays hard and fast with scientific concepts and research. However, if you are more interested in something with a semblance of scientific fortitude, then it’s good to look at some of the fundamentals of writing Science-Fiction before specifically looking into the time-travel aspect of such stories.
Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness - Writing always has some challenge, but I am not referring to hard/easy difficulty, so much as just how much science you want in your fiction. If you want to explore more scientific concepts, of causality, paradox & relativity, and you’re interested in the mechanics of divergent time-streams and other pseudo-scientific principles, then you’re likely hoping to explore Hard Sci-Fi. However, if you’re not as interested in the science and physics as much as the story and the adventure, the unusual time-periods - dinosaurs and robots - then you’re probably wanting to write something that is Soft Sci-Fi, which means you needn’t stress too hard about figuring out the science-fiction theory - heck, this may not be science-fiction at all! You can have a Fantasy or Science Fantasy story, using magic to travel through time.
Pros: One of the benefits of this is that it often means that the person is displaced literally just in time - especially if the portal travels to “itself” - the person steps through the portal, and steps out of the same portal in the same place, but a different time period (although this is not necessary ). This is useful not only for travellers to get their bearings, but it means that the Portal cannot be stolen (although, it is possible that it may be taken over ). For dramatic purposes, having the portal stay still can add to the tension, because it means that in order to deal with any problems happening in any particular time-period, your traveller must physically remove themselves from the location of the portal in order to go anywhere, which can add tension if they ever want to use the portal to change the period they reside in, or even simply to get back home. Another benefit is that this type of time travel may be “naturally occurring”, which means it doesn’t require a device to work at all - fantastic if you don’t want your main character to be a scientist of some sort. It may be a wormhole, or even simply a “time slip” in a room, a crack in a rock, or an empowered patch of wheat in a field somewhere, removing any need for a time machine inventor, if you wish.
Cons: The detriments of these portals, is that they can often have limited control. For instance, with a naturally-occurring time portal, whilst, you may travel through the portal, or back, it means you can only visit two pre-determined time-periods - when you were, and when you end up. Even if the portal is in the control of some “portal device”, it may mean that a traveller is unable to travel to any time before such a portal was invented, as otherwise there will be no portal device on the other side to step through to, meaning it either will not work , or any attempts will cause... dysfunction . Which brings up another issue, can the time portal be opened or closed? Even if the portal doesn’t require a device to “contain” it, this can still mean that if a portal closes after a traveller steps through, they may be stuck in whatever time they just stepped into, with no way back - or , they may even be left at the mercy of those controlling the portal back home to re-open the doorway and allow them back, which may add a ticking-clock element to a time-travel story if they must locate the returning portal at a certain time ; or even a certain place , creating a road trip plot where they must get to the new location of the return portal, in order to get back home.
Pros: The benefits of a time vehicle are that the vehicle itself is often a Cool Ride , and it can not only be very viscerally exciting for your audience, but it can also lead to many merchandising opportunities on your part (if you’re into that kind of thing). The design of a time vehicle can even be thematically, aesthetically or narratively relevant to your story, like the iconically British phonebox visage of the TARDIS from the BBC’s Doctor Who , or Emmett Brown’s cheap, modified DeLorean, from Back to the Future with its iconic gull-wing doors and many plot-relevant operating issues, or even the classic look of the time-travelling sled from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine , which is “technically” a vehicle, but cannot be physically moved under its own power. As well, the fact that time vehicles move means that they have an advantage for the user, as they will have transport and perhaps even some protection within their vehicle. Of course, if the machine is a space-ship, then that opens up several more possibilities for potential stories , exploring Space Opera tropes and aliens; but this is true of many forms the vehicle may take, be it a time-travelling tank , a time-travelling racecar or even, dare I suggest, a time-travelling Giant Mecha ? This often also includes the benefit that the time traveller usually has more control over their vehicle, and may be free to choose the place and time they wish to travel to, opening up a whole timeline of possibilities for their adventures (although, again, there’s no guarantee).
Cons: However, the time vehicle is not without flaws. Namely time vehicles are notoriously difficult to operate, as time travel is often a highly-precise ; energy-intensive ; resource-heavy or even violent operation, which can lead to dysfunction , malfunction or tragedy if the time traveller isn’t fully versed in the safe operation of the vehicle. This also means that a time vehicle is prone to breaking, meaning that a traveller may be forced to fix the vehicle before they can Get Back to the Future . Also, if your vehicle is too uniquely designed, it may be conspicuous and attract a lot of attention in certain time periods - even if it’s not unique, if a device is taken to a time before that vehicle was invented (such as, taking an aeroplane to medieval times), you may not only confuse and scare the locals but possibly even cause a temporal paradox on sight , and travelling to the future in a machine which is outdated may be ''just'' as conspicuous . Another issue is that if the time machine is a single device which travels with you, then the traveller is at the most risk in the event that their vehicle is commandeered by someone with ill intent , as they will have lost their only means of returning to their domestic time-period .
Pros: This obviously has the benefit that it requires less preparation on the part of the user, they not only do not need to drive a vehicle, but they don’t even have to take a single step, they simply need to activate the ability. It also means that their travel can be more inconspicuous, so long as they travel to a place and time where persons like them existed (although they may have to change their clothing so as to fit in ), and don’t do so in the middle of a crowded street. This form of time-travel is also the least susceptible to theft, especially if the ability is natural/biological making theft highly improbable (but not impossible). Also, whilst time travel can be just as difficult no matter the device used, as the time jumper often requires either innate ability or a compact device, the time travel mechanics are usually much simpler or safer to operate, in order to allow for a single person to travel unprotected, and/or for the mechanism itself to be so compact. This also means that they often have a low energy cost and/or resource drain, requiring low - or no - maintenance.
Cons: There are, of course, some downsides. Firstly, the fact that the traveller is so exposed means that there are some places which will be much harder, if not impossible to journey to, such as into a warzone, or anywhere with radiation or extreme heat, cold or weather, any place without an immediate ground to stand upon & anywhere lacking atmosphere; and the very instant that the traveller materializes/appears in their chosen time, they are vulnerable to any present dangers. Also, if this is a natural/innate ability, then precision is generally much harder to achieve, meaning that a person may only be able to jump forward or backward several dozen, hundred or thousand years at a time (or, in some cases, they may only be able to make small jumps forward or back a few minutes or hours, depending on the scope of the story). But, even if precision is possible, there’s still the issue that this kind of travel often limits the travelling capacity to ‘one’, meaning that if the traveller makes any friends ( or lovers ) along the way, or they wish to save someone from their fate/destiny , they probably won’t be able to simply stow them away on their return journey, and thus all problems faced in any time-period must be solved in the present moment (relatively speaking). Also, on the rare but nonetheless possible occasion that such a device does break, it may take some incredibly precise skills and technical efforts to repair, if it’s not entirely impossible to repair at all - especially if this is some innate or biological ability, as depending on its mechanism it may require surgical expertise, physiotherapy, biochemistry or, in some cases, mental or psychiatric care in order to be “repaired”. Also, this form moreso than the others is the most prone to giving the time-traveller no control at all as to when a time jump is initiated, or in which time period they will arrive .
Mental Time Travel : This is when a person cannot travel physically, and can only take their memories/thoughts with them , and often requires them to possess the body of someone who does physically exist in that time. This may mean that a traveller is confined to their own lifetime, only able to possess the mind of their past or future self; but this sometimes allows the traveller to invade the mind and body of a contemporary of the time they travel to, à la Quantum Leap .
The Slow Path : when someone either simply waits for the future to come, or occasionally is placed/imprisoned in stasis or in a time-dilation field for a long period of time, getting to the future that way. This is often the most scientifically accurate form of time-travel, but it limits travel to a one-way trip.
Love Transcends Spacetime : This is more common in Soft Sci-Fi, and may result in The Power of Love allowing a time-displaced couple to reunite. It takes many forms, as it is more a magical concept, so I won’t go into explicit detail, except to say that unless you’re writing a Romance, this is a weird choice...
Adventures in the Bible : Someone travels to the past, to experience or re-enact a well-known story from history (often a biblical one, hence the trope name, but not necessarily).
Back to the Early Installment : The characters in an established story use time-travel to return to a previous point in that story, such as an earlier chapter, episode, instalment or series.
Christmas Every Day : A story where Christmas (or another holiday/special occasion) repeats every day - often used to teach some kind of moral about that day’s importance, but not necessarily.
Conqueror from the Future : A conqueror from the future goes back in time to start his conquest in the past.
Future Self Reveal : Someone is revealed to be the future version of someone else.
Get Back to the Future : Someone gets stuck in the past and has to find their way back.
Godwin's Law of Time Travel : Someone tries to change the past, and ends up creating an alternate history where the Nazis won - this is worryingly easy to do in fiction.
"Groundhog Day" Loop : Someone - or a group of people - gets stuck repeating the same day.
Ominous Message from the Future : Someone from the future send a message back in time, warning that something bad is going to happen.
Precrime Arrest : Someone is arrested for a crime they haven't even committed yet.
Set Right What Once Went Wrong : Using time travel to undo bad events/consequences from history.
Terminator Twosome : Two people go back in time, one to change history and one to stop them.
Time Police : People who either outlaw time travel or enforce laws related to time travel.
Time-Travel Romance : Falling in love with someone from another time.
Trapped in the Past : Someone ends up in the past without knowing how to come back.
You Will Be Beethoven : Someone travels to a significant historical event, whereby the historical figure at the centre of that event dies (or never existed) and realizes that in order for the timeline to remain intact, they will have to "be" that person.

Levels of Time-Line Mutability

Pros : This is light on temporal mechanics, since it requires a perfectly stable time-loop, and deviation from the set path is inherently impossible. It also appears to be the most scientifically consistent form of time-travel, as (in part due to the Anthropic Principle), we’ve only ever experienced time happening one way, so it makes sense that there is only one timeline. It can also be satisfying for the viewer to see, out of order, how exactly you tie up every loose thread of your story to stabilize the timeloop (assuming you DO tie up all the loose threads ).
Cons : Writing a story that sidesteps paradoxes doesn’t always satisfy reader curiosity. Sure, you avoided the Grandfather Paradox when the grandson’s assassination attempt failed, but that doesn’t actually address the paradox, so it can leave some readers wondering about what might have happened , instead of paying attention to the plot. Similarly, the fact that time is unchangeable brings up issues of why the main characters bothered to travel through time in the first place... you can’t exactly Set Right What Once Went Wrong if the timeline is fixed and unchanging. This often results in plots where ignorance or naivete is the driving force behind most time-travel, which can turn your story into an Idiot Plot . Also, the fixed timeline may evoke the creeping realization that we have no willpower, freedom of choice or hope of escaping our inevitable destiny , which can really bum some viewers out.
The Rubber Timeline - In this case, there is one time-line and you cannot change the past, because if you try, the timeline will adjust to correct itself. The name says it all, as much as you try to push against it, it just pushes back. This can take two forms, the rubber ball and the rubber band . To explain them, let’s look at the example of the Grandfather Paradox .
Pros : This resolves the issue of the Butterfly of Doom , whereby any action taken in the past could have catastrophic consequences, since any minor missteps in the past will be resolved by the time you get back home. Also, this kind of change appears to be giving Time itself a will and perhaps even a personality (perhaps playful, perhaps vindictive), as time itself is acting against your changes to fix it, which can help with the tone of your story. It’s also suitable for Soft Sci-Fi or Fantasy stories, especially if you don’t want to deal with Alternate History .
Cons : Just as with the Fixed Timeline, this may bring up daunting questions regarding free will, meaning & hope in a universe with an unchanging future. Also, depending on how characters act in the past, you may need to explain why killing George Washington didn’t change history as we know it , or why we don’t see time bounce back against changes happening in the present. For these reasons, many writers are forced to combine a Rubber Timeline with some other form of timeline, implying that time can change, but only if you do something significant, which is not a point in favour of this kind of timeline, you have to alter its mutability just to make it work.
Pros : This has all the pros of the fixed timeline that you have stable time loops and avoid paradoxes without the con of predestination paradoxes or loss of free will and choice, since the characters still have agency to choose. But if they make the wrong choice, it might destroy time/life/reality as we know it. Another advantage is that the way the timeline breaks may be interesting to explore. There have even been stories/chapters/episodes which start with time being broken, so as to explore what a world is like with broken time, and challenge the heroes to fix it (or endure its inevitable destruction). This can also set a tense atmosphere for your story, since it means characters won’t travel back in time unless it is worth the extreme risk .
Cons : If the destruction of time is too catastrophic, or you reuse the threat of its destruction too many times , then it can lend your characters some Plot Armour , as the audience realizes there’s still so many pages, or so much run-time, left, so obviously the universe has to continue for at least that much longer (although you could be all avant-garde, and end your story by leaving the last half blank after a time-wipe). And if you want your characters to break the fragile timeline during the course of your story, you’ll need to find some way of breaking time that suits your story and doesn’t feel like something you’re making up just so you can get to the next chapter already .
The Branching Timeline - In this case, there is one time-line, and you can change the past, but doing so creates a second timeline. This resolves paradoxes by simply saying that any paradoxical events happened in the other timeline. This resolves some issues, but there’s two main ways to have a branching timeline perform, either with the original branches are pruned and left crooked , or the branches split .
Pros : This kind of timeline resolves the paradoxes by giving you more timeline to work with, and it can create the classic Set Right What Once Went Wrong scenario, as well as give you the chance to explore alternate histories without having to rewrite your story’s canon (unless you want to). Also, if you use the split timeline version, it can create some fascinating stories as well as narrative structures, switching between, especially if you have the two timelines interact somehow - it’s even been used in non-science fiction stories . And if you create several split time-lines, you might even create a Multiverse !
Cons : If you create several split time-lines, you might even create a Multiverse . Alternate History can be confusing at the best of times, but Alternate Continuity is almost impossible to wrangle, even with several writers at the helm, and some readers find it overwhelming. But even without a multiverse, the split timeline creates the issue that you still can’t actually change the timeline, since any attempt leaves the timeline as it was, and creates a new, different timeline. Which reality is actually real ? And you might need to consider, if a villain changes history, and you go back and stop them, are you actually “repairing history” or simply “creating a third timeline branch in which you won”, effectively leaving behind two branches of reality where you failed .
Pros : It means the audience can more easily relate to the characters as they feel contemporary, no matter when you start reading. It also helps to set the tone for a less-realistic story or cartoon, especially for a Long Running Series
Cons : It makes literally no sense if you try to understand how the timeline works , and it punishes long-time fans for bothering to remember older publications of your story. Unless you want to attempt to make sense of it all... Also, some attempts to appeal to modern audiences can fall flat .
Pros : This allows for a much more fun, free and adventurous story, as you don’t need to worry too much about timeline consistency - you can use the rules which suit the chapter or episode of your story as you see fit, to make it work. It can fit well into a Soft Sci-Fi or Fantasy story very well, and it can be used for comedy. It also means that if two of the timeline concepts appeal to you, but you can’t decide, you can easily use them both. A timeline may be fixed, until some catastrophic cosmic event causes it to branch apart. Perhaps a timeline is rubbery and self-healing, but if you stretch it too far it branches off into several timelines. Or perhaps the timeline is brittle, but when you accidentally break it, you realize it’s actually been fixed all along and completely unchanging. Or, a timeline could be a branching timeline, but as you split it too far, it weakens reality and becomes brittle. There’s much more freedom to play with concepts, if you don’t want to follow strict rules.
Cons : Some readers like Rules. It doesn’t matter if your science device can cause you to create matter out of thin air, or uses perpetual motion machines, oe even magic, some readers are willing to suspend suspension of disbelief so long as the unrealistic effects remain consistent . Similarly, this does work best with a more light-hearted tone. That’s not to say you can’t have darker or more serious stories with a Wibbly-Wobbly Timeball, but if there’s more freedom to affect the flow of time, it might be harder to explain why you can’t go back and stop your mother’s death, whilst you can go back and punch Hitler in the face. But, if you do start trying to explain how this stuff “works”, it can easily degrade into Continuity Porn if you go too far, turning a concept designed to sidestep all this overthinking, and turn it into an exercise in excessive over-rethinking.

Paradox Events

What is a causal paradox.

To clap your hands : The Cause is swiftly colliding your hands together, the Effect is a loud “smack” sound.

To kick a ball : The Cause is your foot colliding with the ball at speed, the Effect is the ball moving.

This is not only necessary for understanding consequence, but also physics. Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that “For every Action there is an Equal and Opposite Reaction”. Clapping your hands with force results in a soundwave (W) with force equivalent to the clapping force’s kinetic energy (Wk) through the potential energy (Wp) of the medium, in this case air (W = Wp + Wk); Kicking a ball with force 𝑦 results in the ball moving at a speed of (mass x acceleration) equivalent to that force (F=ma). So, Cause not only leads to Effect, it should also equal Effect, at least in the context of “work”. I’m not a physicist (and don’t worry, I’m going to stop with the sciencey/mathsy jargon now), but what matters is that you can’t get something for nothing , as it has to balance out somehow. And more importantly, perhaps just as importantly, an Effect can itself be the Cause of another Effect in a Causal Chain. Line up dominoes and tip the first. This causes the first to collide with the next, with the effect of it tipping over; which causes it to collide with the next, with the effect of tipping that one over; causing it to collide with another, again and again until the last piece falls over in the line. These are the fundamentals of causality. Causal Paradoxes break this rule, by having Effect precede Cause; Effects without Causes or, in some cases, disruption of these fundamental Causal Chains. So, what kind of Paradoxes can result?

Consistency Paradox (or, “Grandfather Paradox”)

This one is the most well-known, but it’s also the most common (and easiest to understand). The example given is always the grandfather. If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before either of your parents are born, then due to the disruption of your ancestry, you can’t be born, and therefore don’t exist. Which begs the question, if you don’t exist... how can you kill your grandfather (what caused that effect)? Now, with apologies to all the nice grandfathers out there, the purpose of this avocide isn’t out of malice, but a thought experiment. But any equivalent action that prevents the Cause after the Effect would be a “grandfather paradox”. If you went back in time, and killed your grand mother , same paradox; if you went back in time and stole the phlebotinum needed to build the time machine, same paradox; if you went back in time and (somehow) sterilized your grandfather, same paradox; if you went back in time and tripped yourself before you stepped into the time machine, same paradox, & even if you went back in time and caused World War III, resulting in the destruction of your native country, meaning that nobody could have been born there, including you… also same paradox. This is the most common paradox as it’s the easiest to fall into by mistake, since if you go back in time “for a reason”, then by resolving the problem you are also removing the need to go back in time in the first place, creating this paradox once again. Consider a common one - Kill Hitler - Adolf Hitler is one of History’s most infamous tyrants and genocidal maniacs, and that has inspired a lot of people to say, if they had a time machine, they would go and kill Hitler. But, if you go back in time and Kill Hitler as a baby… then Hitler doesn’t exist, doesn’t create that history, meaning that by travelling in time, you remove the desire to travel back in time in the first place.

Ontological Paradox (or, “Bootstrap Paradox”)

You go to your garage, and discover a time machine there
You go back in time (Adventure Ensues…).
You arrive back at your house, five minutes before you left.
Since you had so much fun, you park the time machine in your garage for you to find.
You go to your garage, and discover Time Machine blueprints there
You build the time machine from metal, wiring and Phlebotinum from the local store
You go back in time (Adventure Ensues…)
Since you had so much fun, you copy the instructions to build a time machine in a notebook that says “Time Machine blueprints” in your garage for you to find.

It’s a perfect time loop... but that’s the problem. Who invented the time machine? Sure, all the matter is accounted for, but where did the idea come from? Remember, you can’t get something for nothing, so how can you learn something (especially something as complex as time-machine construction), without it ever being discovered? This kind of paradox is also known as a Causal Loop, since it has no definitive starting cause in the loop of recurrent events, implying that “the loop caused itself”. Causal Loops apply to any effect without a definitive cause, not just ideas for inventing time machines. A lot of works of fiction use this as a joke, where some famous quote, lesson, song, joke or concept gets explained to the “creator” by the time traveller. But, if the time traveller learnt it because it was passed down through culture over time by the creator, and the creator learned it because the time-traveller told them… who learnt it first?

Fermi Paradox : The discrepancy between the high potential for the existence of aliens, compared with the rarity of evidence for aliens. Often expressed simply as "if aliens exist, why haven't we found any yet?". Whilst Enrico Fermi initially used this to refer to the possibility of alien life, the same paradox holds true for time travel. Namely, "if time travel where possible, where are all the time travel tourists?"
Imaginary Time : This is a mathematical representation of time in special relativity, which posits the existence of a temporal dimension which runs perpendicular to time, as we experience it, effectively creating two-dimensional time (note: this goes deep down the quantum mechanics rabbithole, so it may be a bit advanced if you're not an advanced physics student).
Novikov Self-Consistency Principle : This is a principle which asserts that temporal paradoxes are impossible. It was proposed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov. In all honesty, whilst he wrote a book about the subject of "closed timelike curves", this principle was little more than his opinion, but it sounds good for technobabble.
Ontological : Regarding one's being, or existence. As existence is often referred to as temporal, time travel has the potential for bringing up ontological dilemmas.
Retrocausality : Relating to a cause which comes after its effect.
San Dimas Time : An arbitrary, or artificial, sense of urgency during a time travel story, despite the fact that the ability to time travel would render any deadline ineffective (may be justifiable, depending on the temporal mechanics of a story).
Everywhen - To exist throughout all time, (the temporal equivalent of "everywhere").
Nowhen - To not exist in time, at all (the temporal equivalent of "nowhere").
Precedent - An instance of something, or someone, from an earlier time; past version; antecedent; precursor.
Subsequent - An instance of something, or someone, from an earlier time; future version; consequent; resultant.
Somewhen - At some unknown or unspecific time (the temporal equivalent of "somewhere").
Whenabouts - The time someone, or something, is generally occupying (the temporal equivalent of "whereabouts").

Alternative Title(s): Time Travel Tales

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Time Travel Stories That Explore What It Means To Be Human

Holly smale recommends kate atkinson, octavia butler, and more.

The inspiration for Cassandra In Reverse came—as art sometimes does—from heartbreak, or something quite like it. A short but intense relationship that unravelled so quickly, and so unexpectedly, I was left reeling. What had gone wrong? Was it my fault? What could I have done differently?

Caught in a familiar, never-ending thought-loop, I spent months trapped inside my own head: obsessively re-running the entire relationship in enormous detail, looking for clues, searching for the point where it all went wrong. If I could just go back and tweak it—say the right thing, understand a facial expression I completely misinterpreted—would it have had a different ending? Would it, perhaps, not have ended at all?

As I worked through this familiar yet confusing process—carefully editing a memory and allowing my imagination to play out the consequences in detail—I slowly realized it was an idea for a book: a woman, gifted with the power of time travel, who initially uses it to try and fix her relationship. But, when I pitched it to my agent, she had a few understandable questions. Why would anyone become so hyper-fixated on a short-term relationship like that? Why obsess, and repeat, and re-run? Why not just… let go and move on?

The answer to that question came with my autism diagnosis, a few years later. As I grappled with understanding my own neurology properly for the first time, I realized that the way I thought and behaved was tied, inexorably, to the fact that I was autistic. The need to repeat, to loop, to hyper-fixate, to obsess, to examine, to study, to analyze: I did it because I was autistic. Thus, rather than being a time-travel book with an incidentally autistic protagonist, this was a protagonist who time travelled because she was autistic: because the very act of time travel was, on a macroscopic scale, a narrative version of what goes on in her brain anyway.

I think there’s a part of every human who wonders if editing a part of their life would make a difference to where they ended up. But, in using time travel to reflect my character’s internal workings, I was able to give Cassandra a way to show her distinct neurology, instead of just telling us.

So much of being autistic is in attempting—and often failing—to connect to the world around us, and time travel allows Cassie try, over and over again. It allows her to explore what it’s like to carry time with you—blessed, and cursed, with an intense long-term memory—and to see what life is like when you get a dress-rehearsal first. It allows her to search for love, just as I have searched, and to try to understand those around me, as I have also tried. And it allowed me, as the writer, to repeat, to loop, and to undo and redo, to my heart’s content.

My favorite books are those where character and plot become one and the same. And, while time travel has been done so many times, Cassandra in Reverse is, in many ways, simply autistic neurology writ large, which felt like a slightly new perspective worth bringing to the table.

The best time travel stories, for me, allow the writer to essentially explore what it means to be human, and the incredible books I have picked below do exactly that.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

In this beautiful novel, Kate Atkinson uses a form of time-travel to investigate the fragility of being alive in a warm, luminous and witty way. Ursula is consistently dying and being re-born—with each life repeating until she uses her memories (and often instinct) to send it in slightly different directions and make alternative choices. One of the biggest issues of writing a time travel book is making sure that the repetition isn’t boring for the reader, and this book does that sublimely. Every sentence is so beautifully and clearly observed, and its companion book ( A God In Ruins ) plays with an off-shoot of the same basic idea: where would we all end up if we got another chance?

Kindred by Octavia Butler

An incredibly powerful novel, Kindred centers on the lives and experiences of slaves through the eyes of Dana—a Black woman living in 1976—who finds herself repeatedly pulled through time to the slave plantation of one of her ancestors in 1815. Time travel is used with enormous poignancy to explore race, gender and power dynamics through the eyes of a woman with modern sensibilities: a woman who cannot escape the time she has been thrown into, or the inevitable pain and struggle that comes with it. Every character feels alive, every story is explored and compassion is woven into every line: even for the brutal white plantation owners, who also seem caught in a time they cannot escape from. An astonishing book, as well as a vibrant and fascinating narrative that pulls the reader backwards in time along with its heroine.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

No list about time travel would be complete without a nod to what is generally considered the first book to popularize the concept, as well as the first to coin the term ‘time-machine’. In his novella, H.G. Wells uses the eponymous Time Traveller—never given a name—to question the “fourth dimension,” and a human’s ability to travel through time as well as space. He uses time travel to move only forward, thus the book becomes a searing social dystopian examination of what human society—and the earth itself—will eventually become if it continues on the same path, and peers at the living standards of the working class through the lens of the underground Morlocks. Weird, dark, morbid but brilliant, this book opened up a brand new genre and still has enormous power.

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneger

The focus of The Time Traveler’s Wife is love, predominantly from the perspective of the person who doesn’t time-travel: who is, essentially, left behind with the consequences. The connection between Henry, a man with a genetic condition that causes him to time-travel, and Clare—the woman he falls in love with—feels so real, as does the heartbreak, but it is the impact of waiting that really stands out: a sense of longing for a person, or a time, that has been or yet to come.

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore

An incredibly entertaining and poignant novel, Oona is a unique character: one gifted—or cursed—with experiencing each year of her life in the wrong order: hopping forwards and backwards in time, and attempting to piece it together into one cohesive whole. It’s a novel that explores the impact our life choices have on us, externally and internally, and allows the characters to develop organically on the inside, even as her outside jumps around. It also has immense fun with technology, the use of ‘seeing the future’ to financially profit, and how foresight doesn’t necessarily prevent it all happening again, but this is a book that predominantly focuses on the importance of making mistakes, as well as embracing every age of being human.

__________________________________

Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale is available from MIRA Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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10 Ideas for a Time Travel Story

Here are 10 quick ideas for a time travel story, including everything from colonies in the distant past and future, to time traveling Jews, Jesus, and jealous husbands.

If one of these ideas inspires you to create a time travel story of your own, let us know and we’ll share it with out community!

1. Future War

A future dictator invades the past. He sends giant war machines into 19th Century London, Paris and Washington, and he demands that all world leaders surrender to him. It’s up to a team of time traveling heroes to stop him.

2. As Time Goes By

A scientist discovers that he can slow down time in a localized area. He can use this to visit the future (and stop off anywhere along the way), but he can never go back. At first, he uses the device to prolong his own life, spending a day inside the time-bubble as a month passes outside. Later, curiosity compels him to travel into the distant future in search of new wonders and a fresh start.

Our protagonist finds a future world full of wonders, and he begins to build a new life for himself. But when things start to go wrong, he finds himself traveling forward yet again. Eventually, the urge to travel forward becomes irresistible as he searches for perfection. Is he really searching for something, or just running from his own past?

As our traveler comes to the end of his life he realizes that, while he has seen more than most people, he hasn’t really lived at all. He’s spent his whole life running.

3. Doing Time

Using a time machine, a penal colony is established in Earths distant future – a future in which humanity is extinct and the sun is approaching the end of its natural life-cycle. When the end finally comes, do the guards evacuate the prisoners or leave them to their fate?

4. The Man You Used To Be

After his wife leaves him, a scientist travels back in time to be with her again. He’s determined to get it right the second time around, and thinks he knows what to do to keep her happy. But when he travels into the past he comes across an obstacle he hadn’t counted on – the past version of himself.

SEE ALSO: Travelling in time but NOT space

Desperate to be with his wife again, he plots to do the unthinkable – he plans to murder his past self and take his place.

There are two obvious ways in which this story could end, each equally as ironic. 1) He kills his former self and is happily reunited with his wife, but after spending one perfect day together the time paradox begins to kick in and he vanishes into oblivion. 2) He kills his former self, but his wife recognizes that he is not the man he used to be. Because of what he’s been through and what he’s done, he’s changed, and his wife can see it in his eyes. She leaves him again.

5. Future Tense

Fearing the extinction of humanity is on the horizon, a large group of humans travel into Earths distant future to avoid the catastrophe. They arrive in a time in which the Earth has recovered from the disaster, and in which all traces of human civilization have disappeared. Many animal species have evolved beyond recognition. In this new wilderness, they attempt to build a home.

Knowing that the end of human civilization is near, people are desperate to travel to the future colony. With a limited number of places available, people fight for the last remaining passes. Eventually, the future colony finds itself with too many mouths to feed.

6. Past Participants

With the destruction of Earth imminent, humanity begins colonizing the distant past. The colonization effort slowly begins to interfere with the timeline. Each group of colonists that arrives from the future has experienced a different version of history, with increasingly interesting results.

One group of time travel colonists is from a fascist timeline in which the Nazis won the Second World War, and they try to take over the colony. Another group reports having found the remains of the colony during a future archaeological dig, indicating that the colonization effort will eventually fail.

7. Populating Zion

A team of scientists rescue Jews from Nazi extermination camps by transporting them forward in time just before the moment of their deaths. Nazis are confounded when they open the doors to gas chambers and find that their victims have mysteriously vanished. In the future, thousands of rescued Jews struggle to understand what has happened to them, and they begin to hail the lead scientist as their Messiah.

8. Time Me Up, Time Me Down

After inventing a time machine, a scientist travels into his own future where he meets his beautiful future wife. Back in his own time, he meets his future wife for the first time (for her at least), but she isn’t interested in him. He tries his hardest to impress her but fails. How can this be when they are meant to be together?

Determined to win her heart, he travels back to their first meeting over and over again, trying something different each time. He even visits her past in an attempt to learn more about her, but nothing works. Becoming increasingly obsessed, he eventually resorts to kidnapping her. He takes her forward in time to show her their future life, but his actions have drastically changed the timeline.

9. Final Interview

A time travel agency sends a man to interview famous historic figures just hours before they die. The interviews are not only important to historians, they have also become a form of popular entertainment. After interviewing countless historic figures over a long and distinguished career, our protagonist has become something of a celebrity himself. One day, a younger man arrives at his home insisting that he be allowed to interview the protagonist. The protagonist realizes that the younger man is his future replacement, and that he himself is soon to die.

(Thanks to Jorgen Lundman for this idea, the full version of which can be read here )

10. Jesus vs The Time Police

The technology needed for time travel exists, but it has been outlawed by most of the world’s governments. A special police unit or federal agency uses specialist equipment to track down illegal time travelers and prevent them from damaging the timeline.

Some of the time travelers are attempting to alter their own past for personal gain, others are rich tourists seeking a thrilling but illegal encounter with the past. One day, however, they track down a time traveler who has managed to evade them for several years. He has been living in the past for all this time, and he claims to have become an important historical figure. Doing a little research, they determine his claims to be true. The time traveler has had a profound effect on the timeline, and undoing his actions might have profoundly negative consequences. He has written himself into history – a history that the time-police have always accepted to be true.

The illegal time traveler might be a famous general, monarch, or president. He might even be a religious figure, such as Jesus (as such, he may not have had an entirely positive effect on history, but a profound one nonetheless). If the illegal time-traveler is Jesus, might his ascension to heaven actually be his forced return to his own time, staged by the time-police?The time-police are faced with a dilemma – set the timeline straight and undo his actions without knowing what the result might be, or allow him to continue living in the past.

This article was written by Mark Ball . With thanks to Jorgen Lundman.

Use our Random Story Idea Generator for inspiration for more stories.

The Challenges of Writing a Time-Travel Story

Where Did the Time Travel Inspiration Come From?

I have a tendency to come up with story ideas a lot faster than I write them. I mean a lot faster. Fans of When It Rained at Hembry Castle know that I came up with the idea for that book 20 years before I wrote it. Discovering Downton Abbey helped me finally settle down to write my sweet Victorian romance because the upstairs/downstairs element of the show gave me an angle through which to tell the tale.

I came up with the idea for The Duchess of Idaho nearly 20 years ago as well. I lived in Idaho from 2002-2003, and during my time there I learned about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Oregon Trail, which conveniently went through what would later (in 1890) become the state of Idaho. I decided in 2003 that I would like to write a novel about the Oregon Trail, even if I wasn’t sure what that story might look like.

I came up with the general premise of the novel a few years after I discovered Outlander through advertisements for the television show. I guess I had been living under a rock because I hadn’t heard of the books until then. I found the idea of writing a time travel story intriguing, but again the story was placed on the back burner while I finished my Ph.D. and a few other books I wanted to write.

I’m not sure when the idea to connect my Oregon Trail tale to the Loving Husband Series first took hold. Grace Wentworth is the daughter of James and Sarah Wentworth, and The Duchess of Idaho is largely her story (never fear—James and Sarah play an important part).

The Loving Husband Series is both historical and paranormal, and if vampires and werewolves can walk the earth, why can’t there be time travel too? The Loving Husband world is filled with magic, so the time-travel element fits right in.

What Are the Challenges of Writing a Time-Travel Story?

I had never considered the specific challenges of writing a time-travel story. Now that the current draft of The Duchess of Idaho is nearly done, I can see that writing such a story isn’t as easy as it appears at first glance. It’s not just that characters go backward or forward in time —they are bringing their sensibilities with them.

I’ve seen time-travel characters —with different beliefs than the society they have traveled to—handled well and not so well. Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series, does a wonderful job handling Claire’s different sensibilities from those she encounters in the 18th century.

I’ve read a few time-travel stories where the author ignores the fact that the traveling characters would have a different outlook than those around them. I read one time-travel novel where the author stopped the story to rant about how much better we are today than people in the past.

How do you acknowledge the time-traveling character’s differing views from those around them while keeping your story interesting? How much time and attention do you give to the differences in opinion?

There isn’t one answer to those questions, and authors have to decide for themselves how they’re going to deal with the problems that might arise from an interesting combination of social mores.

The primary purpose of a novel is to entertain. As authors, we need to keep the story moving. So then what is the right amount of acknowledgment of the differences between then and now? As with anything else to do with writing, or food, or life, everything in moderation.

How I Dealt With My Modern-Era Character

I didn’t want to spend too much story time focused on how my time-traveling character has different opinions because I want readers to feel as though they’ve traveled back in time.

Readers don’t need constant reminders of the differences between then and now because they are reading now. They know what our current views are. Yet I’m not comfortable ignoring the differences either. It’s important to acknowledge those differences while keeping the plot moving. Twice, the time-traveling character gets in trouble for views that aren’t the same as the others traveling the Oregon Trail, which makes the differences part of the story.

For my fish out-of-water character, every moment means a decision about the best way to handle their odd situation. The point is to stay alive during a strenuous, dangerous journey across the continent in 1850. The Oregon Trail was hard enough without the added pressure of being from a time two centuries in the future.

Your Characters Should Be True to Their Time Period

One of the challenges of writing historical fiction is allowing characters to act in a way that is truthful to their time. Author Diana Gabaldon said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that historical novelists are afraid to write about the truth of the past because that truth often doesn’t fit with our current way of thinking. But if we’re going to write historical fiction then we must be honest about people during the time we’re writing about.

It’s a lot easier said than done, I know, but if we’re not going to be true to the experience of living at that time, why write historical fiction? Add into the mix a character who thinks differently because they’re from another time and suddenly everything becomes that much more complicated.

It’s a good complicated, though. One of the things I love about writing fiction is being challenged, and writing my first time-travel story is providing a unique set of challenges.

Thanks for sharing!

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‘The Greatest Hits’: Save your time

A time-travel romance falls victim to generic characters and clunky dialogue.

You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? “The Greatest Hits” takes that idea and literalizes it right into the ground.

The film is one of those romantic fantasies that enlists time travel as the primary obstacle keeping two people from getting together. Make that one of the obstacles; the others in “The Greatest Hits” are the heroine’s growing collection of vinyl records and her habit of wearing noise-canceling headphones wherever she goes. The course of true love never did run smooth.

Harriet (Lucy Boynton) is mourning the loss of her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet) in a car crash that also delivered a bonk to her noggin that allows her to whoosh back in time — but only when she hears a song that triggers a moment the couple had together. Thus the headphones; otherwise, the tunes streaming from supermarket speakers and other people’s car radios would have her constantly yo-yoing back and forth between then and now. The records she’s obsessively collecting are an effort to find the one song that might give her a chance to alter events and keep Max alive.

Does any of this make sense? Of course not. Time-travel romantic fantasy movies never make sense, and when they’re done right, that’s the source of their idiot charm. 2006’s “The Lake House,” which involves Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock and a magic mailbox, is a personal gold standard in this regard.

Complicating matters is that Harriet has met a cute guy at a grief counseling support group — that sentence alone announces we’re in Los Angeles — and is hesitant to open up and tell him about the whole trying-to-change-the-flow-of-history thing. David, who has lost both parents to either separate illnesses or just plain carelessness, is played by Justin H. Min, a likable actor who was the sensitive android of the little-seen “After Yang” (2022), a movie that you would be strongly advised to watch instead of this one.

What would it take to make “The Greatest Hits” work? For one thing, a music-rights budget that allowed for songs an average filmgoer might recognize, rather than tracks from the back 40 of Spotify or a disco remix of Roxy Music’s “To Turn You On.” For another, a script that avoids dialogue clunkers like “There’s a reason that in some languages, the word for love and the word for suffering is the same.” (I Googled it — didn’t find any.) Shopworn supporting stereotypes like the heroine’s sassy gay Black friend (Austin Crute) don’t help.

The prime offender, though, is writer-director Ned Benson’s inability to create three-dimensional characters, or even believable two-dimensional ones. Harriet is apparently a record producer, but we only know that from one dated reference to Alan Parsons and a brief scene of her telling singer Nelly Furtado to “add a little more compression on the drums”; otherwise, she’s an attractive blank space that Boynton strains too hard to fill in. The dead boyfriend, Max, is even more generic — a genial himbo with all the flavor of a catalogue model.

Benson made a stir with his debut, a three-film project called “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” (2014) that looked at a relationship from his, her and their points of view. His belated follow-up, by contrast, has barely enough personality for one. But he gets points for including the dreadful Kars4Kids jingle as one of the audio jogs that sends Harriet tumbling back in time — for a brief moment, the rest of “The Greatest Hits” seems much less irritating in comparison.

PG-13. Streaming on Hulu. Drug use, strong language and suggestive material. 94 minutes.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com .

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10 New Middle Grade Books, April 2024

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Mystery, time travel, fantasy, adventure, realistic fiction and historical fiction — there’s a book for every inerest on this list! You’ll recogize some of the authors on this list including Erin Entrada Kelly, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, and Lois Lowry.

I starred the Imagination Soup Book of the Month, The Night War. Please download the free book extension activities I wrote as a starting point. The more we can talk about the Holocaust and anti-semitism with children, the better for our world.

New Middle Grade Books, April 2024

Tree. Table. Book . written by Lois Lowry This is a gentle story that begins slowly, developing 11-year-old Sophie, an old soul with a big vocabulary and excellent problem solving skills and an elderly neighbor best friend named Sophie Gershowitz. But this is really a story of grief as young Sophie resists accepting her friend’s decline into dementia. One of the tests Sophie gives Sophie Gershowitz to PROVE that her cognition is fine is to recall three random words. (Tree. Table. Book.) When Sophie G. can’t remember the words, young Sophie asks her to recall a story connected to the words, hoping the stories will help Sophie G. recall the words.That’s when Sophie G.’s shares three meaningful childhood stories that briefly reveal how she survived the Nazis; stories that no one else knows. As Sophie realizes their time together is fleeting, she moves toward acceptance.

Subtle

Isabel in Bloom written by Mae Respicio REALISTIC FICTION Written in lyrical verse , Isabel moves from the Philippines to join her mother with whom she hasn’t lived in 5 years. Now in a new country, new school, and speaking a new language, Isabel makes new friends in a culinary club. She also asks to start a gardening club so they can grow food for the culinary club. Just like the plants grow from seeds into something more, the metaphor reflects Isabel’s seedling relationship with her mother and her new home. A sweet story about friendship, family, and culture.

First State of Being written by Erin Entrada Kelly TIME TRAVEL It’s 1999 and Michael is an anxious and lonely kid in the projects who meets a strange boy named Ridge from the future. Ridge tells Michael and his babysitter and that he accidentally used a time travel invention without permission. As they learn more about Ridge, they become very worried when Ridge gets a cold, a germ that doesn’t exist in his time period, and he gets sicker and sicker. How can they help Ridge get home and get help? It’s a unique coming of age story that zips along as you try to imagine yourself in Michael’s and Ridge’s situations.

Whatever After The Graphic Novel written by Sarah Mylnowski, art by Anu Chouuhan FANTASY / GRAPHIC NOVEL This graphic novel adaptation captures the excitement and adventure of the narrative plot and gives readers a visual feast alongside the story. For those of you who don’t know the plot, a girl named Abby and her brother Jonah find a magic mirror in their basement that sucks them into Snow White’s story in the fairy tale world. And they STOP the witch from poisoning Snow. Which is so nice but actually messes up Snow’s story. How will they fix it? And how will they get home?

Asgardians Odin written by George O’Connor George O’Connor’s Greek mythology graphic novels were beloved by my children and many children. Now, he’s moving on to Norse mythology with the origin story of the creation of the gods and the Nine Worlds. The first half of this book is a lot of telling, which isn’t as exciting as the dialogue-filled and action-packed second half. Nevertheless, you’ll learn a lot in this book, which I suspect will set you up for the next books in the series. Remember, that myths like these are filled with violence and could be disturbing to sensitive readers.

Mystery of Locked Rooms written by Lindsay Currie MYSTERY Sarah’s dad is too sick to work and Sarah’s mom isn’t making their bills. To avoid losing her house and moving, Sarah and her two best friends decide to find the mysterious treasure in a local, abandoned funhouse. The three friends sneak into the funhouse where they face puzzles, illusions, cryptic clues, and secret tunnels. They’ll have to problem solve, overcome failure, stop bickering, and work together because no one knows where they are– and the only way to get out of the house is to solve all the puzzles! Kids who love to solve puzzles and mysteries will devour this novel!

Trouble at the Tangerine written by Gillian McDunn MYSTERY Simon is sick of his influencer parents always moving to the next cool place. He wants The Tangerine to be a home where he can stay and make friends for once. But when the building has a jewelry theft, Simon needs to find the culprit to convince his parents it’s a safe place to live. He and a new friend investigate for her podcast. He grows connected to the people in the building and finally tells his parents how he feels. It’s an interesting mystery with lovable characters that middle grade readers will enjoy.

The Wildes: Vaquita by Roland Smith ECO-ADVENTURE Roland Smith’s writing always speeds along with interesting plots and characters plus plenty of action and this one is another stand-out book for readers who like action, nature, animals, and independent kids. In this second book of the incredible middle grade series, Ring and Asia are in the Sea of Cortez with their dad for a Vaquita Summit to discuss how to protect the critically endangered species. Not only do they spot two in the wild (very hard to do!) but they rescue an injured mother and calf from fishing nets. With poachers and smugglers and a dire rescue situation, this small fishing village isn’t as quiet or as safe as it first appeared.

Legendarios : Wrath of the Rain God written by Karla Arenas Valenti, illustrated by Vanessa Morales FANTASY / MYTHOLOGY Although the publisher is suggesting this is a chapter book, the reading level feels more middle grade to me so I’d say it’s short middle grade. Twins Emma and Martin travel back to ancient Mexico during Aztec times where they meet an indigenous girl whose village is flooding due to torrential rain. To save the village, they must stop the angry rain god, Tlloc. But he won’t stop until the twins return his stolen lightning bolt.

KEEP READING

Book Series for Kids

Graphic Novels for Kids

Melissa Taylor, MA, is the creator of Imagination Soup. She's a mother, former teacher & literacy trainer, and freelance education writer. She writes Imagination Soup and freelances for publications online and in print, including Penguin Random House's Brightly website, USA Today Health, Adobe Education, Colorado Parent, and Parenting. She is passionate about matching kids with books that they'll love.

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Coast Guard, Navy rescue 3 stranded men after spotting 'HELP' sign made with palm leaves

United States Coast Guard and U.S Navy teams teamed up this week and rescued three men found on remote island in the Pacific Ocean lost at sea for more than a week, federal officials said.

The fishermen, all in their 40s, had been stranded on Pikelot Atoll, an uninhabited coral island about 415 miles southeast of Guam.

The rescue marks the second time in less than four years crews rescued castaways found on the tiny island.

The men spelled “HELP” using palm fronds laid on a white-sand beach before being rescued Tuesday, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The men, three relatives who had not been publicly identified as of Thursday, were found in good condition and expected to survive.

Skier killed: Colorado skier dies attempting to jump highway in 'high risk' stunt, authorities say

How did the people lost at sea get stranded on the island?

Coast Guard officials said the fishermen departed on Easter from Polowat Atoll, part of Micronesia, in a small 20-foot open skiff bound for waters around the island where crews eventually rescued them.

According to a news release, the men had experience in navigating the waters around the island, but at some point, the boat's outboard motor was caught by swells and its engine was damaged.

The trio made it ashore on the uninhabited island, but officials said their radio battery ran out of power before they could call for help.

Niece reported her three uncles missing

On April 6, the U.S. Coast Guard in Guam received a distress call from a woman who reported her three uncles had not returned from a fishing trip.

Crews soon teamed up with the Navy for the rescue mission which officials said spanned over 78,000 square nautical miles.

On Monday, crews in a U.S. Coast Guard HC-130J Hercules aircraft from Air Station Barbers Point in Hawaii searching for the missing boaters, flew over the island and spotted a sign in its white sand.

"In a remarkable testament to their will to be found, the mariners spelled out "HELP" on the beach using palm leaves, a crucial factor in their discovery," U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Chelsea Garcia, said. "This act of ingenuity was pivotal in guiding rescue efforts directly to their location."

Crew on board the aircraft dropped survival packages to the mariners until further assistance could arrive, officials wrote in the release.

On Tuesday morning, crews aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Oliver Henry rescued the mariners and returned them and their outboard boat to Polowat Atoll, about 100 nautical miles from the island.

Previous castaways spelled SOS on beach on same island in 2020

Nearly four years ago, three other boaters in a 23-foot boat who departed from Polowat Atoll on July 30, 2020, also washed onto the same island after their boat ran out of gas.

The crew spelled out a giant “SOS” sign on the beach which was spotted by the crew of a US Air Force tanker operating out of Andersen Air Force Base on Guam.

The men were missing for three days before U.S. Coast Guard and Australian naval units rescued them.

As a safety precaution, the U.S. Coast Guard "strongly recommends all boaters equip" their vessels with an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon.

Natalie Neysa Alund is a senior reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at [email protected] and follow her on X @nataliealund.

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Guest Essay

It’s Time to End the Quiet Cruelty of Property Taxes

A black-and-white photograph of a beaten-up dollhouse sitting on rocky ground beneath an underpass.

By Andrew W. Kahrl

Dr. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

Property taxes, the lifeblood of local governments and school districts, are among the most powerful and stealthy engines of racism and wealth inequality our nation has ever produced. And while the Biden administration has offered many solutions for making the tax code fairer, it has yet to effectively tackle a problem that has resulted not only in the extraordinary overtaxation of Black and Latino homeowners but also in the worsening of disparities between wealthy and poorer communities. Fixing these problems requires nothing short of a fundamental re-examination of how taxes are distributed.

In theory, the property tax would seem to be an eminently fair one: The higher the value of your property, the more you pay. The problem with this system is that the tax is administered by local officials who enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy and that tax rates are typically based on the collective wealth of a given community. This results in wealthy communities enjoying lower effective tax rates while generating more tax revenues; at the same time, poorer ones are forced to tax property at higher effective rates while generating less in return. As such, property assessments have been manipulated throughout our nation’s history to ensure that valuable property is taxed the least relative to its worth and that the wealthiest places will always have more resources than poorer ones.

Black people have paid the heaviest cost. Since they began acquiring property after emancipation, African Americans have been overtaxed by local governments. By the early 1900s, an acre of Black-owned land was valued, for tax purposes, higher than an acre of white-owned land in most of Virginia’s counties, according to my calculations, despite being worth about half as much. And for all the taxes Black people paid, they got little to nothing in return. Where Black neighborhoods began, paved streets, sidewalks and water and sewer lines often ended. Black taxpayers helped to pay for the better-resourced schools white children attended. Even as white supremacists treated “colored” schools as another of the white man’s burdens, the truth was that throughout the Jim Crow era, Black taxpayers subsidized white education.

Freedom from these kleptocratic regimes drove millions of African Americans to move to Northern and Midwestern states in the Great Migration from 1915 to 1970, but they were unable to escape racist assessments, which encompassed both the undervaluation of their property for sales purposes and the overvaluation of their property for taxation purposes. During those years, the nation’s real estate industry made white-owned property in white neighborhoods worth more because it was white. Since local tax revenue was tied to local real estate markets, newly formed suburbs had a fiscal incentive to exclude Black people, and cities had even more reason to keep Black people confined to urban ghettos.

As the postwar metropolis became a patchwork of local governments, each with its own tax base, the fiscal rationale for segregation intensified. Cities were fiscally incentivized to cater to the interests of white homeowners and provide better services for white neighborhoods, especially as middle-class white people began streaming into the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them.

One way to cater to wealthy and white homeowners’ interests is to intentionally conduct property assessments less often. The city of Boston did not conduct a citywide property reassessment between 1946 and 1977. Over that time, the values of properties in Black neighborhoods increased slowly when compared with the values in white neighborhoods or even fell, which led to property owners’ paying relatively more in taxes than their homes were worth. At the same time, owners of properties in white neighborhoods got an increasingly good tax deal as their neighborhoods increased in value.

As was the case in other American cities, Boston’s decision most likely derived from the fear that any updates would hasten the exodus of white homeowners and businesses to the suburbs. By the 1960s, assessments on residential properties in Boston’s poor neighborhoods were up to one and a half times as great as their actual values, while assessments in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods were, on average, 40 percent of market value.

Jersey City, N.J., did not conduct a citywide real estate reassessment between 1988 and 2018 as part of a larger strategy for promoting high-end real estate development. During that time, real estate prices along the city’s waterfront soared but their owners’ tax bills remained relatively steady. By 2015, a home in one of the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods worth $175,000 received the same tax bill as a home in the city’s downtown worth $530,000.

These are hardly exceptions. Numerous studies conducted during those years found that assessments in predominantly Black neighborhoods of U.S. cities were grossly higher relative to value than those in white areas.

These problems persist. A recent report by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy found that property assessments were regressive (meaning lower-valued properties were assessed higher relative to value than higher-valued ones) in 97.7 percent of U.S. counties. Black-owned homes and properties in Black neighborhoods continue to be devalued on the open market, making this regressive tax, in effect, a racist tax.

The overtaxation of Black homes and neighborhoods is also a symptom of a much larger problem in America’s federated fiscal structure. By design, this system produces winners and losers: localities with ample resources to provide the goods and services that we as a nation have entrusted to local governments and others that struggle to keep the lights on, the streets paved, the schools open and drinking water safe . Worse yet, it compels any fiscally disadvantaged locality seeking to improve its fortunes to do so by showering businesses and corporations with tax breaks and subsidies while cutting services and shifting tax burdens onto the poor and disadvantaged. A local tax on local real estate places Black people and cities with large Black populations at a permanent disadvantage. More than that, it gives middle-class white people strong incentives to preserve their relative advantages, fueling the zero-sum politics that keep Americans divided, accelerates the upward redistribution of wealth and impoverishes us all.

There are technical solutions. One, which requires local governments to adopt more accurate assessment models and regularly update assessment rolls, can help make property taxes fairer. But none of the proposed reforms being discussed can be applied nationally because local tax policies are the prerogative of the states and, often, local governments themselves. Given the variety and complexity of state and local property tax laws and procedures and how much local governments continue to rely on tax reductions and tax shifting to attract and retain certain people and businesses, we cannot expect them to fix these problems on their own.

The best way to make local property taxes fairer and more equitable is to make them less important. The federal government can do this by reinvesting in our cities, counties and school districts through a federal fiscal equity program, like those found in other advanced federated nations. Canada, Germany and Australia, among others, direct federal funds to lower units of government with lower capacities to raise revenue.

And what better way to pay for the program than to tap our wealthiest, who have benefited from our unjust taxation scheme for so long? President Biden is calling for a 25 percent tax on the incomes and annual increases in the values of the holdings of people claiming more than $100 million in assets, but we could accomplish far more by enacting a wealth tax on the 1 percent. Even a modest 4 percent wealth tax on people whose total assets exceed $50 million could generate upward of $400 billion in additional annual revenue, which should be more than enough to ensure that the needs of every city, county and public school system in America are met. By ensuring that localities have the resources they need, we can counteract the unequal outcomes and rank injustices that our current system generates.

Andrew W. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “ The Black Tax : 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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COMMENTS

How to Write a Time Travel Story (Convincingly)
Events are predetermined to still occur regardless of when and where you travel in time. Suppose you time travel to the past to talk Alexander the Great out of invading Persia, but he hadn't even considered this until you mentioned it. By traveling to the past to prevent Alexander's conquest, you caused it.
How to Write Time-Travel Historical Fiction
4. Avoid "As you know, Bob" conversations with characters from the historical time period. Put yourself in their shoes, with their current knowledge of the time period of which they are a part. You don't go around saying things like, "Barack Obama, President of the United States from 2009 to 2016.".
9 Rules for Writing Time Travel
This is often the most captivating scene of any time travel story. 2. Pick Your Method. Every time travel story has to have something that functions as the device, portal, or catalyst to time travel. Devices. In H.G. Well's The Time Machine, it was a literal machine that the hero climbed into, and that set the standard for decades of time ...
5 Tips on Writing Time Travel That Works
After reading multiple time travel stories, I noticed that it often took 50 to 100 pages to engage the reader in character and conflict and set up the time travel. Following this example allowed me to keep Elizabeth's growth front and center rather than letting time travel take over the whole story. 5. Keeping the focus on the character arc.
5 Unique Tips To Write A Time Travel Story
2. Make decisions and device matter. Timeline is one of my favorite time travel novels for various reasons. At the story's beginning, a team of archaeologists describes a significant battle. Once the time travel story starts unfolding, the macro details of the battle remain largely unchanged.
Tips and Tricks to Writing Time Travel Into Your Story
Time travel and time manipulation is a very common conflict in science fiction, fantasy, and even more action-based genres of fiction. However, despite it being so common, it is possibly one of the hardest supernatural qualities to write effectively into a story. Time travel can be very confusing, and you can lose your readers if you are not careful about how you approach it.
The Rules of Time Travel for Fiction Writers
Don't discount real science when writing science fiction. A recent computer simulation managed to come up with a possible solution to the grandfather paradox and even more recent studies have shown that, at least in terms of mathematical theory, time travel is entirely possible. In 2014, scientists studied the behavior of photons beamed ...
The Writer's Guide to Time Travel (historical fiction tips & tricks)
The Definitive Writer's Guide to Time Travel (historical fiction tips and tricks) February 25, 2017 David Leonhardt Tags: historical fiction, history, non-fiction, time travel 🕑 5 minutes read. Any writer can travel in time (it's true), but to do it well takes effort…and a plan. Here is your complete plan to write convincing historical ...
How to Time Travel: Balancing History and Narrative in Historical
It's time travel, plain and simple. In order to find the right story for a historical fiction novel, it takes a lot of curiosity. Every location, time period, and culture have stories that are waiting to be told. Often, I find mine in my family history, but I also try to face the world with a sense of exploration—Take a walk through a ...
3 Tips for Writing Time-Travel Stories
The time-travel technology has limitations, which creates conflict for the characters. Since the author spells out these limits, readers know the characters must work within that set of rules. 2 ...
How To Write A Short Story About Time Travel (with prompts)
Time travel is one of the most well-loved ideas for writing compelling Sci-Fi short stories. But how to write a short story using time travel as a key component can be a challenge - even for veteran writers in the Sci-Fi fiction sphere. In this blog post we will cover things to consider and avoid when using this trope in your creative writing.
How to Write a Time Travel Story Without Paradoxes
The concept of time travel has long been a popular theme in fiction and film. Traveling back in time to alter the course of history is an alluring idea that has enthralled not just fiction writers but scientists as well. Yet, if you've ever seen or read a time travel story, you're aware that time travel is a tricky concept to grasp. It might be challenging to stay faithful to your ...
43 Terrific Time Travel Prompts » JournalBuddies.com
43 Terrific Time Travel Prompts. Oh yeah…. you have just discovered some terrific time travel writing prompts for you and your writers (of all ages). This brand new list of prompts will help writers spin tales about traveling through time in their fiction stories — or journal writing — just for fun. There are time travel prompts here for ...
Time Travel Short Stories: Examples Online
Jim picks up a hitch-hiker, Ares, who says he's a scientist from the year 3059. He says he traveled millions of years into the future, but came back to the wrong year. Life in 3059 is trouble free, with machines taking care of everything. Future Earth is in trouble, with all life extinct, except for humans and plants.
Not Your Usual Time Travel Story Ideas (2024)
In a world where time flows differently in different regions, a society formed where time travelers exist and time itself can be a commodity. (Originally appeared in my post The Most Mesmerizing Fantasy World Ideas (2023)) Chronicler of Lost History. A person wakes up every day in a different time period, with no control over when or where they ...
How to Write Time Travel Stories
Learn how to send your characters to the past, future, present, and more!Get Brandon's horror/thriller novel BAD PARTS: amzn.to/3esTFYC Listen to "Ten-Year P...
Write a Time-Travel Story / So You Want To
Write a Time-Travel Story. Well, if you want to write a time-travel story, you're in precisely the right place - and time - to learn just that. Now, a time-travel story is, before all else a Story, so General story-writing tips are useful on the outset of any writing endeavour, and if you're still new to that, then I highly recommend the ...
7 Tips for Time Travel: How to Write a Historical Novel
Be careful with back-story. Every person has a rich back-story, packed with triumphs and failures. This history affects a person's point of view in real life, and the same goes for fictional characters. As a writer, you need to show your character's personality through actions - not by telling readers everything about them.
Time Travel Stories That Explore What It Means To Be Human
The best time travel stories, for me, allow the writer to essentially explore what it means to be human, and the incredible books I have picked below do exactly that. *. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. In this beautiful novel, Kate Atkinson uses a form of time-travel to investigate the fragility of being alive in a warm, luminous and witty way.
10 Ideas for a Time Travel Story
Here are 10 quick ideas for a time travel story, including everything from colonies in the distant past and future, to time traveling Jews, Jesus, and jealous husbands. If one of these ideas inspires you to create a time travel story of your own, let us know and we'll share it with out community! 1. Future War.
The Challenges of Writing a Time-Travel Story
One of the challenges of writing historical fiction is allowing characters to act in a way that is truthful to their time. Author Diana Gabaldon said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that historical novelists are afraid to write about the truth of the past because that truth often doesn't fit with our current way of thinking.
10 Favorite Time Travel Books for Kids
The Odyssey and Henry's Box: The Adventures of Charlie & Baxter by Sarah J. Aris, illustrated by Sarah Nieves. (ages 7 - 10) Siblings find a robot in their basement and use their coding ...
When does the new Taylor Swift album come out?
Here's the release time, its genre, track list, length and writing credits. Taylor Swift's album "The Tortured Poets Department" is coming soon. Best movies of 2023 🍿 How he writes From 'Beef ...
The 4 Do's and Don'ts of Time Travel
1. If you go back in time, you can make any changes you want in the past and you'll continue to exist, because the very act of traveling in time takes you outside the timestream and removes you from the effects of changes in history. (See Asimov's The End of Eternity.) 2. If you go back in time, you can make changes that destroy your own ...
AI Story Generator & AI Story Writer
Turn your wild story idea into a tour de force. Churn out a first draft fast with the Magic Write™ AI story generator and give yourself more time and energy to polish your manuscript to perfection. Try Magic Write. Generate inspiring prompts and make stories with ease. Write for free with our AI-powered short story generator tool on Canva Docs.
Why is tax day on April 15? What to know about the day's history
April 15 as the designated last day to file taxes in the U.S. has historic origins. President Abraham Lincoln first added a federal income tax with the Revenue Act of 1861 to help fund the Civil ...
'The Greatest Hits': Save your time
4 min. ( 1.5 stars) You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? "The Greatest Hits" takes that idea and ...
10 New Middle Grade Books, April 2024
New Middle Grade Books, April 2024. When the French in Paris round up the Jews for Nazi prison camps, Miri and her neighbor's baby escape with the help of a Catholic nun. To help them survive, Miri is renamed and sent to a Catholic school for safety and her "baby sister" is adopted by a Catholic family. At the school, Miri begins to help ...
Stranded fishermen rescued from tiny island thanks to 'HELP' sign
The fishermen, all in their 40s, had been stranded on Pikelot Atoll, an uninhabited coral island about 415 miles southeast of Guam. The rescue marks the second time in less than four years crews ...
It's Time to End the Quiet Cruelty of Property Taxes
During that time, real estate prices along the city's waterfront soared but their owners' tax bills remained relatively steady. By 2015, a home in one of the city's Black and Latino ...