Bringing a Fresh Twist to the Time-Travel Novel
What if you never knew which day of your life was coming next? This is the situation Alex Dean, the protagonist in The Day Tripper, finds himself in. When a perfect evening in 1995 ends in disaster, Alex is doomed to never knowing where—or rather when—each new dawn will take him. It’s a time-travel tale, sure, but not quite as we know it.
(5 Tips for Writing a Near-Dystopian Future.)
Here, I’ll share a few things I learned along the way about bringing something fresh to this most classic of tropes.
Make it work for you.
Given the freedom to bend the very laws of space-time to suit your own whims, the ideal is to create a concept that marries perfectly with the story you want to tell. The best time-travel stories are not actually about time at all; they’re about humans, about the things we lose and what might come to be. The central conceit should offer a new way to explore a very human situation.
Take, for example, a story about a son making contact with the mother he lost as a young child; this could perhaps be achieved simply by allowing letters, emails even, to travel back and forth through time. Or maybe a historic tragedy that tore a family apart could be investigated in the present by gifting a character the ability to step into an old photograph, taken before disaster struck. Both of these ideas are twists on the time-travel genre, both exist to serve a plot, and there’s not a time machine in sight!
When I began writing The Day Tripper, I had in mind a character who was dazzlingly bright, likable, but prone to self-destruction. The future for such a person is a forest of possibilities. By having his days arrive apparently at random across several decades, we get to see the power of Alex’s seemingly inconsequential decisions. What small choices are the rot in the roots? Freed from the usual ordering of cause and effect, both Alex and the reader find out sooner rather than later.
Write the rulebook.
Whatever new spin you bring to it, time travel is an area where it pays to be clear on the parameters. How does it work? Who or what can and can’t move through time? And perhaps the real crux—can changes in the past affect the present? These questions and a dozen others are yours to answer with absolute freedom, but they should be laid out and stuck to. Ask the reader to suspend their disbelief just the once so that they’re ready to strap in for a thrill-ride across the temporal landscape.
Alex Dean is certainly able to change his fate; it’s an essential part of making his story satisfying. Early in the book, he meets an eccentric schoolteacher who seems to know a lot about Alex’s disorderly life, eventually confiding the reason for his predicament. In explaining things to Alex, he’s simultaneously doing so to the reader. A cheap trick perhaps, but it keeps everyone up to speed on how things work.
Please the crowd.
Assuming your time-travel switch-up transports the reader somewhere in living memory, it would seem a shame not to serve up a nice dollop of nostalgia. It’s easy to do, and it immediately pulls the reader up close to the story. The Day Tripper takes place against the backdrop of Princess Diana’s death, the rise (and fall) of Tony Blair, the London riots, to name just a few.
But it’s about the mundane details too: newspaper sellers on the street, smokers everywhere, those retired gents who still used to don a suit and hat every day—things we’d miss if only we’d not forgotten all about them. I took this a step further still by naming each chapter after a top song of the time. Not everyone notices those, but I hope those who do enjoy their own small transportive experience.
Check out James Goodhand’s The Day Tripper here:
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Stay off Google (mostly).
You’ve got a solid gold winner of a concept. You’re ready to type “Chapter One.” One last job: a swift online search to make sure no one else has had this great idea. Cue finding at least five novels or films that sound distressingly similar. A compulsion to give up writing altogether follows. Trust me, I’ve been there.
But here’s the thing: It almost certainly doesn’t matter, because those stories are likely totally different from yours. It’s simply that, with a firm concept in mind, it’s too easy to see the similarities in others. Usually nothing more than a case of blue car syndrome.
A wise person once noted that self-doubt is the enemy of creativity. Excessive Googling runs it a close second.
Keep it all about the characters.
Killer concept nailed, Google avoided, rules established, the crowd pleased. But all of my above musings pale against the most important consideration of them all: the cast.
People may pick up a book on the strength of the premise, but it’s compelling characters that will keep the pages turning. And never more so than in a time-travel story, because the reader is reliant upon the characters to take them by the hand and lead them down this nonlinear path.
Of course, this needn’t mean your characters need to be likable. Alex Dean can be infuriating. He usually doesn’t know what’s good for him. But he’s the sort of guy you might meet for a swift drink after work, and you finish up rolling in at 5am. He’s fun to be in the company of. This, I think, is what matters.
One thing’s for sure—a time-hopping tale remains as popular as ever. Much like good stories about magic or ghosts, they tap into our intuition that there are things going on in this world beyond our sight and our comprehension. I wish you all the very best as you, in your own unique way, take the time travel story into the future.
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