Posted: September 18, 2025

The Arc of Time

I've just finished working on a novel whose story takes place over about twenty years, following the main character from college to his mid-forties -- plus a prologue of a scene that takes place when he's seven. I'm also working on a science fiction novel whose action takes place over the course of a weeks. The two of them have me thinking about how the time scale you choose affects how you tell your story.

In broad terms, shorter timelines favor dramatic tension that's based on action. Taking place over a short time span gives your story immediacy and urgency -- your hero is rushing to uncover the traitor or the bomb or the deep conspiracy. And that often breathless drive is the main reason for reading action stories. (Looking at you, Dan Brown.) They also force you to focus on the essentials without distractions, since there isn't much time for lengthy flashbacks or elaborate subplots. There are exceptions, of course. Virginia Woof's Mrs. Dalloway packs a lot of complex character development into a single day. But in general, if you're looking to ramp up your tension, think about shortening your timeline.

Something to watch for while you focus on the action, though -- even the most fast-paced stories benefit if your characters have grown by the end. It's how events affect them that makes your readers care. In the mad rush of The DaVinci Code, Robert Langdon finds access to a faith and sense of wonder that opens his life in ways he hadn't anticipated. And that inner transformation makes the final scene, where he discovers the reality that has been hidden for nearly 2000 years, that much more meaningful.

Longer timelines are better for building tension based on character. Readers need to know a lot about how, say, your heroine's romantic history in order to understand how their latest love fits into their lives. (Note, occasional flashbacks to earlier years do extend the timeline, even if the present day action takes place over a couple weeks or months.) If your hero has a life-changing epiphany by the end of the story, readers need to know enough of his background to really feel how monumental the change is. It simply takes time to sketch out the emotional landscape where the real action of the story takes place. And because of this more leisurely pace, it's easier to immerse yourself in these stories, to settle in and let events unfold.

There's a danger to longer timelines, as well. You can get so lost in tracking how your main characters evolve over time that you forget that your other characters are evolving just as much. Remember, all of the relationships at the end of a novel spread over twenty years are going to be different from what they were at the beginning. In my client's novel, he did a wonderful job tracking his main character's changing sense of who he was and how he fit into the world -- and completely forgot the man's wife. We meet her when they first get together, and she plays a role in the story of his life near the end, but in the ten or fifteen years between, we have little idea who she is or what's happening to her. That gap makes his own development a little harder to understand.

Finally, there are the real long-form novels -- the multigenerational doorstops written by authors like James Michner or Edward Rutherfurd. These go beyond drama based on action or character development and into drama based on history. Essentially, the central characters are not people but a place (London, Hawaii) and a family or several intertwining families whose stories evolve over the centuries. You're watching how events -- character's decisions, historic quirks, occasional national disasters -- affect other characters, future generations, and the world at large. You're seeing how the roots of a family and a place expand over time. These novels appeal to readers in the same way history does.

How time arcs through a story is often hidden in the background -- readers usually don't keep an eye on the calendar as they read. But the length of time you choose for your story affects how deeply your characters can develop and how much tension your readers feel. They may never think about your timeline, but you have to.