Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Time, Novels, Techniques, literary, showing, Passage


Question by joezen777:

What are literary techniques for showing the passage of time in novels?



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I'm braindead when it comes to remembering how this is done effectivle in novels. I'm like character A goes to work at 8am. But has a plot moment at 12pm. How do I smoothly cut from 8am to 12pm? Perhaps it's okay just to skip time with a sentence, but any misnomers? Thanks in advance for answers.




Best answer:


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Answer by Livian
There are several ways to do it. You can actually do like some of the action/adventure novelists do: in italics to the left they put in the location then the time of day; if you referenced the fact that the character arrived at work at a specific time, you can drop down two to three spaces at the end of that scene and then say "At twelve noon, Harry received a very strange phone call......" or whatever.

The other technique which I have seen some very famous authors use is the drop down two spaces then insert a line with 4 asterisks centered in a row with one space between each, then double space again after that. It denotes that you are either shifting forward in time or changing locations.

I don't think there is any hard, fast rule.





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