How To Write a Time Travel Story That Keeps Making Sense, Part 1
Here in Part 5, I offer an approach that allows for time travel without obvious giant plot holes
I’ve been discussing some of the rules for telling an effective time-travel story. Last time, I offered a couple of examples from sci-fi where the trope done right. So now my aim is to put everything together and build a hypothetical plot from scratch.
The first question
The first question when dealing with a story about time travel is: How should time operate? As noted last time, we want to keep time itself as a soft magic system because theories about time are not well understood. We want to avoid the two extremes — implacable fate and the butterfly effect, where huge future changes may result from small past ones. Both ends of that spectrum are too likely to create plot holes later in the narrative.
In my opinion, a writer should avoid multiverse scenarios — sometimes referred to as alternate timelines — like the plague. Bluntly, multiverses kill emotional stakes. No one is going to care about a character if infinite iterations of that character could be running up and down infinite timelines. Stories must conclude, and they can’t conclude if another version of the character can reset things at a writer’s whim. I’ve addressed this before while reviewing films so I won’t rehash it further.
An alternate timeline can work in stories where the characters are traveling into the future because — as I noted last Saturday — the future can always be reset by returning to the present. However, from a storytelling standpoint, I’m limiting the plot I intend to construct to traveling into the past because traveling into the past is more difficult than traveling into the future. It is a better test of my approach.
What if time travel is soft magic but the machine itself is hard magic?
How should we address our theory of time while keeping time travel a soft magic system? I’m choosing to do that by setting limits to the time machine itself. The goal is to keep time a soft system (a bit fuzzy) while making the machine itself a hard system (there are definite rules).
Let’s say our traveler has a machine that can transport him through time. But his machine operates within a force field of sorts. Thus he can only affect things within a certain radius. And to keep things from getting confusing, he can only stay in the past for an hour. If he stays longer than an hour, his machine runs out of power.
This creates a believable scenario. Even if something like the butterfly effect were in play, the future chaos could be mitigated by the force field. The character doesn’t have to worry about avoiding changes to an entire environment, just the changes within a certain radius. And say he did change something he shouldn’t have, then all he has to do is rewind the clock a few minutes and undo whatever he did. He can anticipate problems by limiting the space and thus limiting the other variables. Any loops or paradoxes or alternate versions of the character would all be contained within the force field.
The advantages of making the machine itself a hard system (even if time is soft)
I can play time’s interaction with this machine however I want. If I want to make time a soft system, then I simply have to avoid letting my character stepping on a butterfly or otherwise making any drastic changes within the radius. This is believable because the character is operating within a small space.
If I want to lean into something like the butterfly effect, then I can add other rules. Let’s say I want to introduce a humorous element: The character, despite having tried to avoid it, does step on a butterfly. So he rewinds time — and steps on an ant instead. But a moment later, the version of him that stepped on the butterfly appears, and the two start fighting because they don’t know which version is the real one who should return to the present.
In this scenario, I still get the chaos generated by the butterfly effect and its paradoxes. But I don’t have to worry that the ripples through time will create something that is hardly credible — like our character returning to the present to find everyone transformed into lizards.
The advantage of the force field concept
I can go soft or hard with this approach. The introduction of the force field focuses the story on the mechanics of the machine rather than on time itself. If I wanted to be very careful, I could explain how the environment interacts with the machine. For example, I could describe a bird flying through the bubble, which is technically another segment of time. Perhaps a hunter on the ground sees the bird disappear — then reappear a moment later. The bird doesn’t know what happened; however, the hunter on the ground is very confused.
But I don’t, strictly speaking, have to do this because the force field itself is establishing the setting of the story. Everything outside of the bubble is as relevant or irrelevant as I want it to be. The force field can be as big or as small as I want it to be.
What about leaving the force field?
I could make leaving the force field a cardinal sin because nobody knows what will happen if a person steps into another time and starts affecting the environment. In that scenario, time is a full soft magic system with a mystery element. So, in this case, that’s how I’m going to treat the subject. The force field is small, and everything inside it is safe. Everything outside of the force field is the unknown, and to step outside of it is like opening Pandora’s box.
Overall, the direction I go in, as a storyteller, should be determined by the kind of story I want to tell. I’ve gone into so much detail here because there’s a specific way I’m choosing to implement the rules. I’ll explain more once I’ve finished putting together the plot.
The next big question
So, now that we’ve established how our traveler is traveling, we need to ask why he’s traveling. Let’s say he’s just seeing the sights. He doesn’t need to dress for the period because nobody can see him in his time machine. The force field acts like a one-way mirror; as long as he stays inside it, he doesn’t risk the unknown, even if he observes significant historical events. But there is still a problem. I’ll address that in my final article in this series next time.
"Bluntly, multiverses kill emotional stakes. No one is going to care about a character if infinite iterations of that character could be running up and down infinite timelines. Stories must conclude, and they can’t conclude if another version of the character can reset things at a writer’s whim."
Some writers and filmmakers can make this work, though. A great deal of Michael Moorcock's fiction, for example, deals with characters who are said to be the same "person" through different physical and time incarnations...
I can see what you're saying if the differences between the characters are acknowledged. (I confess I'm not super familiar with Michael Moorcock's fiction. I know of Elric, and that's it.) No Way Home, for example, I believe works because the audience still sees the trio as different people. They're not looking at Spider Man so much as Tom, Andrew, and Tobey. The movie leans into this rather than trying to ignore it. That allows the audience a chance to relax instead of worrying too much about the mechanics because the writer isn't trying to sneak something past them.
I think one of the reasons the trope doesn't work in something like Multiverse of Madness is because the audience is supposed to ignore the question of whether or not the Wanda in universe A is the same as the Wanda in universe B. This question has major ramifications for whether or not her children would really be her children. If the children are different because they've had a different set of experiences (they exist in reality instead of inside Wanda's mind) then for all intent in purposes they are not really Wanda's children. They are somebody else's. This creates a hole in Wanda's logic, which creates a plot hole in the film because the question is never addressed. I believe the audience picks up on this issue, even if not consciously, and those kinds of questions are what cause people to start to check out of a story. The story becomes harder to follow, but they aren't sure why. That's my theory anyway. The same can be said for the Gamora in Endgame. Gamora b isn't the same as the original Gamora. The writers didn't try to downplay this as hard as the questions in Multiverse, but any investment in Gamora and Quill's relationship is gone because this Gamora is a new person and the audience knows it.
As to what I was referring to in this article, I believe I was talking about the infinite regress issue created by the Terminator series. I think they were planning to do something similar with Wanda before the Dr. Strange movie flopped, but the problem created by what the Terminator franchise did is that, sooner or later, the audience will inevitably figure out that the story can't end because, whenever the studio wishes, they can just pull another John and T-800 out of the ether because they've created a scenario where endless Johns and T-800 can be summoned from an infinitely branching timeline, which is basically a simpler version of a multiverse. I believe this was the studio trying create a situation where they could cash in on the same IP endlessly, but it was destined to fail because the audience is always going to understand that the John A and John B are different people because they've had different experiences. Nothing is going to change that so the differences have to be acknowledged, not ignored, to make a multiverse story work. Perhaps, I should've added the word "can" to the first sentence because I was writing with a specific scenario in mind.