How To Add Interest To Your Writing With Time-travel

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Using events in another time period to advance your plotline adds interest and color to your story. Generally you achieve this with either time-travel, which is moving your present-day protagonist physically to the location, flashbacks to another time within the protagonists lifetime, or reincarnation, where they emerge as another person. Your readers really don’t care how you get there; they simply want to be there. Research carefully, find interesting tidbits about your time period, like the food, the clothing. Your reader wants to be a tourist along with having an adventure.

Travelling in time is only theory and not something you can look up in Wikipedia, but research into the possible theories, learning new things, investigating new places adds a whole new dimension to writing that makes the job of committing some 70,000 words to paper exciting. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about whaling in 1865 when I wrote Love Out of Time, and discovered a fascinating event in the Civil War called The Stone Fleet Incident. You didn’t want to know how they did laundry on a boat, but I told you anyhow.

The wildly popular, romantic “Highlander” series by Diana Gabaldon has brought back interest in this genre. She uses Scotland and the Battle of Culloden in 1746, as her historical period. Her female character passes through an energy force to get there, and back again. Her romantic interest is hauntingly memorable.

In my novel, The Haunting of Aaron House, I use flashbacks of the ghost inhabiting Samantha’s body. The main secret to this writing is a strong sense of place. Your reader wants to be there with your protagonist, so you must put yourself there to observe small details, like clothing, speech, and manners—reacting to the scene so your readers hear the sounds, smell the odors around them. Garbage? Food? Blood?  In The Haunting of Aaron House, Amalie, the ghost in Samantha, is having a flashback to the Battle of Gettysburg. She’s in the middle of Pickett’s Charge.

“Amos! Amos, my beloved, where are you?” She stopped, holding her mouth, coughing. “I can’t breathe. The smoke from the guns is choking me. Too much noise. Cannons exploding, and men crying, horses screaming in pain.” She ran farther, her hands over her ears, staggering to avoid soldiers, and fell to the ground, crying for Amos.

Love Out of Time uses time-travel, complicated by shifts to parallel universes. We go to 1865, and a whaling village in Massachusetts called New Kensington. My main character, Sara Burkhart, rents a beach house in present day New Kensington that is haunted by a sea captain, leader of a group of time travellers from the old town. Sara’s ghost, Caleb, sends her back in time to i865 New Kensington. In this brief excerpt of Sara’s first visit, she wakes in the middle of the night.

Cautiously she opened one eye at a time, afraid of what she’d find, peering through the mist. It was night. She was outdoors. The smell of salt water indicated an ocean nearby. Roughly clad male bodies shoved past her, ignoring her presence. Judging by the shadows of tall-masted sailing ships in the distance, the sounds of bells and creaking timber, and the odors of rotten fish, unwashed bodies, and wet wool, she was somewhere far removed from her time.

Looking up. She saw a sign hanging overhead, the words “Sounder Inn” painted in coarse letters around a spouting whale—a tavern. …….Cautiously, she ventured inside. A strange mix of men of all races and nationalities…..some nearly naked and covered with tattoos.

You get the idea. Try it and go places you’ll never be.
See these books on my Amazon page.  http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005N0BVCS

Fiction: How To Start A Novel

If you write, every conversation, every observed happening, every glimpse of an interesting person, or every snippet of dialogue herd on TV, is fodder for a novel.

When I began my last novel, Love Lost in Time, the location came first because I had childhood memories of vacations at the seashore, and when I’m writing, I’m there, in that place. Okay. Who is there?

Thirty-something woman whose life has been shattered and she must find her place in a new life. She rents a beach house in a small seaside, tourist town to think. I know something about this. I’m on my fourth major change. Sara decides she is not going to repeat as perfect wife and mother, simply occupying space. A quote from the book:

“The mildly judgmental way Clover looked at her, suggested she was being compared to the Toy Group at a dog show—amusing but without meaningful purpose.”

Okay. I’ve got my theme. Now for the fun part. She’s going to fall in love with the ghost renting the house, who died in the 1860s. Some of you remember, “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir?” One of my favorite movies.

My books have to be about something new to me, because I thrive on research. In this instance, I settled on the 19^th Century whaling industry. My ghost was a whaling ship captain. By now my imagination was at a full gallop.  I’m an American History junkie, especially the Civil War. Here’s my chance to learn about whaling. I read Moby Dick. Ismael suggested the character of the husband who deserted Sara to find adventure. I read Whalers, the Time-Life Book about early whaling and learned to love whales. I discovered a little-known event in the Civil War called, “The Stone Fleet,” and used it as a mystery Sara has to solve when she is sent to 1860 New Kensington. Time travel research got me into wormholes and vortexes and I sent Sara to a meeting of the local Metaphysical Society to learn about parallel universes. I added a local insurance fraud that Sara discovers that puts her life in danger, and a mystery of the origin of some of the local residents, who look a lot like people she met in 1860.

By now I’m totally engaged and having the time of my life writing this book. I haven’t forgotten the romance, which like everything else, has a surprising twist, and, of course, since it is the New Jersey shore, we have to have a hurricane.

Go to http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UPMAS9G and read the first ten pages of the book and the synopsis. Of course, I hope you buy it and let me know what you think by writing a review on Amazon. Or you can e-mail me at author@joycezeller.com, or even visit my website to see what other romances I’ve written. http://joycezellercom.weebly.com

Point of View--Interior Monologue

The Interior Monologue point of view is one of the most powerful devices an author has to reveal the inner core of a character. It requires sinking deep into a character, living in the moment, voicing thoughts uncensored by political correctness or culture. In other words, it reveals the basest emotions. It is a great way to give a lot of backstory in a few words, but it requires real effort on the part of the author to sink into the character and become that person. You must lose yourself and all your inhibitions and let go.  Sometimes it is called, “stream of consciousness.”  That means there are no pronouns like I or no tags like ‘he thought.’ It is the character talking to himself, revealing truths he’d never voice aloud.

I used this device in a short story in a December blog about two years ago. The title is “Marilyn Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” The scene is on a sidewalk in Chicago. Henry is waiting for his ride. It goes like this:

“I've lost my mind.  I'm standing in a puddle of slush on the sidewalk, in Downtown Chicago, waiting for my ride and shivering my ass off, because I've been sucked into to another Christmas cocktail party. Hell, I just came from an office party. 

“I’m a pushover that’s what. I hate these things. The food is lousy, alcohol gives me a headache, and I stand around trying to look like I'm having fun, but nobody wants to talk to me. Bud wants me to meet this woman he's gone ape over--the broad he's going to marry if he can talk her into it, and, OK, I owe him. He’s new in the office and the only one who’s tried to be friendly in a while. The rest of those losers all took Marilyn’s side in the divorce and now they just ignore me. Learned a lesson there.  Four years of marriage is more than enough. Shit, if the guy wants me to go to this party to meet this woman, well, what the hell.” 

So, what have we learned about Henry in one short paragraph? He’s unpleasant, opinionated, friendless, divorced, doesn’t like women and abused his wife, at least verbally. He’s lonely and wants to please Bud. You also suspect that the author doesn’t like him either and he’s being set up to get his comeuppance. You're curious, you’ll keep on reading. 

The entire story is Interior Monologue, in Henry’s point of view. You can read the rest in my blog archives.  http://joycezeller.blogspot.com

IM is a good way to get in a lot of backstory quickly, to establish a character. Since it involves intense emotion, it is best used in extreme situations, like the innermost thoughts of someone about to be murdered, or commit murder, or a character experiencing an extreme situation.

I used IM in another way in Accidental Alien. The scene: a seed pod from outer space, has just germinated, in a forest on Earth, producing a young plant that will mature, in a short time, and become a being that looks like a man, but is really a plant. At this point he has only hearing, smell, and an imbedded artificial intelligence.

“His hearing, especially acute, detected sounds of movement—some slight vibrations in the ground, accompanied by the approaching sound of rhythmic crunching and tearing. A new scent caught his attention. It smelled oddly fecal. What was it? What were those succulent sounds, wet and juicy, like plants being ripped from moorings? He interpreted the "something" as animal, chewing and eating vegetation, and he was directly in its path. The greenish odor of freshly bruised leaves caught in his senses, alarming him.

“No, this couldn't happen. Terror ripped through him. He was going to be consumed as food. Images of rending and grinding by jagged teeth threw him into a panic. He wanted to live, to grow into his pre-destined form, whatever that might be, and explore this strange place.”

IM is much like internalization, where you interrupt dialogue or the progression of the story to let the reader know what your point of view character is thinking and feeling. The following are excerpts from near the end of Maddie’s Choice. The scene is during a gunfight between drug dealers and the Feds.  Maddie is handcuffed to a corral fence when her captor is shot. This is internalization:

“Blood, obscenely, brilliantly red, welled in thick globs from his shoulder. She couldn’t look away. She’d written scenes like this, never imagining the awful color of real blood from a mortal wound.”

If I had used IM here, it would read like: “Blood everywhere. How could one body have that much blood? The gorge flooding her mouth, dribbled down her chin, burning her lips. Hold it together. Can’t black out.”

The use of IM here would have distracted from the flow of the action, but you can see how much more dramatic it would have been.

Next time: First Person, present, past and future.