Fiction is remarkable for its ability to move through space and time with nothing but a punctuation mark or a paragraph break. It's a superpower and, at times, a liability. Moving around in time too fluidly can trigger a kind of seasickness in the reader, causing them to lose their bearings. Marking time too overtly can seem ham fisted. What is the sweet spot?

Many writers use timestamps as scaffolding, while they write — labeling the year or month or day, to keep an nonlinear unfolding of time straight. Some keep them in the finished product, but I often suggest that writers try to do away with these trappings of the writing process by the end, allowing their scene to unfold so clearly, that the reader doesn't need to be informed when it happened with a label. Labels at the top of chapters are often overlooked by readers, who may be confused if they are the only way to get temporal bearings, but if you build time into your scenes with details that could only belong to that specific moment, you will never confuse your reader, and they will enjoy the reading far more.

On p 125 of Beloved, a new chapter begins. None of the chapters in Beloved have titles, numbers or other markings. They generally flow forward in the present time stream, and then the narrative builds flashbacks, large and small into each chapter, so that gradually the details of the past accrete and elucidate much about the present. But this chapter begins in backstory, without a timestamp or reference to the year or the fact that this is a flashback, and yet we know for certain where we are. Morrison returns more fully to an unforgettable moment she has already drawn for us: the day, at the end of the Sweet Home time frame, while Paul D was forced to wear a bit in his mouth, when he felt demeaned by the gaze of the rooster called Mister, because the rooster was freer than him. But evoking this rooster again, she catapults us into that time frame. No date or timestamp needed.

PROMPT

Search your text for markers such as "the next day," "in September," "the following Wednesday" and see if you can do away with them, replacing them with details that aren't so explicitly day and date-oriented but instead do vivid scene building, leaning on the known contexts you have established for you narrative and pushing them forward. Maybe the weather or vegetation tell us what we need to know, maybe a strutting rooster or a lame dog or a broken step belong indubitably to a certain specific moment and can replace more prosaic, generic listings. Try removing as many time markers as possible and see if the passage of time is still clear — or indeed clearer.