You Are The Wizard Of Speed And Time
by Wulf Moon
I can't afford a DeLorean and a flux capacitor, not even in 2025, but I have found a way to take you back in time through this low-budget article. You see, you pay by the year, and fortunately we're not traveling all the way back to 1955 when cars were made of steel instead of plastic. We're pulling the lever back and heading to 1979 when the country was a beautiful jive talkin' boogie wonderland. Hold on!
Wow! 1979. We're here! And it's just like I remembered! American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, cassette tapes that often became brown spaghetti in car stereos, jogging shorts and hotpants, wild polyester disco shirts, and there's my 1967 Mustang! My beautiful three-speed Mustang orange coupe with the black hardtop!
Oh no! I pushed Full Stop too soon! This is late '79 when my brother rolled my Mustang on an icy corner, turning my high school souped-up dream car … into a gray Bondo bucket for the rest of my senior year and beyond. The shame! I barely had money for gas, let alone a body shop to restore it. And the pretty girls? They quit asking if they could go for a ride.
Why did we come here? Moon, isn't this supposed to be an article on writing? Why are we bumming around in '79 in your beat-up Mustang, and why can we see the pavement whizzing by through the rusted-out floor deck in the back?
Yeah, forgot about that. Don't worry--I used heavy gauge wire to hold up the floor underneath where it rusted through there. You should be safe as long as we don't go across any speed bumps.
Here's my point. First, look how fast traveling through time can be in written stories. I just snapped my fingers and
bam!, here we are! (And may I say your frizzy 70s perm looks spectacular!) Second, there was an experimental short film produced this very year called
The Wizard of Speed and Time. This film was virtually a one-man production by special effects creator Mike Jittlov. No CGI here!
Every special effect was created through stop-motion animation, rotoscoping, and pixelation. That one man could create what normally required entire teams of animators to make certainly made him a wizard of animation. Years later, Jittlov got the funding to create
a full-length motion picture called by the same name, loosely based on how he made the short.
In the short-film, Jittlov used his special effects wizardry to make the wizard in his film travel the world at high-speed, granting wishes in a lightning blitz of scenes. In the feature-length film, he revealed his secrets that made his wizard speed through space and time. It was exhausting work because every second of a movie requires multiple frames per second. Can you imagine setting up those shots one by one as he made tiny progressive movements?
How does this relate to writing? When you understand your medium and how to manipulate it, you can move readers through time and space with the snap of your fingers. You can slow poignant scenes down or speed dramatic scenes up. You can even move your protagonist instantly through space and time through scene cuts or flashbacks. In writing, you truly can be The Wizard of Speed and Time!
Would you like to see how writers do these tricks, perhaps even become a wizard yourself? Great, let's see what this 'Stang can do when I put the pedal to the metal! Eighty-eight miles per hour to make the flux capacitor engage? Pshaw. I've buried the speedometer on this car, way past 120 mph (kids, don't try this at home. I'm a trained professional!). Oh, you in the back seats. Hold your feet up. We're heading back to the future and we're about to go over a speed bump.
# ← speed bump
Scene Breaks
Scene breaks are your magic sparkles, but unlike what technicians were charging in The Wizard of Speed and Time movie, you don't have to pay six-hundred bucks a sparkle. With a flick of your wand (or a single keystroke) you can take readers backward or forward in time or place, and all it takes is ending a scene with a centered hashtag symbol like you see above, known as a scene break. Go one double space down at the end of one scene, make a single hashtag strike, go another double space down and bam!, you've transported your protagonist or plot through space and time into the new scene! No DeLorean's, no flux capacitors, no HG Wells time machine with all the story setup to build it. That hashtag symbol is a pure grammatical magic trick.*
How do we use it effectively? I've mentioned in a prior Super Secrets of Writing article that scenes are like mini stories within a story: they have their own beginnings, middles, and ends. You can end a scene with eighteen-year-old Jimmy saying, "Dad, I don't care about becoming a timeshare salesman. That's your dream, not mine. I'm off to New York to become a Broadway actor!" Drop your centered hashtag below that last line as described above and bam!, start the next scene with Jimmy in a suffocating bear costume posing for tips in Midtown Manhattan. Jimmy's livin' the dream!
You just transported your protagonist in both place and time in the blink of an eye. And that's what scene breaks are for--transition markers in location or timeline or quite often, both.
A word of caution. Some emerging writers never use scene breaks. It happens--they don't understand their power yet, or the mechanics of placing them in their prose. As a freelance editor, I'll line edit their stories and some don't have a single scene break even in a lengthy novelette. As the tale goes on page after page with the protagonist jumping from one place to the next, the story starts feeling like one giant, run-on sentence and such stories are tedious to the eye and tedious to read because they're like a three-hour play where the curtain never falls and never rises on a new setting and this can and does become taxing to the reader because who doesn't like a fresh and exciting clean break now and then or even a little break in the text to rest our tired eyes and if the reader has been reading a fast-paced action scene it can be thoughtful to give them a breather through a scene break and then follow up with a calmer scene to vary our pacing so they can come up for air and God help the voice-over actor that has to read this paragraph aloud!
But there's an opposite swing to this pendulum: too many scene breaks, and also non-justified scene breaks. Again, what is a scene break? A transition in the story in either place or time or even in POV. I've edited many a story for emerging writers where the scene comes to a full stop, the proper double spaces and hashtag symbol occurs, and the story starts up again exactly where it left off at the close of the scene above. There is no break in time--it's a couple of seconds later! There is no change in setting--we're on the same starship bridge with the same characters speaking. There's absolutely no break in anything to make it necessary to create a scene break, and yet there it is.
After explaining in the margins what the purpose of a scene break is, I often wonder what moved them to create the break. Were they tired and they needed a break? Had they been writing for a long time and they needed to run to the bathroom? Or did they recognize their scene had been going on far too long and thought they could trick the reader by dropping in a scene break and making them feel the scene was somehow shorter, even though the scene picked up exactly where it just left off? Honestly, I think it's the latter. The problem is readers are smarter than that. So are editors and publishers, and they won't buy it. Yes, I mean that literally. They won't buy it. Professional editors buy professionally written stories. And professional writers know how and when to create a proper scene break.
There's one more type of scene break I see. An unjustifiable scene break. It is indeed a new scene in a different place and time, an actual break. Yay! Gold star! Have a cookie!
But the scene is so small--often just a sentence or two--that it's not even a scene. Remember: a scene is like a mini story within a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has substance to it, weightiness, justifying its place in this world. But what about a scene composed of only a few sentences like this:
#
Jimmy slammed the door. He went to the airport. He got on a plane to New York.
#
What's wrong with that scene? It's just needless stage direction. Jimmy told his dad he was going to Broadway to become an actor. Delete that useless scene. If you cut to a new scene with Jimmy in Midtown outside a Broadway theater, the reader will understand that Jimmy had to travel to get there. Trust me, it's much more exciting for readers to travel instantaneously through space and time so they can get to the good stuff. That's where you show readers that you are indeed The Wizard of Speed and Time … instead of The Jester of Slogging Timelines.
Be the wizard!
I have more speed and time prose tricks to show you before this flux capacitor I jury-rigged into my '67 Mustang winks out. I can't just leave it here in 2025. It could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe! Granted, that's a worst-case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localized, limited merely to this article and anyone that reads it.
Okay, let's go with the latter--that's a chance I'm willing to take. See you in the future for "You're The Wizard of Speed and Time, Part Two."
* Some sources advise three centered hashtags; others advise three centered asterisks. In any case, when the copy is changed to single-spaced for printing, the symbol or symbols will be taken out, replaced by a blank line between scenes. But Shunn's Guide does advise one hashtag (number symbol), and that's been a respected model for fiction writers since 1995. https://www.shunn.net/format/story/
