You Are The Wizard Of Speed And Time
Part 2
by Wulf Moon
Great Scott! Wait! Is that
Scott with one T or with two? I'm so confused. All I know is a lightning bolt hit the intake on the flux capacitor I rigged into my '67 Mustang, shooting us instantaneously forward in time to Part Two of this article! All I remember before that was falling off my toilet …
No, wait. It's all coming back to me.
We were idling in 2025, the flux capacitor was … fluxing, and I had just taken you back in time to see my beautiful '67 Mustang that my brother rolled, and it turned into a Bondo bucket for the rest of the future I owned it.
The girls! They're gone! And all because my brother woke me up for my cooking shift that started at midnight and asked if he could warm my car up for me. That rat! He didn't tell me "warming it up" meant taking it for a high-speed drive down icy Wisconsin roads and flipping it over in a ditch! I've got to fix this!
Control yourself, Moon. You know what messing around with the space-time continuum can cause. We're just here to show writers how easy time jumps in prose can be. In the first article, we took them back to 1979 in a heartbeat. We showed them the short film made that year called
The Wizard of Speed and Time. And we commandeered my 1967 Mustang just a little too late in the year's timeline, but we taught writers the magic trick of how a single stand-alone hashtag can transport readers instantaneously in time through scene breaks. And now here we are, back in good ol' 2025, ready to share new tricks with our writing wizards-in-training while we cruise the town in my Mustang. Hey, check out my old cassette player playing
Candy-O by The Cars!
Let's start moving in stereo, spin these wheels forward, and pick up where we left off in the past. I know. Time travel. It's Heavy!
Flashbacks
A flashback is a prose magic trick where you can take readers back in time and reveal a segment of history on your protagonist. You can share a moment that made your characters what they are or share secrets from the past that they carry in the present-day timeline of your story. While flashbacks can be done within a scene, a scene break is often an effective way to notify the reader that these events are not occurring in the present.
But remember, oh apprenticing Wizard of Speed and Time, if you are about to take your reader in your '67 Mustang time machine down memory lane, you need to signal for them to buckle up and tell them we're going for a ride! You also need to provide signals that you're transporting them back to the present of your story's timeline at the end of the flashback. If you don't effectively do so, your reader will get lost in flashback limbo, with no god to pray to for deliverance.
You left them.
Alone.
Confused.
Trying to figure out where they are in the story.
And whether they should be wearing hotpants or culottes.
Time Dilation/Time Contraction
Here's two more magic tricks for wordsmith wizards to master. Through sentence and paragraph structure, you can expand time within a story, drawing out those poignant moments of sacrifice and allowing readers to fully experience their emotions before moving on. You can also contract time within your prose, making the reader feel fast-paced action scenes with focused ferocity.
One of the best examples I can give you of time dilation and contraction within a movie is in The Fellowship of the Ring. When Boromir defends Merry and Pippin against Uruk-hai orcs, the film's frames go into slow motion as the first arrow hits Boromir in the chest. You see the shock in this powerful warrior's face. You feel his mortal wound. Time is slowed for you to take in what is happening, allowing feelings of empathy and concern to blossom within you. Two more arrows are fired and for each, the orc chieftain moves in slow, painful motion. Each time he draws back the bowstring every creak of the wicked bow is heard, increasing the dramatic tension until the arrow is finally released. Even the captured hobbits are lifted over the orc's shoulders in slow motion, giving you enough time to experience empathetic feelings of defeat and loss.
And then, our hero appears! Aragorn with blade drawn, slashing at the orc, and the frames of the fight speed up so fast it's as if you are experiencing Aragorn's adrenalin-rushed wrath and fury firsthand.
It's an intense moment in the motion picture. But what made this scene so special was that the director understood his medium and that he was The Wizard of Speed and Time. He slowed the scene down to allow us to experience the raw emotions of death and defeat, then juxtaposed that segment against a rapid-fire battle of swift vengeance against a wicked foe. Peter Jackson played his audience like a fiddle.
You can, too … by becoming The Wizard of Speed and Time in prose.
Time dilation is simple. Hover over that moment of sacrifice in your story. Draw out the feelings and emotions as lovers look deep into one another's eyes. Wax a little poetic and take your time describing poignant moments so the reader can experience them as well. This is where descriptive paragraphs can radiate sensitivity and feeling, and just as it takes longer to read longer paragraphs, time can slow down for the reader if the prose is also emotionally engaging. Create the space for readers to experience the range of emotions that come with loss. As Boromir stated earlier in the film after the party lost Gandalf: "Give them a moment for pity's sake."
But how about fight scenes? These should normally move quickly because they are life or death moments. And yet I've edited fight scenes where the fighting halts as our hero flashes back to a moment from his youth and pines for the days of old beside his dear old dad. If you're in a knife fight, there's only one thing you're thinking of, and that's how to avoid your opponent's blade so you can cut and bleed him out before he bleeds you. Who takes trips down memory lane when life or death is on the line? Doesn't happen, and if a writer does this it kills the lightning-fast pacing of the fight.
Time should contract so that the readers can sense from the text layout that attacks between the opponents are occurring rapidly. How can our prose represent the rapidity of these motions? With short, clipped action lines happening on the page in rapid-fire succession.
How about a hot argument between a man and woman? Practice writing clipped dialogue, what I call ping-pong dialogue. Ping-pong dialogue is like a fast-moving game of ping-pong where the ball whizzes from player to player. Dialogue is the ball in this game, and the writer snaps clipped replies in rapid succession in line after line between arguing parties. No drawn-out descriptions here! This is speed chess on a short timer: move, slap; move, slap; move, slap. In fact, why not make it an argument where you throw in a slap.
"How dare you!"
"You started it!"
"Don't you ever touch me again."
"Fine. I'm leaving."
"Good. Get out! And don't bother coming back."
Awww. Let's hope they kiss and make up later. We can slow the prose down then to bring forth all the romantic feels of love redeemed.
Congratulations! You've just traveled there and back again on this topic with lightning speed. What did I tell you? Excellent wizard material! Now you just need to practice the proper swish with your wand. Uh, it's swish, not swat. There you go! Keep practicing!
It's time for you to hop out of my time-traveling Mustang. Thanks for not putting your feet down on the floorboards. Where am I off to? Oh, 1979 again. But this time, I'm going back just a little bit further. Back to when my uncle did all the custom work on my 'Stang, like putting a 302 carburetor on the 289 engine. Back to when he painted it in gleaming Mustang orange. And this time when my younger brother asks if he can warm my car up before I go to work?
I'll know what he's really up to, and I'll tell him to take a hike. Bondo bucket will be … wait for it, wait for it, … erased from existence. Shiny tricked out '67 Mustang will still be mine! Girls, how about a ride?
I know what you're going to say. "Moon! What about all that talk about screwing up future events, the space-time continuum?"
Well, I figured, what the hell.
