Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She’s built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time—to any point in the traveler’s lifetime—and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it’s not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.
After Beth’s husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella—their only daughter—and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology.
Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp.
As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future.
HOW TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE
One of the first challenges when deciding to write a time travel novel is creating the machine. Because there’s got to be a machine, right? Of course there does. Whether it’s a Delorean or a hot tub, there needs to be the thing that gets your characters blasting through space time. For me, I knew some basics going in.
First, I knew it would be a traditional sci-fi machine, i.e., something built in a lab by an engineer and a bunch of smart people.
Second, I knew it would be the type of machine that stayed put. Ditto for the traveler. This was not a situation where the machine itself, or the person within it, would end up in an overgrown meadow with a smoking volcano in the background and a curious T-Rex sniffing at a possible new toy. I made the assumption that if time travel was possible then other stuff was possible as well: quantum computers, the harnessing of negative energy, impossible amounts of digital storage, light-speed data transmission, etc. Ergo, I used all the technological advancements of my near-future story world to create a unique machine that only sent a person’s consciousness through time, which ended up giving me a lot to play with (along with some challenges).
Third, I knew that traveling through time, despite what the super-smart scientists in my book thought, would mess up the present, and possibly (probably) the future. From a storytelling standpoint, I liked the idea that there were some “hard rules” that my characters believed as gospel, because I knew I was going to break the hell out of them.
Fourth and last, I based the mechanics of my machine, and some of the other technology in my story, on real science, which brings me to my next point.
KEEP IT REAL (UP TO A POINT)
My job as a fiction writer is to make stuff up. Whether it be monsters or curses or, you know, time travel, I have a ton of liberty when it comes to how much “reality” I want to infuse into my stories. Cloud creatures that make it rain bad dreams? Sure! Sounds fun. A witch’s curse that makes someone die horribly every time you sneeze? Hilarious. No notes.
For time travel, however, I felt it important to fuse my story with a little more reality. Much like my historical horror novels, Boys in the Valley and the upcoming Sarafina, I wanted to make the reader actually believe the stuff that was happening in my books was not just fun and scary, but actually plausible. With Third Rule specifically, I wanted the reader to think: Dude, this could actually happen, and not be wrong.
There’s a lot of future science in the book, and I knew that to make the story really sing, I’d need to do some heavy lifting on researching the theoretical possibilities of the science. In the Afterword of the novel, I list a few of the physicists that I drew from for the time machine, the digitization of a human consciousness, and the mechanics of sending data away from and then back to the earth in a way that the information itself would be stuck in the past instead of the present (which led to some key plot moments where reality was revealed to the characters in fun and alarming ways).
But to the point of this essay, what I learned was that there’s a point where you want to ground the reader in real science (or history or facts, etc.) so that the events of the book feel possible, and therefore make the reader connect more with the story and empathize with the characters. But there’s also a point where you want to let go. Where you push past the boundaries of reality and facts and hard science and you open the world up to the speculative and, perhaps, the supernatural. For me it was interesting to find that balance between the “real” and the “not real,” and the hope is to give the reader some footing in facts just before you blow their minds with ideas and events that can’t be explained.
However…
EXPOSITION IS A BALANCING ACT
Getting all that science into the book created another tricky problem: how do I let the reader know all the hard physics behind the technology without boring them to tears and stopping the pacing of the story dead in its tracks?
One option that I’ve used in the past is the “sprinkle” method. Apply a little truth here and there as the story goes along to let the reader know some real-life details. But while that might work with some stories, for this particular story I felt I needed to get all the heavy lifting out of the way early. That way, when my characters began to run into problems, or experience unforeseen plot twists, the reader would understand why BAD THING wasn’t supposed to happen, and why it wasn’t supposed to happen. In other words, I had to explain how my version of time travel worked before I could get into the meat and potatoes of my story.
And while any writing teacher worth their salt will beat it into a writer’s head to “show don’t tell,” I knew for this book I’d have to do some telling before I could do some showing.
The solution I came up with was to create an entire character to act as a sort of “reader proxy” for the book. In this case, the character I introduced happened to be a reporter writing a story about the time machine, ergo, they’d needed to know how it worked.
Voila!
Of course, that new character needed to have more agency than just being an exposition conduit, and I gave that to them, but I still had to balance how much info to give, how detailed to get, and when to deliver these parcels of theoretical physics and quantum mechanics to the reader in a way that wouldn’t create story speedbumps and keep things clicking along.
Ultimately, I feel I was able to find that balance, although I’m sure mileage will vary with readers. But figuring that all out was a big lesson for me as a writer.
MINOR CHARACTERS CAN BE COOL! (OR EVEN CRUCIAL)
It seems obvious, but the reality is that I’d never given a ton of thought to minor characters. I’m not talking about secondary, or B characters… I’m talking about folks who appear in one or two scenes throughout the entirety of the story.
But after I wrote Third Rule, I was caught off guard by people bringing up this one character again and again. The guy had like 2.5 pages of “screen time” in my novel, but he was mentioned by my editor, my agent, and even a movie director who I met with about a possible adaptation of the story. They all loved Jerry (that’s the guy’s name), and I was completely caught off guard.
It got to the point that when I did initial edits I was asked to add more Jerry! As in, I gave him a whole chapter where he spills all sorts of tea to my protagonist.
After some discussion, I realized that people didn’t like Jerry because he was funny or smart, they liked the character because he was disruptive. What I mean by that is that the story goes, and goes, and goes… and then, WHAM. Who’s this person? Why are they acting like this? And isn’t it cool how they kickstart the story a little bit?
I’m not suggesting a random character has to show up midway through a western novel wearing a giant bunny head and gunning down the cranky old sheriff with a laser bazooka from the future (or am I?), but what I am suggesting is that sometimes even a brief scene can add some needed texture and depth to a cast of characters and, quite possibly, provide some key piece of knowledge (make sure it’s earned – easy on the dues ex machina!) that propels the story forward in a fun, unexpected way.
From now on I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to my tertiary characters, because those guys recently became a whole new tool in my storytelling toolbox.
DATES MATTER (aka SPREADSHEETS CAN BE FUN!)
We’re gonna wrap it up on a very practical tip, because I’m boring that way.
In screenwriting it’s important to keep track of your days and nights, your dusks and dawns. But there’s a second layer to that, which is keeping track of your dates. Knowing if it’s a Tuesday or a Saturday, if it’s January 4th or June 11th, and whether it’s been a week since the BIG INCIDENT, or a day, or a month. Is it snowing or raining or sunny? What time does the sun set? Is someone’s birthday coming up—and if so, will the party be an outdoor affair?
It sounds obvious (and trivial), I know, but it’s not something a lot of new writers think about when writing a story, and believe it or not, it can mess you up if you’re not careful.
One might be surprised at how many times you’re at the keyboard, about to give your character a day at the beach, and go: Wait, is it even a weekend? Because my character mentioned how much he hated Mondays in the last chapter. And then you have to go back and read-through your work to make sure all the timing works out and that can suuuuck.
With Third Rule, this went to insane extremes. Without divulging spoilers, suffice to say that there are a few different realities in play in the story, so keeping track of days and dates became something that could only properly be tracked in a spreadsheet—a reference for me to know that when Character A went to the park, it was definitely a Saturday, and when Character B had a one-year anniversary of an INCIDENT, that it tracked to the proper calendar day. Meaning, if a scene takes place on February 3rd, 2025, it better damn well be a Monday, because that’s what the real-world calendar says.
In my case, I was dealing with key incidents taking place in 2044, and on my initial drafts, I wasn’t paying attention to whether February 3rd, 2044 was on a Monday or Friday.
But here’s the crazy thing: that came back to bite me. BIG time. During the editing process, sharpshooter copy editors were breaking my brain with incorrect date usage (yes, even 20 years in the future), and it kinda messed my story up a smidge and led to some frustrating nights at the keyboard.
So moving forward I plan to be way more cognizant about those pesky days and dates, especially when dealing with the past, or the future (or both).
Or you know… multiple realities.
PHILIP FRACASSI is the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Award-nominated author of the story collections Behold the Void, Beneath a Pale Sky, and No One is Safe! His novels include A Child Alone with Strangers, Gothic, Boys in the Valley, and The Third Rule of Time Travel. His stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Nightmare Magazine, Interzone, and Southwest Review. Philip lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Copps Literary Services, Circle M + P, and WME.
Philip Fracassi: Website | Bluesky | Instagram
The Third Rule of Time Travel: Bookshop | B&N | Orbit
brentsalish says:
I don’t know about the book yet, but terrific title.
March 20, 2025 — 4:35 PM