{"id":60605,"date":"2025-03-20T08:36:59","date_gmt":"2025-03-20T12:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=60605"},"modified":"2025-03-20T08:36:59","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T12:36:59","slug":"philip-fracassi-five-things-i-learned-writing-the-third-rule-of-time-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2025\/03\/20\/philip-fracassi-five-things-i-learned-writing-the-third-rule-of-time-travel\/","title":{"rendered":"Philip Fracassi: Five Things I Learned Writing The Third Rule Of Time Travel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She\u2019s built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time\u2014to any point in the traveler\u2019s lifetime\u2014and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it\u2019s not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.
 
After Beth\u2019s husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella\u2014their only daughter\u2014and 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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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HOW TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    <\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    One of the first challenges when deciding to write a time travel novel is creating the machine. Because there\u2019s got to be a machine, right? Of course there does. Whether it\u2019s a Delorean or a hot tub, there needs to be the thing <\/em>that gets your characters blasting through space time. For me, I knew some basics going in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Second, I knew it would be the type of machine that stayed put. <\/em>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 <\/em>the technological advancements of my near-future story world to create a unique machine that only sent a person\u2019s consciousness <\/em>through time, which ended up giving me a lot to play with (along with some challenges).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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 \u201chard rules\u201d that my characters believed as gospel, because I knew I was going to break the hell out of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    KEEP IT REAL (UP TO A POINT)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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 \u201creality\u201d I want to infuse into my stories. Cloud creatures that make it rain bad dreams? Sure! Sounds fun. A witch\u2019s curse that makes someone die horribly every time you sneeze? Hilarious. No notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For time travel, however, I felt it important to fuse my story with a little <\/em>more reality. Much like my historical horror novels, Boys in the Valley<\/em> and the upcoming Sarafina<\/em>, 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. <\/em>With Third Rule<\/em> specifically, I wanted the reader to think: Dude, this could actually happen, <\/em>and not be wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    There\u2019s a lot of future science in the book, and I knew that to make the story really sing, I\u2019d 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 <\/em>and then back to <\/em>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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But to the point of this essay, what I learned was that there\u2019s 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 <\/em>possible, and therefore make the reader connect more with the story and empathize with the characters. But there\u2019s also a point where you want to let go. <\/em>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 \u201creal\u201d and the \u201cnot real,\u201d and the hope is to give the reader some footing in facts just before you blow their minds with ideas and events that can\u2019t be explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    However…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    EXPOSITION IS A BALANCING ACT<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    One option that I\u2019ve used in the past is the \u201csprinkle\u201d 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\u2019t supposed to happen, and why <\/em>it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And while any writing teacher worth their salt will beat it into a writer\u2019s head to \u201cshow don\u2019t tell,\u201d I knew for this book I\u2019d have to do some telling before I could do some showing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The solution I came up with was to create an entire character to act as a sort of \u201creader proxy\u201d for the book. In this case, the character I introduced happened to be a reporter writing a story about the time machine, ergo, they\u2019d needed to know how it worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Voila!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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\u2019t create story speedbumps and keep things clicking along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Ultimately, I feel I was able to find that balance, although I\u2019m sure mileage will vary with readers. But figuring that all out was a big lesson for me as a writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    MINOR CHARACTERS CAN BE COOL! (OR EVEN CRUCIAL)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It seems obvious, but the reality is that I\u2019d never given a ton <\/em>of thought to minor characters. I\u2019m not talking about secondary, or B characters… I\u2019m talking about folks who appear in one or two scenes throughout the entirety of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But after I wrote Third Rule, <\/em>I was caught off guard by people bringing up this one <\/em>character again and again. The guy had like 2.5 pages of \u201cscreen time\u201d 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 <\/em>Jerry (that\u2019s the guy\u2019s name), and I was completely caught off guard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It got to the point that when I did initial edits I was asked to add more <\/em>Jerry! As in, I gave him a whole chapter where he spills all sorts of tea to my protagonist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    After some discussion, I realized that people didn\u2019t like Jerry because he was funny or smart, they liked the character because he was disruptive. <\/em>What I mean by that is that the story goes, and goes, and goes… and then, WHAM. Who\u2019s this person? Why are they acting like this? And isn\u2019t it cool how they kickstart the story a little bit?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I\u2019m 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 <\/em>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\u2019s earned \u2013 easy on the dues ex machina!) that propels the story forward in a fun, unexpected way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    From now on I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    DATES MATTER (aka SPREADSHEETS CAN BE FUN!)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    We\u2019re gonna wrap it up on a very practical tip, because I\u2019m boring that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In screenwriting it\u2019s important to keep track of your days and nights, your dusks and dawns. But there\u2019s a second layer to that, which is keeping track of your dates<\/em>. Knowing if it\u2019s a Tuesday or a Saturday, if it\u2019s January 4th<\/sup> or June 11th<\/sup>, and whether it\u2019s 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\u2019s birthday coming up\u2014and if so, will the party be an outdoor affair?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It sounds obvious (and trivial), I know, but it\u2019s 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\u2019re not careful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    One might be surprised at how many times you\u2019re 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.<\/em> And then you have to go back and read-through your work to make sure all the timing works out and that can suuuuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    With Third Rule, <\/em>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\u2014a 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<\/sup>, 2025, it better damn well be a Monday, because that\u2019s what the real-world calendar says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In my case, I was dealing with key incidents taking place in 2044, and on my initial drafts, I wasn\u2019t paying attention to whether February 3rd<\/sup>, 2044 was on a Monday or Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But here\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So moving forward I plan to be way <\/em>more cognizant about those pesky days and dates, especially when dealing with the past, or the future (or both).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Or you know… multiple realities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n\n\n\n

    PHILIP FRACASSI is the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Award-nominated author of the story collections Behold the Void<\/em>, Beneath a Pale Sky, <\/em>and No One is Safe!<\/em> His novels include A Child Alone with Strangers, Gothic, Boys in the Valley, <\/em>and The Third Rule of Time Travel<\/em>. His stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Nightmare Magazine, Interzone,<\/em> and Southwest Review<\/em>. Philip lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Copps Literary Services, Circle M + P, and WME.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Philip Fracassi<\/strong>: Website<\/a> | Bluesky<\/a> | Instagram<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Third Rule of Time Travel<\/strong>: Bookshop<\/a> | B&N<\/a> | Orbit<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She\u2019s built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time\u2014to any point in the traveler\u2019s lifetime\u2014and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it\u2019s not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe. After Beth\u2019s husband, Colson, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-60605","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-fLv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60605"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60608,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60605\/revisions\/60608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}