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I am writing a story that involves time travel, and I have a chapter where a character from the future interacts with his present-day self. This chapter is written from the present-day self's POV. ...
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T12:25:06Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/46530 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
Tempo Mental
·
2019-12-08T12:25:06Z (almost 5 years ago)
I am writing a story that involves time travel, and I have a chapter where a character from the future interacts with his present-day self. This chapter is written from the present-day self's POV. Early feedback on the chapter indicates that I'm not doing the greatest job distinguishing between the two instances of the character. I'm very wary of using out-of-character perspective tropes (e.g. "the older blond", "the other man"); what are some good ways to distinguish between them without taking the reader too far out of the story? YA genre, present-day character is 15; time-traveling character is 20. So far I've used "the man", "his older counterpart", "his future self", "his older self", "Older Adrien", and "his other self". The younger character -- and I think the one who is causing the most problems for my readers -- is only ever referred to "Adrien". Both of them get "he" and "his" and I believe I am not breaking any of the rules that would make those difficult to distinguish.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2019-07-10T10:32:44Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 22