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Q&A

In fiction writing, how can one make the passage of time seem shorter?

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More accurately, how can one write a story that spans across a good deal of time, but is not so much lengthy in its contents to match that time?

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This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/31413. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Stories are asynchronous. There is no particular connection between story time and calendar time. The length of a story is determined by the complexity of its action and the depth of its detail, not by the elapsed time between its inciting incident and its denouement.

You will sometimes have to make it clear to the reader that time has passed between one incident and another, and there are various ways to do that. I think you will find more than one existing question here that deals with ways to do that.

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