Black Hole Fiction: Managing Time

World of Writing Series: TIME

As a writer, TIME was possibly one of the last things I thought about when writing my first novel. It did not occur to me that in order to build a world for my reader, I would have to instruct them (subtly) on the passage of time. It sounds stupid now I think on it but I thought that it would be the one thing that as I wrote the reader would simply catch on that time was passing in the way I imagined time was passing in my story. And this is because we rarely have to think about it in the real world.

But consider how, come one o’clock on a Friday, when you’re bursting to leave the office, the hours seem to drag on before reaching five but then whip through the weekend where, before you know it, you’re chasing down that…