Temporal Mechanics: What Speculative Fiction Can Teach Us about Writing Time

Deciding how time works in your fiction is one of the most crucial structural choices an author makes. Good time management can pull a plot tight, open a character's entire life to exploration, and hold readers' engagement; choices about time will often end up shaping the narrator's voice and dictating the balance of scene and summary. In this class, we'll look at some superbly crafted science fiction and fantasy with bold, unusual time structures as a way to study in high relief the strategies and tools authors in all genres deploy to structure time.