One Hundred Fantasy Clichés That Really Need To Rest In Peace

#64: Time Travel

Note: I know I covered this trope's issues back in the last edition of the editorial. However, back when I wrote it I was about seventeen (I am almost nineteen now) and rushed it for the sake of ranting about the subject manner. Now that I have gotten older, I know the quality of the work is what matters over how much work you release. J.K. Rowling could have easily continued the Harry Potter series with the next generation after book seven, but chose to stop so the writing quality would stay consistently great. The same pretty much applies to me too. That is why I feel covering this subject again would be a well thought out choice. Fixing my mistakes from the last time is definitely an admirable feat. So I hope you guys enjoy!

Unless you are a very skilled writer or write for The Doctor Who TV series, do not ever create a time travel story. Not only is the trope completely overused, but it can ruin what was otherwise a well thought out plot. Time travel has killed many stories before they reached their greatest potential, all because of issue after issue that comes along with it. It sounds like a cool concept on paper I admit and one of my favorite RPG video games of all time, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, dealt with the time travel trope beautifully. After you hear about what ruins a time travel story though, you might be thinking twice about the possibility of using it.

Issue number one is a little something I would like to call the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect, for those of you who do not know, is changing history based on a single aspect of the past.  Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound of Thunder illustrates this issue perfectly with the main character's mistake of crushing a butterfly in prehistoric times.  As a result of killing this butterfly, upon returning from the past, the present has become a dystopian wasteland with a dictator leader.  One tiny change caused the entire future to be rewritten.  This is an issue if you intend on sending a character into the past.  You will have to chart out every action they do during this time period, so one tiny action will not ruin the realism of the story by not affecting present day.  There is a reason why the main character barely disappeared forever in Back to The Future after stopping his dad from accidentally getting hit by a car, which would have started his romance with his future wife.

  The second issue, this time pertaining to a time travel experience into the future, is the risk of accuracy.  If you send your character to a time not too far into the future, such as 2030, around the time the first spacecraft is expected to go into Mars, readers in the future will be dumbfounded by all of the wrong predictions you could have made.  A notorious (yet creative) example of this issue is Back to the Future 2.  Although it is a great movie, almost none of the predictions made about the year 2015 were even half true.  We are still decades away from flying cars, hover boards are an expensive reality, newspapers died out because of the internet, and dehydrated food cannot be restored to a classy three course meal.  In the actual 2015, the hover boards we used were just glorified skateboards, recent fears of air travel have pushed back the flying car decades away, dehydrated food not counting fruit is usually disgusting, and if you want to read about the news, you can just go online.  If you want to set a story in the future, it is a huge risk.  The only way you could get around the problem is by not giving it a specific year, but still having it be hinted to be a future date.  The Hunger Games did just this, and it is not even a time travel story.

  Finally, the biggest, most notorious issue with time travel stories are that they can be confusing as heck.  Due to the fact you have to explain and balance each aspect of the timeline and the characters' actions in that time period, simplifying the story is not easy.  This gets especially bad if you send the same character back to the same exact time multiple times over, creating numerous copies of themselves.  Unless the pacing is really outstanding, you are going to leave someone confused.  J.K. Rowling only just avoided the multiple copies issue in the third Harry Potter book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, with the logical explanation that running into your past self could put both parties into shock and thus create the butterfly effect.  That example was only used for not even the last quarter of the book and had an excuse that makes a lot of sense to the general public.  Outside of that though, there are not many great examples where this issue was avoided.

  Time travel is a tempting premise that with genius balancing could work.  The problem with using it generally, especially if you are a newer writer, is that a lot of thought needs to go into it.  You could give it a try, but the results will probably not be so pretty.  If it happens in the past, the butterfly effect needs to be thought about.  If it takes place in the future, you need to be careful about the year you want to send your characters into.  If you want to do it at all, do not make the character go back more than one time.  Confusion will be guaranteed to the audience unless you follow all of these rules.