Lessons from Fan Fiction: Time is a Factor

By necessity, television shows create short-cuts. We don't really want to watch a person search for a parking space for ten minutes. And sure, DNA tests take longer in real life, but that's not terribly exciting. Granted, it gets downright weird how quickly various FBI personnel can get from Virginia to Washington D.C. to Maryland, etc. But hey, let's just pretend that traffic was really really good that day!

One of the biggest differences between real life and fictional life is how long it takes things to heal. Even in the Star Trek universe, muscles need to be exercised, neurons need to be re-established, brains need to be retrained. Technology may speed up operations and improve results, but the human body--as Yuval Noah Harari points out in Sapiens--has not evolved as quickly as humankind's creations.

Take, for example, Matthew Gray Gruber in Season 5 of Criminal Minds. To the annoyance of the show's producers, he severely dislocated his knee in the off-season. Consequently, his character spent a number of Season 5 episodes in the BAU office on crutches.

The rewrites worked--and were probably good for the writers' inventiveness--but the length of time Gruber took to heal in real life points to how often shows give us one, maybe two, episodes of fictional broken bones before, oh, well, the person is all well now! Because watching people heal can get really tedious.

When writing fan fiction, the writer has to decide, Exactly how long should it take to fix the ship, take a character to heal, enter data into a program? Too short and the reader's skepticism will kick in. Too long, and the reader may move on to, say, watching paint dry. 

On the other hand, time--and repetition--can prove quite useful to a writer. Not only do things take longer in real life than in fiction, events in real life occur more than once. The Quartermaster has to take inventory not just once in seven years. It would likely be a quarterly event (or more in times of crisis).

On Star Trek: Voyager, Neelix works as a useful reminder that food stuffs need to be collected on multiple occasions. His need to restock becomes a useful plot device. Likewise, whenever necessary, a writer can remember, "Oh, I can have crew members check the replicators in this story--again--because, you know, that's something that has to be done more than once." 

More on the problem of time & fiction at a later date . . .