Who, What, Why and Where. Writers often use the What If tactic to either come up with a plot, fix a plot, figure out a plot, or plug up a plot.
I do it now and again just to amuse myself, but I'll also utilize it for working out a plot when I need to know the best way to get from point B to point C. And it's a good tool for checking over your novel when it's completed - asking yourself some questions to see if you've left anything open and dangling in the realm of stupidity that your agent/publisher/readers will catch.
The question that I've been pondering lately involves time travel, which usually makes me roll my eyes because too many writers (books, movies, and tv) really screw it up. But my question is: What if those predictions from the 50's were true, and by the year 2007 we're all flying around in our personal hovercrafts, leaving the household chores to our robots, working two days a week from the comfort of our home offices, using our virtual reality computers, and taking long vacations on a resort on Mars?
What if all that were true, and a reality, only someone from the future invented a time machine, traveled back into the past on a lark, and stepped on a butterfly. And thanks to that hapless twit, we have the reality we live in now - which is technically an alternate, someone-screwed-up-and-changed-it reality. We're completely oblivious to this until that hapless twit shows up and apologizes for having fucked us over and set the human race back about a thousand years.
The consequences of that question are explored to a certain degree in my new novel - the one I'm competing with in the Great Tea debacle.
Now, I know what you're saying: If this guy from the future travels to the past and changes the future, wouldn't that cancel out his own existence, thus making it impossible for him to travel to the past in the first place? That's called a time loop, which is solved by the parallel universe theory.
Let's imagine Fred, Barney, Wilma and Betty are standing in Fred's basement, watching as Fred steps into a time machine. He goes "poof" and heads into the past. While he's there, he steps on the proverbial butterfly, thus causing dear old Betty to never have been born. When he returns to the present, he finds Barney and Wilma waiting for him, anxious to hear about his adventure - but no Betty.
Fred stepped on the butterfly, Betty was never born. Fred remembers Betty, realizes what he did - but Barney and Wilma have never heard of Betty. She was never born, so they don't know she's gone.
You're thinking - But, if Betty was never born, then she never married Barney, who then never took that job at the rock quarry, never met Fred, and wasn't there to help him build the time machine in the first place.
Now instead of following Fred, let's stay with Barney, Betty and Wilma. They wave as Fred goes 'poof' then stand there, chatting and enjoying the cheese platter, and wait. Fred has now squashed said butterfly. Does Betty puff out of existence? Does she vanish, leaving Wilma and Barney with a serious case of amnesia? What happened to her wine glass? Did it fall to the floor?
No. What happened was, Betty, Barney and Wilma are left to wait forever - because Fred never returns.
The reality Fred is alive in is the one where the butterfly died, and Betty wasn't born. So that's the only reality Fred can return to.
The reality Wilma, Barney and Betty are alive in is the one where Fred left in a time machine and never came back.
So, could the Terminator have traveled back in time and murdered Sara Conner - thus preventing her son from being born, which would have eliminated the Terminator from ever having to travel back in the first place?
Yes and No. He would have traveled back, killed Sara, and prevented the kid from being born - but that would not have affected the people who sent him. It would have created an alternate reality, wherein Sara Conner was murdered before ever having a son.
Dizzy?
Don't worry - when I go back and spray Raid all over the Jurassic and prevent your birth, it'll only be a reality somewhere else, which is where I'll be, which kinda makes it a win-win for me, eh? :D
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14 comments:
I actually followed that. Makes total sense to me. :D
VERY well-explained. I also dislike time travel in most movies because it's handled terribly. But you have a real grip on it.
I think the reason so many people muck it up so badly is because they're only willing to see the actions of Fred - they're not asking themselves what's happening to Barney, Wilma and Betty.
If they'd stop at think for a second, then logic would smack them upside the head like a large mouth bass.
It also gets way more complicated (worse?) when you start really studying Tachyons, too... Oof.
Not to mention light traveling backwards at a negative speed, eh?
And if Tea travels west at the speed of the USPS, can anyone hear you scream?
WOW! Well explained - definitely left me spinning...
My verification word: tynapqp.
Which is the sound my brain made after reading that. I followed it and understood. There's a reason I don't write time travel. Oof. Too much.
~Mary (Soccer Mom)
The problem I had -- and the reason I don't write time travel stories -- is that the more I read about it, the more educated I became (and I've read a fair bit, I know a fair bit), the less able I was to find a proper story anywhere within the science. Which is just me, I realize, but there you go.
The trick is, the story can't be ABOUT the time travel - too boring, convoluted, messy and you'll get a lot of people saying "That's not how Spock did it!"
You write a story with an exciting, convoluted, un-messy plot that derived from the possible result of someone possibly having mucked with time at some point in a previous . . .um . . . time :)
And you do it in a month or less, thus ensuring you loads of tea.
This is actually why I've become such a fan of the new TV show "Journeyman"
It is a time travel story, but time travel has almost zilch to do with the actual story. I was hugely impressed when, in the first episode he's zipping back and forth...and yet, the story we care about is the situation with his wife, his brother, his boss, the person he went back in time to help.
Very well done, says me.
You're going to write a very interesting book in November, Kristine.
If you wind up looking for someone to read it, and you don't hold grudge after I win, I'd love to see what you turn out, Kristine. That sounds really interesting.
Wow! I like the way your mind works. It makes total sense!
My brain hurts.
I have time travel in my novel. Although it follows my rules for my urban fantasy.
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