Time and Distance by Bonnie Le Hamilton

Have you ever stopped to think about how much time it takes you to get from point A to point B? or how much time it takes to get from point A to point B then to point C then point D, and finally back to point A?

Trying to figure out how long certain things will take, depends on distance, how large of a city (population), and even the number of people with you and how many places you’re planning to go. All of which add time to how long it will take. And your character running into someone else will add more time to the trip.

Which is what Konnie and I were talking about not too long ago. She said something about my characters getting too much done in one day. But, well, I always think her characters take too long to do simple tasks.

I’m guessing that both of us need to work on it, but in a lot of cases we’re guessing how long a certain action or event will take, we have no real way to tell us how long it will really take. There are some things that are easy to guess, while others are not so easy.

I mean I can have my characters drive across town in twenty minutes or less, but I generally put my stories in small towns, that’s what I know. That’s where I live and I rarely put my characters in larger cities. I may have lived in those larger cities in the past, but I don’t now, and I’ve lived most of my life in small towns, so its just easier to put my characters in small towns.

Konnie on the other hand lives in a large metropolis. For Konnie, she can drive ten miles in any direction from her home, and still be in the city. I can drive that far and be out in the countryside, sometimes in less distance than that. For Konnie, traffic is a constant problem, and traffic jams happens, routinely.

The last time I saw anything close to a traffic jam around here, a train had just gone through town, shutting off roadways for several minutes. Cars were backed up a whole quarter of a mile! 😊 There was once (years ago obviously) when Tom and I were watching the news and the reporter was standing with interstate behind him talking about proposed construction in that area and how it would affect rush hour traffic.

As he talked cars were zooming past him at about one every two to three seconds (it was rush hour). Then the reporter drew everyone’s attention to those cars, saying, “As you can see traffic is bumper to bumper right now.”

I turned to Tom and asked, “If that’s bumper to bumper, what do they call it when your bumper is literally touching the bumper in front of you?”

He said, “Around here that’s a fender bender,” deadpan and straight-faced. And it still makes me laugh because it’s so true.

At any rate, travel time is affected by so many different factors making it hard to figure out while writing a story. And of course, there is the issue of actually doing the shopping, and how long it will take. I’m sure some people think it takes them a matter of minutes to do their grocery shopping, but I’m telling you, I rarely finish in under an hour, and I’m just shopping for me. Think about how long it takes all those people who actually fill their cart, or even more than one cart?

How do you figure that out? I’m not sure. I guess. Maybe I guess wrong sometimes, but I think it’s possible to go too far in the other direction where you have characters barely managing a couple of things in a busy day. I manage to accomplish more on my busy days than my lazy days, because I keep going, keep working.

But when writing my stories, I need to remember that my characters aren’t working alone, and those characters they interact with might be having a bad day, or my character didn’t realize how long it would take to chat or whatever.

However, I think sometimes that Konnie is too vague about the passage of time, and she has her characters accomplishing too few things in a single day. If you have your character taking a half hour just to brush his teeth, you have two valid choices, either this is a character flaw of some importance to your story, or you have some editing to do.

Anyway, consider the time it is taking your characters to accomplish tasks, look at them closely. Is it taking too much time? Is it taking too little time? And how can it be fixed?

Happy writing everybody!