Just how much can you do in a year?

[GyroscopicGraphite]

A problem that I'm sure comes up rarely, or least is noticed far less than one would think, is how to handle timeframes. How much can actually happen in a set amount of time? Its easy enough to say 'these chapters happened and Wednesday, those chapters on Thursday', but could an entire character arc and 6 sex scenes really happen in only two days?

It's even easier to just describe how a person managed to single handedly flip the world on its head in a matter of a couple weeks, or how a character became a masterful painter despite only getting their hands on cheap watercolors a year or so ago. But could someone really fully learn a skill in less time than it takes the Earth to circle the Sum?

Obviously, suspension of disbelief tends to kick in, especially when time isn't brought up as a major point often, so the reader (or the author for that matter) doesn't usually notice these things.

But not just in our writing, in our lives, how much can we do in a year? How much has happened to us in just the last year? Are you living in the same house? Living with the same people? Some people went from going an dates to going on a honeymoon, some from married to freshly divorced. A few started writing their first story a year ago today. A couple may have published their last chapter a year ago today.

I think in a society of mindless scrolling and souless work, we can easily lose ourselves in traps of truly wasted time. Time spent not learning, not relaxing, but truly being wasted. So I ask again; how much can you do in a year? Better, yet, a lifetime?

 

[OttoVonHerunterhangen]

It depends on the era and what the state of technology is in the time you are writing about unless you are talking about biological functions (to date, you can't get pregnant and proceed to live birth more than once a year. Don't ask me about a decade from now)

Seriously, even with writing, when I was going to high school before PC's existed, it took a good three months to turn out a 10 page term paper. Before typewriters how long would it have taken to write it down on paper? After PC's I took a creative writing class in the summer back around 1988 and wrote 10 different stories, one of which was a 10 pager for a 6 week class. That was in Word Perfect on an antique PC-XT class machine.

Same thing with music, and I mean before AI came on the scene, which is turning everything on it's head production wise. But music in the 1960's and 1970's took a lot longer to produce than it did in the 2020's simply because of the parts of production that became automated. Same with photography, film making (entire movies can be completely edited on computer these days, that used to take having to physically cut and splice pieces of film before making a master copy of the movie).

Training has been similarly effected. How long for example would it take you to master Chemistry 101 if you could view the lecture videos at your own pace while sitting in the lab so you could do the experiments in between watching the vids? I'd say about a week rather than the four months University's teach it in.

Yes, it is really easy to get distracted these days, doom scrolling and such, or playing games, or answering unrelated postings on a message board (stares at ceiling and whistling tunelessly)

But if you are driven? Yeah, you can do a whole lot in less than a year these days.

That isn't to say your point about watching time frames isn't valid, it is outside of writing science fiction and fantasy, it's just interesting to contemplate in a real world sense.

 

[TheLowKing]

A popular aphorism is that it takes 10,000 hours of concentrated practice to master a skill. If you make 40 hour weeks, that's roughly 5 years of work. In 5 years' time, you can become an expert in something.

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When I write a longer story, I tend to make timelines. Day 1, Thursday, story starts, meetcute. Day 2, Friday, school, see each other in the distance. Oh, now I can't have them meet at school the next day because it's the weekend.

Or: day 1, mercenary gets hired to escort a horse-and-carriage caravan. Distance the caravan will travel is 300 miles. How long will that take? What's the terrain? What will happen along the way? How much needs to happen along the way?

 

[Dansak]

This is a constant headache for me. In my stories, shed loads of stuff tends to happen in a very short space of time. I'm forever going back during the edit and adding a week or a month here and there to get the timeline moving to a place that's more realistic to the connection between the characters. Having said that, real life can move pretty quickly too.

I met my wife in April 2021, we moved in together in June the same year, I proposed in December 2021 and we got married in March 2023, a few weeks shy of two years from our first date. Since then we've moved house and undertaken a massive refurbishment project on the new place, and we've both taken on new, very demanding jobs in that time. It's been non-stop since we met. I wouldn't change a thing.

So yeah, A LOT can happen in a year.

There are real stories of people getting married just days after meeting and happily spending the rest of their lives together. I don't think writing to much into too short a space of time in fiction is a huge issue, so long as it's intended. I try (and often fail) to make it a thing, have the characters joke about it and have their family and friends mention it, things like that. It's all about pacing, if you plan it and write it that way then it's usually not an issue. But for me, my problem comes when it moves to quickly and I haven't planned it, then it's a headache to edit it properly.

 

[TheLowKing]

It's also worth mentioning that stories are generally not about ordinary events or feature average people. You don't write about some 9-to-5 worker's dime-a-dozen week. You write about that one month when they got hypnotized into not-giving-a-fuck-mode, when they met the woman of their dreams, and when they tried to steal from their asshole boss. A lot happening in a short amount of time might be a little unrealistic or improbable if it were real life, but in a story it might just be fine.