On Writing the Concept of Time Travel

In my Crossed Spaces short story ‘The Clockmaker and the Time Machine’, the idea for the characters came to me in a dream—three siblings in hiding from the government due to one having powers—but adding the time machine element came from my love of time travel stories.

I can’t remember when I first became interested in the concept of time travel and time machines. Perhaps it was the first time I watched Back to the Future as a child in the eighties, but it has always been a concept that gripped my imagination—from books like H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Michael Crichton’s Timeline, to TV shows like Quantum Leap and DC’s The Legends of Tomorrow. Though I have written a multitude of stories across the speculative fiction spectrum, ‘The Clockmaker and the Time Machine’ is my first foray into writing about a time machine.

I’m pedantic about details and a lover of science, which is why it has taken me so long to write a story on time travel despite my fascination with such stories. When I decided to include a time machine in my story, I wanted the idea to seem scientifically possible.

When drafting ‘The Clockmaker and the Time Machine’, I based the original idea of the time machine on a vague concept of black holes and gravity. But as I entered the editing stage, my focus was on making a vague concept hold up and seem plausible. Thus started the most background research I have ever done for any story.

I watched dozens of videos on black holes, on gravity, on time, and on the scientific possibility of time travel. I consulted with people who have a great deal more knowledge of physics than me. The more I learned, the more my brain turned to mush. I began to think I had given myself an impossible task. This was why I had shied away from writing about this concept until now. I questioned myself why I was driving myself crazy on researching the plausibility of time travel for just a line or two in a story of fiction.

But I owed it to fellow readers of sci fi and lovers of time travel stories to make my time machine plausible. One of the downfalls of being a lover of time travel stories, is the frustration of reading a story or watching a movie that makes you scream, “That doesn’t make sense!” Sadly, it is too often that an otherwise interesting time travel story has let me down for this reason (I’m looking at you Avengers). I did not want to leave room for any reader to throw my story down in frustration because the science didn’t add up.

In the end, despite my hours and hours of research, I decided it was best to keep things simple rather than become bogged down in details. I learned from my research that the more I explored various concepts of time travel, the harder I had to work to make everything make sense. More details meant more ways it could be picked apart. The story would get lost behind the technical flaws. And it was the story that was the most important part.