The Rules For Writing An Excellent Time Travel Adventure

Time travel is the concept of traveling into the past or the future — usually in fiction. In this post we cover the rules for writing an excellent time travel adventure.

Time travel is possible — you do it every moment of the day. It’s just the going back or forward in time that’s the tricky part. But that hasn’t stopped writers for hundreds of years from spinning fantastic, paradoxical stories about hopping back to the Middle Ages for a cool goblet of mead with King Arthur.

Novels That Travel Through Time

As you can see by these books, you have time travel adventures in any genre.

Famous novels include:

1. Time And Time Again by Ben Elton
2. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
3. Kindred by Octavia Butler
4. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
5. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
7. Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa
8. This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
9. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

If you’re looking for more books, click here: Time Travel Books

But how do you get away with not making it unbelievable? How do we avoid contradictions, paradoxes, and other mind-bending mistakes?

There are, basically, three rules for time travel in fiction:

1. Star Trek Rules
2. Edge of Tomorrow Rules
3. Bill and Ted Rules

Why no Doctor Who rules? Because there are no rules in Doctor Who.

The Rules For Writing An Excellent Time Travel Adventure

1. Star Trek — A Timeline Worth Fighting For

“Time is the fire in which we burn.” ~Dr. Tolian Soran, Star Trek: Generations (1994)

Star Trek has dozens of time travel episodes, and you can find examples of all three rules if you look for them. However, the main one is this: The timeline can change. Minor or major things can be altered, and many powerful beings and civilizations can travel through time. What keeps it stable is that they all keep each other in check.

Don’t think about this too hard — because it doesn’t make sense.

The way it works is that there are organizations that monitor time travel — The Department of Temporal Affairs, for example — who fight to keep history from being changed. In Trials and Tribble-ations, Sisko travels back in time to Kirk’s Enterprise to catch a Klingon criminal who’s gone back to kill Captain Kirk by planting a bomb in a cute, fluffy tribble.

The rules they follow are simple:

1. Do not interfere with major recorded historical events.
2. Dress in the era’s clothing. Pretend to belong. Stay out of the limelight.
3. Only do what you absolutely must to avoid changing history.

When they return to their own time, they’re interviewed by the Department of Temporal Affairs, who try to confirm that they haven’t altered the timeline.

Later we also learn that Star Trek’s universe contains several organizations that live outside of time — whatever that means. Some of these powers, like the “Travelers”, safeguard the timeline from the outside so they can maintain an objective perspective.

So what does this allow?

It means you can tell any time travel story without internal logical errors. If someone breaks time, someone else can fix it later.

It also allows for accidental time travel — where people find themselves as part of an “approved”, predetermined, self-contained paradox. Such as Data finding his head in a cave, then going back in time to fulfill that impossible event. (Of course, being a robot, this doesn’t kill him.)

These rules present an ordered, controlled universe that functions because it’s constantly monitored by people with a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Essentially, it’s a kind of Temporal Cold War — a term they actually used briefly in Star Trek: Enterprise.

Read: A Quick Start Guide To Writing Science Fiction

2. Edge Of Tomorrow Rules — Live, Die, (Time Travel) Repeat

“I’m not sure what’s worse: the fact that I keep dying or that you get used to it.” ~Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

This is more of a Japanese style of time travel. You find it in stories like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time or Re:Zero, where your future mind takes over your past body.
In other words, the only thing that changes is that your past self knows the future.

In Edge of Tomorrow — or All You Need Is Kill (the original Japanese title, which we can all agree is better) — Tom Cruise is sent back in time each time he dies. Thus, he learns what killed him and can change his actions to avoid dying the next time. Read our blurb on the film.

So what does this allow?

It lets the author stop worrying about the timeline. It places the protagonist in a position of power and makes the universe revolve around their decisions.

It also means that, theoretically, enemy agents could do this too and change the timeline — so you either ignore that possibility or make it impossible for anyone else to have that power. Perhaps it’s a divine gift only the protagonist possesses.

In About Time, only the male heirs of the Lake family can travel to any point in their lives — from birth to death — and change anything they want. But… they generally don’t.

Why? Because they learn that if you travel, for example, to a time before your child was born, you might change something. You might do something that prevents your child from existing — or worse, kills your wife.

So, as a rule, as they age, they find there are points in time they dare not revisit — lest they alter something they cherish in their lives.

“We’re all traveling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.” ~Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson), About Time (2013)

3. Bill And Ted’s Excellent Rules That Have No Bogus Consequences

“Hey, if we’re successful, it means we already did it, right?” ~Bill S. Preston, Esq., Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

In Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its two sequels, we have a refreshing lack of rules.

Bill and Ted are basically the messiahs of a future world order, so anything they do is a predetermined good thing that will lead to world peace and universal happiness for all beings.

So what does this allow?

They can’t mess up the timeline because they’re creating it as they go. Therefore, their use of a time machine to capture historical figures and use them to finish a high school history project is totally fine — even the predetermined correct thing to do — because THEY CAN DO NO WRONG.

That’s the only real rule of their universe: Whatever Bill and Ted do is the right thing for them to do.

It’s a surprisingly elegant solution for such a gloriously dumb movie franchise. Frankly, it’s brilliant. Why not steal this excellent idea for your next time travel story?

The Last Word

But whatever you choose to do, please — please — keep your rules consistent and reasonable. Have a plan for how your plot will use them, and don’t just use them as a deus ex machina. Unless it’s funny. You can get away with anything if it makes your audience laugh.

“Be excellent to each other… and party on, dudes!” ~Ted Theodore Logan & Bill S. Preston Esq., Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Christopher Luke Dean writes and facilitates for Writers Write. Follow him on Twitter: @ChrisLukeDean

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4. The Logic Of Setting When Writing In Another World
5. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Science Fiction
6. The Greatest Fictional World Builders: Akira Toriyama
7. Creative Things I Learned During The Pandemic
8. The Writing War Machine
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10. What Makes A Compelling First Chapter?

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