I ranted here not long ago about <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/2009/09/entering-the-twilight-zone/">the dreaded second act</a>. This is just one of the nightmare beasties to haunt those of us insane enough to write fiction for a living. Here's a second. Time, in the strict, dictionary sense of the word, namely 'the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole'.

Mostly time stinks. It's a blight on us all, a nasty chunk of so-called reality that tries to poke its ugly head in where it's not wanted. Let's leave aside those books that use time the way statisticians use chart paper, as pegs on which to hang an argument. You know the kind. The ones with the X-Files style chapter headings, 'Peter's pantry, 1109 am, Thursday August 13, Stoke Newington, London, England, The World.' Nothing wrong with that. I <a href="http://www.davidhewson.com/standalones/solstice/">wrote one myself once</a>.

But most books don't over-obsess on the passage of time, even if their authors do. Think of books you just read, enjoy, then put to one side. Try to remember the last one you really liked. Then ask yourself: over what time period did it take place?

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Don't know, do you? Well, OK. Maybe roughly. A few days. A week. A lifetime. But by and large <em>time does not matter.</em> Yes, readers want to know what comes next. But their concern is usually driven by something that's happened to the characters or might. Not normally because of some fictional ticking clock in the page.

Yet writers still agonise over time. They nag people who make writing software to include some kind of timeline feature so they can map out the chronography of their story to the last second. They -- you may wish to look away here -- plan their tales in sad columns in Excel spreadsheets as if they were lines on a P&amp;L statement (and may the Lord have mercy on their souls). They worry that, in the real world, it may take a DNA sample two to three months to come back from the lab, when in the pages of their story it happens in a couple of days, not that the reader is any the wiser either way. Use time in a book in any real sense and it will, more than likely, complicate matters unnecessarily and run the risk of making the whole thing as dull and full of languid pauses as 'real life' itself.

Time is important only in so far as it makes, or keeps, your story credible. All fiction is a whopping great lie. The secret is to lie so well that your fabrication takes on the mantle of truth. Objective reality is dangerous bunkum that belongs to newspapers and TV stations (not that they know it some of the time). <em>Subjective</em> reality is, to the novelist, everything. If it seems real enough to touch inside the page, then it's real inside the reader's head, and that’s the only place that counts.

In practice this means that all you need ask of time is that it sounds feasible. You can't fly from New York to China in a couple of hours. You mustn't put someone in hospital with multiple fractures one day and have them walking round biffing people on the nose the next. The moments in your story must add up in the sense that they shouldn't contradict one another, or make some other event impossible or improbable. But that really is it.

Let me give you one concrete example in which time trips up writers. Most of us who produce series books never imagined we were headed in that direction. I wrote <em>A Season for the Dead</em>, the first Nic Costa book, as a standalone novel. I never saw it as a series until after it was finished and I had an agent and a publisher asking, 'So what happens to these people next?'

I write a Costa book a year. Like many series authors, I started off thinking this meant the year between books meant a year between the lives of the characters in them.

<em>This is insane.</em>

Why? Because after three books Nic, who was twenty four or so in the first book, was twenty seven. And his colleagues who were much older were suddenly entering their fifties. I love writing these books. I want to write them forever. But I can't age my people one year every year. Otherwise Peroni and Falcone would be up for retirement and Nic would be looking to settle down, breed children and wonder about which brand of safety seat to buy for the back of the car. Treating time literally will kill any series. I deeply regret all indications I've given in the earlier books that will allow readers of a sufficiently anal bent to add up the warped and highly inaccurate chronology of the series. You won't get those clues again. They're needless and confusing.

And here's the real rub. I do need time in one very specific way. These stories are, to me, very much about Nic Costa and his entry into adulthood. The growing up of a decent yet naive young man as he finds the world's a rough place where you have to cut corners from time to time. <em>I need Nic to age a little</em>. That shows him experiencing changes in his life and adapting to them. But at the same time I need my older characters to stay where they are before they get pensioned off.

You see the dilemma? You see the solution?

No. Well, here it is. Lie and lie big. Throw the whole space time continuum out of the window. Nic gets older. Falcone and Peroni don't. The later books mention Nic's age but blur theirs. If you were picky you could go through the books and work out how this process is going on numerically. No, I'm not going to do this for you. All I will say is that at his present rate of ageing Nic, if I spelled things out, would overtake Teresa Lupo in age about six years or so from now, and do the same to Falcone and Peroni somewhere around 2019. Ridiculous? Maybe. But it's fiction and fiction fundamentally <em>is</em> ridiculous. The only thing more ridiculous is the literal. I am not going there.

And if you want proof here it is. This two-stage process of ageing has now been going on for four or five books. Until I point it out to people <em>no one notices.</em>

That's how important time is in the great swing of things. Not at all.