Are you wondering how to write time travel romance? Do you need some assistance? We’ve included 8 tips below to help you write a novel in this subgenre of romance.
1. Must have time travel
A time travel romance is a specific niche in the romance genre that, in addition to romance, blends elements of science fiction, fantasy, and/or historical fiction, depending on the method of time travel and the time period characters get to visit respectively.
As such, time traveling is the essential part that is the cause of all of the events in the novel. At least one of the protagonists has to time travel for the novel to happen, because it usually involves two people from different time periods falling in love.
However, it is worth noting that both the romantic heroine and the hero can time travel to a different era, and also, the character who time travels may or may not be accompanied on the journey by other major side characters (who would get to have their own adventures in the other time period too).
2. Understand the different methods and types of time traveling
The method of time traveling can be scientific in nature with the protagonist and/or other time traveling characters using a machine to do so or being in the proximity of a scientist who is devising such a machine. Time travel can also be magical in nature, with magical creatures sending a person to the past through their magic. Or, as is the case with the novel The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, the time traveling hero is born with a disorder that causes him to unwillingly time travel to different periods of his own life.
When it comes to time traveling types, there are two of them: closed loop time travel, and changing timelines time travel.
The closed loop time traveling is where everything that happened in the past has already happened, even if the protagonist is experiencing it for the first time from their own perspective, and nothing can be changed – even if the protagonist tries to do so. For example, perhaps a woman visits an old crumbling mansion and sees a painting that looks quite like herself, down to the beauty mark on her chin. As the novel progresses, she travels back into the past, where she and the lord of the manor fall in love and he commissions an artist to paint her.
The changing timelines time travel is where a character goes back in time, and if they make a change, they travel back to a present that has been changed (usually for the worse), and then they have to go back to set things right. This type of time travel is a lot more complicated, because you need to ensure that the ensuing change to the timeline does not cause the original time traveling character never traveling back in time in the first place – which can cause an inconsistency and a major plot hole in the story.
3. Choose the time periods of time travel
You can have four different time periods of time traveling. The first one is a character from the present traveling to a certain time period of the past. This is where the historical fiction elements come into play, because you need to treat that part of the novel as historical fiction and try to be as accurate as possible in the descriptions of the time period.
The second time period is a person from the future traveling to the present day. Such time travel rarely happens by magic (although it is possible), and borrows elements from science fiction (specifically speculative futuristic science fiction) to depict the future time period the character is traveling to.
The third time period is the character from the near or far future traveling to a time period of the past. Here, you will have to blend both historical fiction and science fiction and you will need to depict both a futuristic setting and a setting in the past.
Finally, you have a character from the past traveling to the future (from their perspective), which can either be the current present time period or a futuristic one. As with the third time period, this one also blends historical fiction and science fiction in the depiction of the settings.
4. Make the setting believable
When a character time travels to a time period from the past, you will need to do a lot of research of the time period, everything from historical events to the people’s general way of life, to be able to depict the setting appropriately and make it believable. The time traveling character has to react to the differences between their own time (the present or a future time period) and the setting in the past. Additionally, the other characters should react to the time traveling character and how different they are in comparison to the people of said time period.
When there are future time periods involved, the more time you spend in that time period, the more it should be developed. You need to have a timeline of a future history, i.e. determine what has happened from our present to the time period the character is traveling to or from, in terms of major world events and the people’s way of life.
Most importantly, characters need to react to what is to them a new time period. A character traveling from the past to the future will not know what a smartphone is or how to use it. A character traveling from a highly developed futuristic time period to the Middle Ages will have a difficult time adjusting to using the medieval version of a toilet. A higher number of years (decades, centuries, or millennia) between the time period a person comes from to the one they are traveling to, means that there should be a higher level of exacerbated reaction to the people’s way of life.
5. The main plot is still romance
If the romance happens along the sidelines (as a subplot) then you are writing a time traveling novel with romantic elements. For a time traveling romance, the main plot that is driving the story needs to be the romance. This means that the hero and heroine need to meet and fall in love, and all of the events of the novel will depend on that driving force.
Maybe it is the hero who time travels to the past, meets a lovely girl, and falls in love with her. Maybe it is the heroine who travels to the past and meets the hero who is from that time period. Rarely, both the hero and heroine travel to the past from the same (or different) time periods and fall in love in the time period of the past.
Regardless of which path you choose as to which character gets to time travel or not, the main plot still needs to focus on the romance. This means that the hero and heroine will meet, fall in love, try to be together (made especially more complicated if the time traveling occurs several times in the course of the novel with the hero and heroine trying to make it work despite the fact that they come and live in different time periods), then conflict should arise between them, followed by a separation at the climax, and a reunion at the end of the novel.
6. Ensure the presence of conflicting values
As previously mentioned, nominally, in a time travel romance, the hero and heroine will come from different time periods. This means that they will have grown up under vastly different circumstances and ways of life. They will uphold different values, and often, these values will come in conflict.
That kind of conflict can and should be a main reason for the conflict both between them, and as the inner conflict each one of them has to face. In other words, although they have fallen in love, for their relationship to actually work, each one of them will need to rethink their principles and values in order to adapt to the other person and be able to be together.
If both the hero and heroine come from the same time period and travel to the past, then their reaction to the past is what will drive the conflict between them. In other words, one of them might view the past positively and romanticize it, while the other might actively dislike it and want to go back to their own time period.
7. Give the characters a choice
In any time traveling story, there is always the need for the choice: will the time traveling character stay in the time period they traveled to, or will they go back to whence they came from?
When it comes to time travel romance, presenting the characters with such a choice is a must – especially if staying in the past for one character might mean changing the future so much that they prevent themselves from traveling to the past in the first place. A closed loop time travel does take care of that problem, and if the character remains in the past, it is because that was always their fate.
The presence of the need to make such a choice is also what the romance hinges on, as well as the ending of the novel, and whether the hero and heroine stay together or separate at the end.
8. Choose the type of ending
Traditional romantic novels nearly always have either a happily ever after ending, where the hero and heroine stay together and become committed for good, usually with a wedding, or a happy for now ending, where the hero and heroine decide to start dating without committing to each other long term. In a time traveling romance, where the hero and heroine stay together at the end (usually in the era the time traveling character traveled to), they end on a happily ever after note (rather than a happy for now).
When it comes to time traveling romance, due to the fact that the hero and heroine usually come from different eras, the ending might be that while they are emotionally committed to each other, they cannot stay together because the time traveling character needs to go back to their own time.
A happy ending (of either of the two types described above) does not necessarily have to be how the novel ends. In cases where the time traveling character decides to go back to their own time, they go back changed for the better by the experience, in the sense of how it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.