From what I understand, time travel seems to be a difficult concept to get right, especially when there are a number of things that make it confusing. Are there any ways of pulling off the "time travel concept", without being too complicated?

Think of it as a river the way Zecora described it; life is a river, in which the slightest change can lead to a cascade of effects in the future. There is no way to make time travel un-complicated for humans to understand because you are talking about the 4th dimension, we only live in the third dimension. The best way you can describe it is to write your character the way they would perceive time travel, since no one's idea of it is exactly the same.

Hope that clears things up.

4981275

If you can follow the plot of Back to the Future, you're good.

A closed timelike curve, or, in writing terms, a Groundhog's Day loop, is the simplest. I've not finished it, but so far Hard Reset is a really good MLP example of that. This type of story doesn't have many variables. Usually only one character is traveling in time, and they're tied to a particular location and/or set of events. So, fairly simple.

There's also the boilerplate Dr. Who time travel plot, where the story is about visiting another time, rather than traveling back and forth in time. Unless they do something obviously causality-shattering like saving Jesus or killing Hitler, it's basically just a travelogue.

When you have a story where characters are traveling back and forth in time, crossing their own timelines a lot, that is when the headaches occur. Avoid that unless you're really confident in your plotting abilities.

4981275
What you need to keep in mind is that it's not time travel that's complicated, it's causality. Normally A leads to B leads to C leads to D, but once time travel occurs than D can lead to E replacing B which leads to C which means D isn't D etc. This is what can get incredibly complicated, depending on how you work it.

And yes, there are some simple ways to do time travel. You could do a story where they have the ability to travel to the future, but either can't go back, or can only go back to their departure point. You can have them travel back far enough in time that anything they do will be erased by a natural disaster like Atlantis or Pompei, or just by the passage of time like the age of the dinosaurs.

4981314 What about a case where the main character isn't the one traveling, rather another character crucial to the plot travels to the future to see what happens?

4981275

Make like a tree and get outta here

4981332

Then you get spoilers, sweetie! :D

Seems fairly straightforward, except for figuring out how to keep the audience from learning too much from that. Or if the rest of the characters meet the past version of that guy when they get to the point in the story he visited.

So, straightforward relative to time travel. ;)

If vague precognition is all you need, maybe a Pinkie Pie cameo would work just as well?

4981275 First of all choose your time travel headcanon for the story. There are three main ways:

Stable Loop - this is what Twilight experienced in "It's about time". Basically everything that you changed while time traveling was already that way. If in this kind of time travel you go back in time to save your parents, either this will be impossible, or it will turn out that your parents never died in first place and your past self just thought they did because he didn't have the whole picture. Actually changing the past is impossible in this canon.

You don't have to worry about paradoxes, because creating one is impossible. Your grandfather getting killed by a traveller is something that physically can not happen.

Adaptable Timeline - In this canon going to the past will basically delete everything that happened after your point of entry and overwrite it with a new chain of events.
Paradoxes are once again impossible. If you kill your grandfather, your present self will simply continue to live in a timeline where your younger self will never be born.
There can be some other interesting effects though. If you for example alter the timeline in such a way that your younger self doesn't obtain a time machine, then he will never leave the present with it and there will now be two of you. The S5 finale was probably done like this or the one below (brr, that's a scary thought).

Adaptable Timeline + Multiverse
Basically like the example above except that time traveling doesn't remove the old timeline, but simply creates a new one. Repeated time travel leads to multiple universes with different things happening in each one. The rules are essentially the same ones as above, but in this canon the time traveller might actually jump in-between timelines to get back to his old one. Things like travellers or invasions from alternate timelines (and a lot of other interesting stuff) also become possible. Read You Can Fight Fate by Eakin for this one. That story really plays with all the possibilities of this idea.

Cascading Consequences

This is where things get weird, because there are no strict logical rules. Basically changing things in the past will have effects slowly cascading back into the future and change things.
This is the only kind of time travel where all those cliche effects can take place including but not limited to:

- Creating a paradox destroys the universe
- Touching your younger self destroys the universe
- Changing things in the past will have you slowly fade from existence
- If you change things in the past dinosaurs will start to pop up all over New York after you return (groan, that was a stupid movie)
- The results of a time travel are picked up by anyone but the traveller himself

Since this kind of time travel is not really logical in first place you can basically choose whatever arbitrary time travel rules you want to. However, be aware that unless you really know what you are doing this kind of story will probably make no sense.

Choosing your time travel head canon is a difficult thing. If you want to have further tips, write some specifics on the story you want to write. This is always easier with a specific example in mind.

The Cascading consequences one is the bread and butter for Back to the Future series.

Marty goes back to 1955 and meets his parents and past Lorraine starts to take a liking for him (in the original timeline, George was supposed to be hit by Lorraine's dad (Marty's grandfather)...

In BTTF 2, Old Biff steals the time machine and the almanac that Marty buys. Doc brown warns Marty before the time machine is stolen that buying the almanac was a bad idea.

older marty is injured due to the drag race with that guy, but in the third movie, he smartly doesn't race the guy. We make choices in life and whether they are good or bad, have consequences.

In the third installment, saving Claire from plunging over the cliff in 1885 changes the future, where the bridge that is in 1985 that spans the ravine (the one where the train destroys the delorean. Doc Brown ends up marrying Claire and has two kids, Jules and Verne.

4981664
Fantastic summary! The most common problem I see in time travel stories is a failure to stick to one system; often they'll try for one of the first three, but end up with the fourth because the writer didn't think things through.

The key to making the fourth option work is when understanding the time travel is completely unnecessary to the story, such as the well-handled Doctor Who episodes (“wibbly wobbly timey wimey… stuff” is both a fantastic T-shirt quote, and a reasonable summary of how time travel works in the show. They know it doesn't make sense, and they don't care).

4981275 There's a thread that goes in dept on this subject:
http://www.fimfiction.net/group/916/school-for-new-writers/thread/230978/lecture-writing-time-travel

4981275
I'd suggest reading Timeline by Michael Crichton. There is no time travel. You're simply going to another part of the multiverse. (Don't bother with the movie... it was crap)

4981907 And that is essentially why Back to The Future is not a very logical movie. Don't get me wrong, the writers knew what they were doing and managed to make everything look sensible at first glance, and thus made a fun and enjoyable movie but if you look deeper a lot of it makes no sense. The whole fading photograph thing for example.

4981664 a variant of the Cascading Consequences, widely used in SF literature, is the "resilient timeline".
There, there is a single timeline, that has a resiliency that permit to it to absorb small variations (as the time travel itself, if the traveller doesn't make major changes) without changing the future from which the traveller comes. But, if the variations are too much, then the original timeline will be erased (sometimes violently, with a timequake that rise along the timeline) and replaced with a new one.
An example is John Varley's "Millennium".

4981275

It comes down to picking a model of causality and sticking with it. For instance, the past can either be changed or it can't. You can't have both, unless there are certain exceptions that you make damn sure to establish. You can never have any contradictions or inconsistencies in your time mechanics.

One time travel movie I kinda hated was Looper, because the ending makes no sense given how time travel is supposed to work in the setting, resulting in a plot that literally can't happen.

That the time mechanic in your story are confusing is actually less of a issue, because time travel is a confusing subject.

4981664

Note that you can get creative with the causality models, because we're writers who are allowed to use our imagination.

I once thought of a time travel story concept where only one timeline could exist at a time, but it was possible to change the past and paradoxes basically wasn't a thing.

In this setting a time traveler actually could go back in time, kill his grandfather, and keep existing due to what I called retro-causality. The idea was that cause and effect worked both ways - you keep existing because the act of killing your grandfather requires you to exist, and time kinda didn't care where you came from or why you exist as long as you do. The fact that you no longer have a history and your memories don't match the new reality you created was pretty much your problem.

I had a lot more rules as well that I don't recall. I believe one allowed the time traveler to basically collect memories from his or her future self and use it predict what effects a certain act would have. All of this led to some very peculiar applications of time travel.

4982416

I like that idea. The grandfather paradox always irritated me. If you went back in time and killed your own grandfather, you never would have been born. Which means you never would have went back in time and killed your grandfather. Gah.

4981275 No story has ever really got time travel rules perfect. The only thing you can do is be consistent and avoid basic paradoxes that are mentioned above in the thread.

4981275 People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbily wobbily...timey wimey...stuff. Just remember that and you'll be fine.

Personally, I always liked the explanation that the old X-Men cartoon used.

Those who travel through time have some McGuffin (in this case, a bracelet) that keeps them tethered to a fixed point in time. So long as they are in possession of this McGuffin, they can alter the time stream without consequence, because they currently exist outside of it. Basically, their personal history is placed in stasis while they are time traveling. However, this is always temporary, and once they have finished what they set out to do, they remove/deactivate the McGuffin and slide back into the new timestream they have created, sometimes forgetting the entire escapade.

EG: Bishop went back in time, winding up in a war torn future even earlier than his own era, finding that times Wolverine and Storm. They join him and travel back even further to correct what is polluting the time stream. Upon finishing their mission, Bishop returns to his own time, the future, to see what has changed, after telling them that removing their bracelets will cause them to merge with the conciousness of the new versions of themselves, and forget their entire lives.

Being that they were lovers in this bad future, this is played for drama. For anyone interested, the episodes in question are titled "One Man's Worth."

-Lumino

4981275

I don't see that a lack of complication should be your goal. Dr Who has probably the most convoluted time travel concept in fiction, ya know, nothing is fixed except certain events which time lords know but most other creatures have no clue about... well sometimes time lords know them, but sometimes they don't... anyway if you mess with those events, monstrous winged bat things will come and eat everything in site, because that will fix what's happening and not cause more problems because logic... except when that doesn't happen because someone puts up a shield or puts things in a time vacuum of some kind, or let's face it, by this point, just says it won't, or forgets that it should... oh and time travel takes a lot of technology and energy... except when it doesn't because someone is really smart and found a way around that, or if there are two of you, because then you can do all kinds of BS... unless you touch, which will matter unless... wibbly wobbly timey whimey... yes I had to say it at some point.

Anyway, what do you want to do with it? If you have a compelling narrative, interesting concepts and good characters, no one will care how convoluted your story is. Don't believe me, watch Bleach!

4981275
Time travel is actually very easy to pull off conceptually. It isn't horribly confusing, and I don't know why people think it is.

Mostly, it is just unintuitive.

The most important thing is that you pick a way for time travel to work and stick with it.

Can the past be changed?

If no, then you end up with stable time loops. That is to say, you went back in time to change things, but what you did actually was the way things always were. Examples of this are It's About Time and the way time travel works in Gargoyles. You can't create a paradox because the past is fixed - if you went back in time, you already went back in time in your own timeline, and whatever you did created the conditions of your present.

If yes, then you end up with alternate futures. These may be alternate universes which can be traveled between (in which case, you can't change the reality you came from, thus the possibility of paradox is moot anyway because you're not changing your universe's past), or your own universe might change according to what happened in the past (this is the variety that can create paradoxes). Typically speaking, in this last case, time travelers are immune to the effects of time travel (which again prevents paradoxes, because they're just immune to unmaking themselves), though it may simply have a delayed reaction on them as time tries to "catch up" to them (in which case, paradoxes are dangerous, but they might have time to fix things before they fade out/are changed to match the new reality).

The main confusion arising from time travel happens when someone mixes varieties of time travel without thinking about it.

4981275 Time travel is an inherently non-linear process as is writing stories that involve it. Once we start treating time as a dimension unto itself some really weird things start to happen. The simplest way to describe it is to think of everything past, present, and future happening all at once, independent of those notions, and simply occurring in different places. Rather than only being able to be in one place at any given point, we're allowed to be in more than one place, or more than one of us in the same place. Ultimately that's what writing a time-travel fic is about, writing about time as it were a place you can go to.

Personally I have two ideas regarding causality that are the reason I don't write time travel fics. If we consider augury--the ability to see the future--a form of time travel then the question becomes: are we seeing the future in which we saw the future or the future in which we didn't.

If the future we see is the one wherein we saw the future, we are compelled to act in a manner defined in part by personality, and in part by circumstance. This would indicate that future is inescapable. Our actions have no effect on the outcome as what we do is already determined by who we are. Even the notion to make a choice to try to break free of that is itself an ingrained in our personalities--part of who we are.

On the other hand, if the future we see is one in which we didn't see the future then it is an impossible future, as the present is already different from that future's past. We can of course try to make that future occur but it can never be because that future is based on a different past than has occurred. Time travel itself is very much the same. Unlike augury however, time-travel has the added problem of going in more than one direction.

For time travel specifically there is funnily enough an idea that once you arrive in the past it ceases to matter from whence you came, or how you got there, because you exist then regardless of what comes after. There is speculation among scientists that objects in the fourth dimension can break, and become severed, very much the same way that objects in the third dimension can, and be "mended" or "glued" back together again. That is how I prefer to think of time travel. Not moving through time, but instead the breaking of our fourth dimensional self, and redistributing the pieces. Thinking of a time traveler as one continuous fourth (or above) dimensional object is what leads to many of the paradoxes we see discussed.

In short, the only way to really write a time-travel story is to stop thinking about time as a line, any kind of line. Try thinking of it as an object instead. Some physical prop on a stage. It plays a part in your story, and can be manipulated by members of the cast, but is itself its own entity independent of those who manipulate it.