time jumps
Story timeline discontinuities
Time jumps are narrative leaps forward or backward in a story's chronology, skipping over intervening events.
A television series might time jump five years between seasons.
In fiction, time jumps compress or expand the timeline: The novel time jumps between the protagonist's childhood and her present-day investigation.
Distinguished from flashbacks, which revisit past events in detail, time jumps simply reposition the narrative clock.
- rewindReturn to beginning
- flashbackInvoluntary past memory
- warpBend from true form
- chronologyTemporal ordering of events
- dream sequencesFictional scenes depicting sleep visions
temporal distortion · leap · years later · fragmented narrative · flash-forward · in medias res · cutting back · skip · timeshifts · framing device · replay · temporal · snap · splice · meanwhile · transition · cut · narrative
- flashback techniquesbackstory, retrospective, childhood memories, repressed memory, reverse chronology
- narrative techniquesflashback, nonlinear plot, fragmented narrative, flash-forward, point of view
- storytelling techniquesflashback, voiceover, subplot, flash forward, twist
- experimental narrativemetafiction, nonlinear plot, fragmented narrative, unreliable narrator, stream of consciousness
- narrative timeflashback, flashforward, foreshadowing, pacing, chronology
- Memory Themesflashbacks, amnesia, memory loss, nostalgia, deja vu
time jumpslinear narrative
Story following chronological order
chronological order · linear progression · play-by-play · stream of consciousness
time, jump, times, jumping, timely, jumper, timing, jumps, untimely