Unravelling Time in 'TWICE UPON A TIME'

By Michelle Harrison | Guest Blog

The starting point for my new book, TWICE UPON A TIME, came from a news story about identical twins born either side of midnight on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, meaning they had not only different birth days, but also different birth months and years.

The idea of twins being ‘split up’ by time in this way set my mind galloping – there had to be something magical about that! From this I created the Morrow twins, Merry and Spike, who have a strange effect on clocks, and can see visions into the past and the future. Together they can even stop time – but only for a minute. When their Mum’s work takes them to Fox House, they use their special abilities to solve a murder which took place a decade before.

I had great fun coming up with ways in which the twins could manipulate time in this story, particularly when it came to their visions of the past and premonitions of the future (who could resist looking into what life might hold?) as well as being able to pause time. The twins and their new friend Ben use one of these instances to play tricks on the unpleasant Alastair, so I had to cram as much mischief as I could into sixty fictional seconds, which was a gleeful experience!

Time is an endlessly appealing subject when it comes to stories. How often we all wish we could have done something differently, or not at all. If only we could go back in time to change an event and therefore an outcome. What would we do if we could stop time, or predict what was going to happen to us, or others in the future? Stories are an incredible way to explore a world in which time – and imagination – hold no limits.

Writing Challenge

Write a story of up to 500 words on the theme of time. Here are some ideas to get you started:

· Time travel to the past or the future. What could be changed or prevented? Who could your character meet?

· Predictions of the future, or visions of the past – this could be either very funny or incredibly spooky…

· A character or object with the ability to erase events or people from time itself.

· A character (or object) with the power to stop, slow down or speed up time.

· Different timelines within a story, told by two characters. What connects them? Perhaps they are writing to each other from the past and the future.

· An unusual timeline – perhaps your story starts at the end and is told in reverse to reveal a surprising twist at how it all began.