How to Skip Huge Chunks of Time in Your Memoir

I used to struggle with how to skip over long time periods in my writing. How could I jump forward in time without confusing my reader?  

Over the years, I’ve developed three tricks that you can use to advance through time in a seamless way in your memoir.

Trick 1 — Take advantage of chapter breaks

The end of a chapter offers a great opportunity to skip long periods of time. You can start a new chapter in a different time and location and your reader will be able to follow your story.

Take Anthony Bourdain’s memoir, Kitchen Confidential. In chapter one, he's living in France during elementary school. The next chapter starts after he graduates from high school, and he heads to Vassar College in New York.

He doesn’t offer an explanation of what happens between fourth grade and college. The chapter break enables him to launch into a new story without losing his reader.

This is how he ends chapter one:

“I'd sit in the garden among the tomatoes and the lizards and eat my oysters and drink Kronenbourgs (France was wonderful for underage drinkers), happily reading Modesty Blaze and the Katzenjammer kids and the lovely hard-bound bandes dessinees in French, until the picture swam in front of my eyes smoking the occasional pilfered Gitane. And I still associate the taste of oysters with those heady wonderful days of illicit late afternoon buzzes. The smell of French cigarettes, the taste of beer, that unforgettable feeling of doing something I shouldn't be doing. 

“I had, as yet, no plans to cook professionally. But I frequently look back at my life, searching for that fork in the road, trying to figure out where exactly, I went bad and became a thrill-seeking pleasure-hungry centralist, always trying to shock, amuse, terrify and manipulate. Seeking to fill that empty spot in my soul was something new. I like to think it was Monsieur Saint Jour’s fault. But of course, it was me all along.” 

And this is how Bourdain begins chapter two:

“In 1973, unhappily in love, I graduated from high school a year early, so I could chase the object of my desire to Vassar College - the less said about that part of my life, the better, believe me. But suffice it to say that by age 18, I was a thoroughly undisciplined young man, blithely flunking or fading out of college (I couldn't be bothered to attend classes). I was angry at myself and everyone else. Essentially, I treated the world as my ashtray. I spent most of my waking hours drinking, smoking, pot scheming and doing my best to amuse, outrage, impress and penetrate anyone silly enough to find me entertaining.” 

In chapter two, he just launches into a new story, offering the reader no explanation as to what happened between fourth grade and the end of high school. It's just a new story. And sometimes you can really do this with a chapter break. 

Trick 2 — Use an events paragraph​

An events paragraph is a wonderful device that will get you through a period of time, whether it’s large or small. An events paragraph gives your reader the sensation that they have lived through this period of time with you without taking up much space in your book. 

To create an events paragraph, make a point in your first sentence. Then, in every sentence that follows, you mention an event related to this point. ​

I’ll give you a short example of how this works in Tara Westover’s book, Educated. First, she makes a point in the first sentence of her paragraph:

“Months passed in this way, mother leaving the house at all hours and coming home trembling, relieved to her core that it was over.” 

There's the point. So now each sentence that follows is going to mention an event related to this point.

“By the time the leaves started to fall, she had helped with a dozen births. By the end of winter, several deaths. In the spring, she told my father she'd had enough that she could deliver a baby if she had to, if it was the end of the world. Now she could stop.” 

Trick 3 - Use an idea to get through time

My final trick for jumping through time is to use an idea. This concept is a bit more complicated, but I’ll do my best to explain it. 

What do I mean by using an idea? 

An example of how this works can be found in Daisy Hernandez’s memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed.  In her book, she uses the idea of wanting to be a writer to skip  through time. In one paragraph, she goes from being a high school student to her post-high school years.

“In high school, I tape a picture of an electric typewriter to the refrigerator and he buys it for me, the exact model. He grins watching me type my paper about Oscar Wilde. My father observes me for a few seconds bending over the electronic typewriter, then retreats to the kitchen for a can of Budweiser.”

That's where her scene ends, and she’s in high school. Now, in a single sentence, she jumps way ahead in time to her professional years. This is how she does it. 

“I enter the book publishing industry after college in the late nineties. I open mail for book editors, write rejection letters, and proofread, flap copy. I spend day after day immersed in manuscripts. And at the end of every two weeks, I am paid on time.” 

Because both of these passages are about the narrator being a writer, she is able to skip through a huge period of time in just a few sentences.

A reader doesn’t expect to know everything you did throughout your life. If you tell them the story about you becoming a writer, they only expect scenes related to this. So set up what your chapter is about and only pick the periods in time that cover this idea. 

I hope these three tricks help you to seamlessly skip time in your memoir.  Wishing you happy writing!