RE: Critique and Advice; the treadmill of adventuring.
06-25-2016, 10:19 AM
I don't think that the main problem with time travel is paradoxes, but that the readers eventually arrive to the conclusion "Wait, can't we just let our more experienced more competent future self to handle this for us? They know the answers to these problems since they've already done it once!"
I bypassed this by making the future self a bad guy, a sort of Ghost of Christmas to come who wanted the main character to avoid his mistakes and re-do his past. I realized about two seconds after introducing him to the story that I needed him out, because there was no real reason why he just wouldn't make the main character follow his lead rendering the MC a passive observer - and if he couldn't affect the story then there was no real reason to put him in in the first place!
The bottom line is that the vast majority of stories don't need to include time travel in order to be told, and in a format where your ability to plan the story ahead is limited it just isn't worth the trouble and headache.
I bypassed this by making the future self a bad guy, a sort of Ghost of Christmas to come who wanted the main character to avoid his mistakes and re-do his past. I realized about two seconds after introducing him to the story that I needed him out, because there was no real reason why he just wouldn't make the main character follow his lead rendering the MC a passive observer - and if he couldn't affect the story then there was no real reason to put him in in the first place!
The bottom line is that the vast majority of stories don't need to include time travel in order to be told, and in a format where your ability to plan the story ahead is limited it just isn't worth the trouble and headache.