: Re: How can I hide a second narrative within my story? (using time travel) I've been planning a story that follows two characters. At the end, one character (let's call him Joe) goes back in time

@Moriarity138

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As I often do, I would refer you to what I call "Sturgeon's method" (from Theodore Sturgeon, via Samuel Delany) which is to establish --for yourself --a far fuller and richer sense of the details of your fictional world than you'll actually end up putting on the page. In this particular case, I would write a complete version of Old Joe's story first, from his perspective. (No one will ever see that version except you.) Then go back, and using what you've learned from the first version, write Young Joe's version, entirely from his perspective, and including only the things Young Joe would know or notice. Thus, Old Joe's story will exist like a palimpsest beneath Young Joe's, but in the most organic and natural possible manner.

You might not realize, but there are more than a few well-known stories with this same closed timeloop structure --it might or might not be valuable to seek them out. Robert Heinlein explored it twice with "By His Bootstraps" and "All You Zombies" (filmed as Predestination, 2014). Delany himself explores it explicitly in Empire Star and implicitly in Dhalgren. This last features an entire city gradually revealed to exist in a closed timeloop, as does Diana Wynne Jones' Tale of Time City. It features heavily in the movie 12 Monkeys, as well as in the French film that inspired it, La Jetée and is the main theme of the movie Looper. There's an interesting variation on it in the "Oceans Unmoving" sequence of the long-running webcomic, Sluggy Freelance. It has also been explored frequently in television science fiction, notably in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Dr Who, and is a minor theme in Piers Anthony's OX and Michael Ende's Neverending Story.

As many versions as I've listed here --some by excellent authors --I don't know that I've ever found any of them completely satisfying. It's easy to get all caught up in the mechanics of it (like Heinlein does), or just to fall in love with the concept itself (which is the problem in Empire Star). To really be done well, I think the challenge is similar to a sequel. Both stories need to be complete and satisfying in themselves, but they also have to connect together into a single large story arc.

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