: Re: How to continually and organically let my readers know what time it is in my story? My novel takes place in a big world, with MANY POVs. Although I know when things are happening, I am afraid

@Dunderdale623

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I found using dates/hours gets hard to track for the readers. They get ignored and the reader gets confused by the time skip.

I believe the best way is to have an overreaching "loud" story arc in the sidelines, echoes of which are accessible from every single other arc. Election campaign with scandal events unfolding in news. Celestial bodies in the sky going through a sequence of events, like two moons crashing. War campaign progressing, battles and skirmishes, spies captured, infrastructure bombed. In general, an easy to follow sequence of events that will be known to everyone involved, regardless of their location and time, will appear in the backgrounds of their scenes, and as result provide the reader with an easy set of anchors in time to see which events happen in parallel, when we're doing a backwards time skip, and how the consequences of one arc influence another... never mind providing a wonderful opportunity to foreshadow big events of a different arc - as the current arc faces big echo of some unknown so far climax, and then you skip back to that other arc and bring it right up to the climax previously mentioned.

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