Depicting "Fast Travel" When Writing

I've been writing quite a bit lately and it's reached a point where even when I stop, I still find myself thinking about the world I have dreamt up.  This invasive immersion is something I've done many times when writing and I think it helps because unconsciously you are figuring out kinks in your story and you often have moments where plot-holes appear out of nowhere and relatively quickly a solution to said plot-hole presents itself.

This has led me to think about writing itself and what it is you try to portray.  The obvious answer here is that you try to portray the story, but that's superficial and represents an answer that many people who aren't writers would give.  A writer would say we try to portray much more than this, that we try to portray characters and their lives, and a living breathing world in which they reside.  A surprising amount of time for a writer goes into thinking about the lives and backgrounds of the characters we create. 

When you first start out writing, one of the major problems new writers have is that our characters are not three-dimensional and they aren't believable e.g. their dialogue doesn't feel natural.  Those who are defensive about their work in their early days will challenge this with the "I know more about my characters than you do" response.  I'll admit when I first started writing narratives I was in high school and I was guilty of this attitude.  I was focused almost entirely on my own perception of my work and dismissive of others opinions.  As a writer there are times when this can be necessary but it is very easy to fall into a pit of arrogance by doing so.  It is important to know your characters well, but to be frank, if you can't communicate that knowledge then what is inside your head means nothing.  What matters is what's on the page - or what the reader can infer from it.  If you don't convey what is in your head you'll never be a great writer, you'll be a great thinker, nothing more.

There is a balance here which is very hard to strike and employs a skill that takes many years to hone and which even experienced writers can still struggle with.  You can spend a thousand words describing the intricate details of a bedroom, but if it's not relevant to the story it's a waste of time.  The balance is knowing what is relevant and what is not - and depending on the genre, knowing how to include details which will be important later without making it obvious why. 

There is a level of abstraction that must be utilised.  If we use your own life as an example, when you leave your house to go and buy food you will pass quite a few people and places.  You don't stop to think about every single person you pass and you don't pay attention to every single detail around you because it's not relevant to what you want to achieve.  When writing the same scene you wouldn't give details of every single person you passed for example hair colour and height.

For me personally one of the things I find hardest to abstract when writing is time.  For example if a journey takes three days, and there is a lot your characters need to discuss to progress the story during that time this can be quite easy to write.  The problem in this scenario is once you establish this journey takes three days then each time they make that journey you are presented with the dilemma of how you fill that time. 

Video games are a lot more forgiving in this respect as a journey from point A to point B can often take a lot of time the first time you make it, but the game introduces "fast travel" to make it easier to backtrack.  Using fast travel as an author can ruin a story entirely.  Game of Thrones for example has a problem with this in their TV adaptation of the book series A Song of Ice and Fire in that some characters' journeys from point A to B can take an entire season whereas other characters can be seen to make the same journey in a single episode.  TV programmes have a lot more lenience due to their episodic nature as you can to an extent dismiss the time between episodes as being indeterminate and a valid explanation of why things happen quickly.  The explanation given by one of the producers of Game of Thrones is that individual characters timelines are not intended to be in perfect sync in the show unless they are in the same place at the same time.

In terms of episodic gaps, the equivalent of this from a literary standpoint would be to have one chapter end and the next chapter commence three days later, cutting out the journey time.  However this in turn has its own problems in that it will either the annoying to the reader as it poses lingering questions of what happened during that time, something which can frustrate the reader if the author uses the ambiguity at a later point to reference the events they never saw, especially if a flashback is used.  Alternatively this gap can pose another problem if you decide to go back later and write "filler" - this runs the risk of boring the reader if the author is simply stalling for time and delaying progression of the story which I have written about before.  In the post linked above, it can be seen as rambling, and not about anything even remotely interesting or relevant.