Hey DLP,

So I'm plotting a time travel fic (a Harry-goes-back-in-time-to-kill-teenage- Riddle) and wanted to get suggestions on how to go about it. I know it's been done to death - but I'm trying to avoid a rehash and hopefully breathe new life into the genre. There'll be quite a few twists and turns.

Anyway what clichés/tropes should I probably avoid? Conversely, what would you WANT to see? What other advice would you give? I'm particularly interested in hearing what you think about Dumbledore and how his role should be handled.

 

In any sane universe where Canon!Harry travels back in time to any point after his original birth, the conflict ends pretty much immediately. You need to figure out a way to introduce uncertainty into the story, or it'll be a wild mass of justifications for why they can't round up the horcruxen in about a week.

 

Having something to do besides killing riddle is important. some other way for us to identify this as harry, and to be interested in him, as opposed to the Magical Terminator.
(unless harry can melt his body and reform it. That would be good enough for a one shot that I don't care).

 

Do: Avoid overt fixfics unless played for laughs.

Do: Use rabid butterflies, innocuous changes that make things spiral out of control and that set the protag up for a hard run even with the advantages of foresight.

Do: Spend a bit of time thinking out the mechanics of time travel and how things work. It's annoying when the author botches time travel within their own fictional universe (I'm looking at you, Tsume Yuki).

Don't: Have your protag go back to Hogwarts if he/she is jammed into an adolescent or child self. I'm watching the sort of banal shit my son is getting up to in middle school and I can't imagine it being anything but slow torture for an adult time traveler.

Don't: Expect anyone to even read your first chapter. Any more, folks scan until the last paragraph if they know the story is a dimension/time travel thing.

What would I like to see? It doesn't work for your stated objective, but I wouldn't mind reading more stories set in the time of Dumbledore's youth. More generally, I prefer stories about adults interacting with adults, not children coping with the Draco Malfoys of their little worlds.

 

Your first goal should be to avoid anything that was done in Nightmares of Future Past. It was the progenitor or codifier of most of the cliches in time travel fics. Such a list would include things that should generally be avoided in all fics: friendly goblins, unreasonable distrust of Dumbledore, starting the Defense Association early, shopping trips, etc. Unless you have an original take on these ideas avoid them at all costs.

Do the things that The Unforgiving Minute did. I.e. be awesome and original.

 

Add "magical cores" to the list of things NoFP did that should be avoided.

 

Just don't.

 

Feel free to ignore the following advice:

If you're writing a time travel story, start it out in the desperate future. Don't say "Voldemort laughed and cast Avada Kevadra. Harry, bathed in green light, fell for an indefinite amount of time"... because that shit is in every time travel story and God awful boring.

The reality is, to make a good time travel story, you need a legitimate reason for the main character to go back. It has to be so terrifyingly bad that the only conceivable choice to make is to erase the past. Voldemort just winning isn't enough; we're talking about an entire world on fire.

I mean, think about the Quidditch World Cup in canon. Death Eaters (who don't even know the Dark Lord is still alive) appear randomly and begin terrorizing Muggles. Imagine if there was no Ministry of Magic to arrive and chase the Death Eaters away. Now imagine that Ministry is actively terrorizing Muggles.

So, essentially, you'd have a much older, wiser, fucked up Harry looking back and going, "Where did it all go wrong?" and zeroing in on a single point in his history that is the place he can change it all.

NOW.

Want to make it interesting? The point of divergence cannot be: GoF cemetary, the night the Potters died (anytime before Voldemort was reborn, really) or Battle of Hogwarts time. Instead, you make the destination unknowable to Harry; he can manipulate time, but time can just as easily manipulate him. Whatever method he choses has just as many ways it can go wrong as right; he could quite literally go back to a time before he was born and die as a result or change the future so much that its even worse than what he remembers.

Once he gets back, he's at an extremely inconvenient time and nothing seems to be going in his favor. Almost insurmountable odds are against him; every move he makes to avoid falling into a particular trap only lands him in another, more difficult situation to get out of.

Having Harry struggle to remember certain events properly, even waiting until just moments before the event to make a move so that things happen similarly, can make the difference between a good story and a boring one. You have to capture the suspense of knowing what's coming but being unable to move on your knowledge until just as the event is happening.

Bulletpoints:

1. Voldemort has to be an active villain. He can't make the exact moves he made in canon once Harry is seen acting against him over and over. If you show his POV, make sure that he becomes aware of Harry's interference and begins to become more paranoid until he suddenly does something Harry is unprepared for.
2. Harry cannot know everything. Yes, he'll still have his knowledge from the future, but something deviates and then things start to spin out of his control. He's not a Prophet; he's someone who lived through one chain of events and is now seeing another set that are remarkably similar but not quite the same.
3. Harry can't tell anyone. Getting help from someone else may blow his cover or make him seem like a dangerous lunatic, so he has to be quiet about everything he knows. Someone sensing something's definitely wrong and not knowing what it is (ex. Hermione suspecting that Harry is turning dark) will be necessary to add thriller to the suspense.
4. Things that were important to canon Harry are NOT important to future Harry. What is the point in Quidditch, dating and being social now when a billion people are going to be enslaved and murdered in the future? I'd think an aloof, if not outright caustic characterization makes more sense.
5. As things get out of his control, Harry becomes more and more desperate without an outlet for his frustration, perhaps even attempting to go back in the past again.

 

Given the Pottermore assertions about Time magic, I'd be interested to see some brain-bending side-effects whenever the time-traveling troublemaker tried to make a significant change. The experience of time would get increasingly surreal as reality complains of having to rewrite itself.

Harry raised his wand and---

--he was suddenly enclosed in darkness. Lighting a Lumos, he checked the clock on the wall; four hours had skipped by in a heartbeat, during which Harry simply had not existed. Otherwise, surely the Polyjuice would have worn off by now.

 

If you want to try something original, you could always go with: "Hell yeah, I'm a time-traveler, what's up bitches? Let's fuck Voldemort up!" instead of the usual spiel about how he has to hide it and preserve the timeline so Lily and James can get to fuck and he can be born, even at the cost of many lives. Not to mention the fact that it would never work, even if he arrived back in time and decided to hide in an abandoned shack with no human interaction. Isn't Chaos Theory a wonderful thing?

EDIT: I don't really get how nobody would believe Harry was a time-traveler and that he must be insane. They already have time travel for fuck's sake, is it really that much of a stretch that someone might figure out how to go back further? This is people with magic we're talking about, not just some filthy muggles.

 

Never do a canon rehash. Never.

Don't care about preserving the timeline. You're a time traveler, you went back in time to change history. So, change history, don't preserve it!

"Oh, I have to relive my second Hogwarts year? Better let Ginny write in the diary for the whole year! That makes sense, right?" No, it doesn't. Fucking unleash Fiendfyre! Who cares if people think you're mad? You're here to save lives, not to win a popularity contest.

 

The worst thing that I see to do is for Harry to go back, and for everything to just play out the same way. It usually ends up in a canon rehash just with an older Harry. Avoid that, make it interesting. Also, avoid using goblins knowing Harry is from the future, avoid using Gringotts as a base of operations, avoid magical trunks, avoid inheritance, avoid Luna realizing Harry is a time traveler, avoid admitting everything to Dumbledore.

 

There's a few reasons for that.

1. It's incredibly boring for Harry to do some world-breaking magic to get back in the past and then go, 'first thing I'm going to do is tell Dumbledore'. Maybe it's not unbelievable, but it would certainly make me close the story.

2. Anyone who would risk erasing everything and being completely alone in the world is certifiably insane. I mean, if you go back and get rid of World War 2, would you? Perhaps, but you'd have no way of reliably predicting what is going to happen past the very first event you changed. Like Harry could appear in front of Hitler in the late 30's, ice him and then pop back for lunch at Hogwarts?

3. If you time travel backwards, you can't just go forwards after you make changes. Wherever Harry ends up, he has to stay there until 'present time'. Changing a whole bunch of shit right to start with is not going to end well if he has to live it out afterwards. He has to manage how often and how much he changes things, and also ignore some things he would like to change -- like Sirius being in Azkaban -- because it would irrevocably change the progression of events.

Example: He goes and gets Sirius out of prison after first year, but ends up caught trying to enter the prison. No one believes he's Harry Potter (as Harry Potter has just completed first year at Hogwarts) and his method of time travel has been removed from him by the guards, thus rendering him stuck.

Cool tid bit: Imagine time-traveller!Harry going back to the year that Sirius spent going around the world, getting purposely sent to Azkaban, waiting for Sirius to break out and then convince young Harry they are up to nothing while they're actually hunting horcruxes in advance of GOF when Voldemort's reborn.

 

Thanks for all your responses, guys. Thanks especially to Atram Noctem for his well thought out reply.

Just to make one thing clear, killing Riddle is Harry's overt motive, definitely the source of looming tension, but not the beginning and end to all things plot.

Rough Background: Voldemort wins war. World goes to hell. In a final act of desperation, Harry must transcend time and reason to kill him.

At this point Harry doesn't care about the consequences of killing young Riddle and has no intentions of returning to his own time. The future's beyond hope. All his friends are dead. He's half-suicidal and probably a little batshit crazy. But not stupid, and not on some psycho murder rampage either. Harry's sense of humanity - albeit skewed and massively fucked up by this point - is integral to his motivations and decisions.

Also, Tom already covers the homicidal sociopath role quite nicely.

Moreover I'm a big fan of twisty relationships and plan to focus on the emerging dynamic between the two boys - not in a friendship or romantic context obviously. But hopefully in an interesting way.

I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with Dumbledore though. I can't give him the boot, but I want my Harry to be fiercely independent.

Anyway, keep the suggestions coming!

EDIT: I should probably make clear that Harry's going back in time to kill teenage Voldy. He wants to avoid the whole horcrux nonsense completely. Also, I have no desire to rewrite the books . Harry's not de-aging. He'll be nineteen when he goes back.

 

First off, that 'world-breaking magic' already exists. Just because you can only go back five hours with a time-turner doesn't mean it isn't the same basic concept or the same magic. You're erasing the universe no matter if you go back 10 years in time or five hours. Unless you're just creating a new universe, which is entirely possible and avoids the paradoxical nature of time-travel.
Anyway, even going back in time does irreparable damage to the original timeline. It doesn't matter how microscopic the changes you make are, they are going to dramatically change things, even those that appear completely unrelated. It's Chaos Theory 101.

 

The point of Time Turners is that they don't actually require that one rewrite the world through their use. This is a fundamental limitation of the devices and the reason one cannot use them to rewrite the past.

Time Turners are actually one of the more benign ways to introduce time travel into a story without invoking the worst sorts of paradoxes (the grandfather paradox, e.g.) The only problem is that in doing so, you pretty much toss out any possibility (or even illusion) of free will and choice, one of the central themes of JKR's series.

Most who say things like this tend not to have the slightest clue what "chaos theory" even is (aside from a few inane Jeff Goldblum mutterings from Jurassic Park).

 

Actually, that's not at all how the time-travel that exists in the HP universe works. Time-turners operate on stable time loops which come into existence by unknown methods (the universe is precomputed with the time-loops already existing; you aren't actually changing anything when you use a time-turner).

Edit: sniped by Pers. Also, yay determinism! I don't think it's necessarily incompatible with the other kind of time-travel either, though.

 

Disagree completely with this. Like Pers mentioned, nobody reads the first chapter. There is a reason for this. Why Harry goes back doesn't matter, and by that I mean, everyone already knows why he goes back. It's obvious. The future sucked. It doesn't matter what form of suck it took, just that it did. You aren't going to come up with a future that I care about or haven't seen done before, so don't waste time on it. The exception to this is if you need to establish Harry as batshit insane like Swim did in Circular Reasoning, and even then I still kinda don't care and skim it anyways.

It also doesn't matter how Harry goes back. I've read a million different ways of doing this, from potions, to the veil, to gods, to phoenixes, to super time turners, to random department of mysteries shit. It really doesn't matter.

You may as well start your story off with Harry landing in the new time period going "whoo, it worked!" That way you get to the part that actually gets read.

 

The time turners are paradoxes in themselves. You're going back to change something that's already been changed by you. Like Harry saving himself from the dementors. The logic behind it is insane and really fucking stupid. Anyway, it doesn't really matter. I was more talking about the ability to travel back in time as a concept, which wizards would accept as a matter of fact. Thus, the idea that wizards would find you insane if you claimed to be a time traveler seems preposterous to me, especially if you can prove it with some knowledge about future events or secrets.

I'll be the first to admit that I only have somewhat cursory knowledge about it. That being said, I didn't even know the concept was popularized by Jurassic Park, I got it from Sci-Fi books and alternate history.

 

It's cool to disagree. Pers is wrong (haha, IMO), however; I always read the first chapter, and in fact, it usually determines whether I read the rest, and never have I immediately skipped to the end of any story. I'm not Meg Ryan. I don't even like skimming through stories -- if I'm going to do that, I might as well not even read it.

Some stories are able to get by with time travel by having Harry hit with a curse and instantaneously forced back into his younger self. Those usually suck.

I would like to see a back to the past story built on a back bone of a decent dystopian future that Harry just barely escapes. I'm talking about an arc of the story done in the future, where Harry has a bunch of people helping him that get knocked off one by one in more and more brutal ways, until they realize that things are so bleak that the only way to ever defeat Voldemort is to sacrifice everything in the world to go back to another time.