How to Ruin Your Story
Time travel, alternate timelines, or multi/parallel universes. Or worse, more than one or all of these.
You grew up on YA novels, and then after that you largely stopped reading. Maybe you read the Dresden Files or a series by Brandon Sanderson. You might have struck out a bit and even read Dune. Hey man, it’s okay, you were a kid then, you didn’t know better. Most girls I grew up with went from Hunger Games to Twilight if it makes you feel any better.
You think you can write it. You think it’ll be interesting, or a twist. But you’re a hack writer, and you probably think antiheroes are the peak of fiction.
The second you introduce these elements, you close the loop of having any opportunity for your reader to have any investment in your story.
Time travel?
One story ever has done time travel well, and nobody has ever heard of it for that reason.
Alternative time lines?
You think it’s a “What if…?, but really, the If, isn’t. Otherwise it would be What Is, instead of What If. Also, as with all of these tropes, it allows you to retcon things. Which allows you to remove the consequences, which allows you to remove the stakes. The game is rigged, and the story teller is telling you that your investment doesn’t matter, and that you should feel stupid for ever caring. Maybe not literally (figuratively), but actually, yes, literally (literally).
Multiverses are just the same. Anything that can happen has happened or did happen can intervene in our lovely story and ruin any tension or investment.
Here’s a great multiverse alternate time-line time travel story idea for you, and I’ll give it to you for free:
It’s the one where the story is never written.