Extremely Short Timespan/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A novel, film, or other work of fiction covers the events of a very short time period.

  • Straight: All the events in a novel take place during one evening.
  • Exaggerated: All the events in the novel take place during the same ten seconds.
  • Downplayed: Half of the events in a novel take place in the same 48 hours. (The rest of the novel covers a far longer time period.)
  • Justified: The story is in real time, and it shows multiple POVs.
  • Inverted: The events in the novel cover a thousand-year span.
  • Subverted: The first two-thirds of the book cover only one night's worth of events, but the pace suddenly picks up and by the end the story spans over two years.
  • Double Subverted: ...Except the last two-year segment was actually another character's imagining how that future might turn out as he takes his shower on that same night.
  • Parodied: An elf in the story had written a story about a period of a year which is described in this fashion.
  • Deconstructed: A character experiences time slower than other people, and the whole TV series is shot in slow motion to capture the agony he goes through; as a result, each episode only covers a few minutes' worth of events. This eventually drives the character mad.
  • Reconstructed: ???
  • Zig Zagged: Due to large amounts of time traveling, nobody's really sure anymore of the series' technical timespan.
  • Averted: The events in the series cover a few weeks or months of in-series time.
  • Enforced: "We can only afford to shoot at one location on this budget. Let's have the whole thing take place during one party, okay?
  • Lampshaded: "The last ten minutes feel like they've taken so long..."
  • Invoked: The police can only legally hold a clearly-guilty suspect without evidence overnight. Thus, the work takes place over a 24 hour period as our heroes seek out that evidence.
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: The villain's plan takes several months to come to fruition, so that if something goes wrong, he has plenty of time to come up with a fix.
  • Discussed: "Ever notice how all our problems are solved within one or two days?"
  • Conversed: "I just wasted six hours of my life reading about... one day? Come on!"

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