You're telling a story. You've located the 5-second moment. You've built the scaffolding. As you draft, you feel the urge to jump forward in time — and three years later, looking back... — or to jump backward — and to understand this, I have to tell you about something that happened when I was nine. Matt Dicks's default rule: don't. I would say that most of the time, maintaining stories within the moment is probably the better way to go.1
Most stories work best when they stay in the moment — the entire piece takes place within a relatively narrow chronological window. The narrative is anchored to a single timeline. Time-travel jumps break the listener's spatial-temporal orientation and dissipate the audience's emotional investment in the present moment of the story.
Dicks names this as the default but immediately notes the exception: certain stories operate differently. The spoon-of-power story jumps from 2007 (when the spoon first appeared) to the pandemic year (2020-2021). I often tell people that that's sort of a mistake — try to keep a story in the moment. And had COVID not happened, the story probably would have ended with Jamie giving me the spoon and me feeling the power of it for the first time. It's only because of the weirdness and extraordinary nature of a pandemic that allows that story to jump ahead.2
The principle is: stay in the moment unless something extraordinary licenses the jump. Most pieces should obey the default. A few specific pieces have exceptional material that earns the time-travel permission.
The principle has three components:
1. Default: stay in the moment. Most stories should keep their chronological span to days, weeks, or at most a few months. Audience attention is calibrated for relatively-continuous timelines. Long jumps break the orientation.
2. Exception: extraordinary material licenses the jump. Dicks's spoon story jumps to the pandemic because the pandemic-year material was so extraordinary in itself that it could carry the listener across the time-gap without losing them. Ordinary time-jumps don't earn this permission.
3. The other thing licensed by extraordinary material: revealed-late time-frame. You don't know in that story that Jamie was my student 16 years ago. You don't know that until the very end. And that works well for me because that story could be happening last year or two years ago. It's sort of a surprise to you that I've had the spoon for 16 years.3 The audience assumes the time-frame is recent; Dicks reveals at the end that the events happened 16 years earlier. The reveal becomes part of the surprise architecture. This trick works only because the audience hadn't been signaling time during the piece — the time travel in the spoon story is mostly the reveal of when the events actually happened, not jumps within the story itself.
The principle distinguishes narrative time-travel (the spoon ending) from BABC structure (the son's-swim-test). BABC explicitly jumps backward to A and returns — that's a different structural model. Time-travel-within-the-story is about whether the single-arc story should hop forward or backward within itself.
Audience attention has limited capacity for temporal-tracking. When a story moves continuously through time, the audience's tracking is automatic. When the story jumps, the audience has to re-orient — figure out the new timeline, integrate the new material with the previous material, update their model of the protagonist's state. Each jump consumes attention-budget that could have gone toward content-engagement.
Most stories don't have enough cross-jump material to justify the cost of re-orientation. If you jump forward six months to deliver one piece of information, the cost (re-orientation) exceeds the benefit (the information). The audience would have been better served by you staying in the moment and finding another way to deliver the information — through internal narration, through brief reference, through a character's later remark.
The exception applies when the cross-jump material is itself substantive enough to justify the cost. The pandemic year is substantive. It's a singular event that most listeners experienced themselves. It carries its own context, its own emotional weight, its own time-orientation. The audience can re-orient quickly because the destination is universally legible. Most cross-jump destinations aren't this strong.
The time-travel rule pairs with BABC model in interesting ways. BABC explicitly violates stay-in-the-moment by jumping backward to A and returning. But BABC is structurally bounded — one excursion, one return. The time-travel rule applies to additional time-jumps beyond BABC's built-in flashback. Once you've used your BABC flashback, don't add more jumps.
The rule supports leverage audience imagination: by staying in the moment, the storyteller lets the audience's imagination fill in the chronological context. Long-span stories often need explicit time-markers; short-span stories let the audience assume the timeline is intuitive.
The rule complements small moments are more powerful: small-moment stories can stay in the moment because they don't need expansive chronological context. Dramatic-event stories often require time-jumps to establish the dramatic significance. The two principles reinforce each other — stay small, stay in the moment.
You jump time without earning it. The cross-jump material isn't extraordinary enough to justify the re-orientation cost. The audience disengages. Stay in the moment unless the material genuinely warrants the jump.
You make multiple time-jumps in one piece. Each additional jump multiplies the re-orientation cost. Audience tracking degrades. Limit to one jump (BABC's built-in) or zero.
You confuse narrative time-jumps with reveal-of-time-frame. Saying I've had this spoon for 16 years at the end isn't a time-jump — it's a reveal. The story stayed in the moment; only the audience's understanding of when the moment happened shifted. This is a permissible move that doesn't break the stay-in-the-moment rule.
You time-jump because you don't know how else to deliver context. Often the desire to jump signals a structural problem the storyteller hasn't solved. The fix is usually to find another way to deliver the context — internal narration, character reference, implied background. Time-jumps as a crutch produce structurally weak pieces.
The stay-in-the-moment rule is fundamentally about audience cognitive load — managing the attention-budget so it's spent on content rather than on temporal-tracking. That principle has direct analogues across disciplines.
Behavioral mechanics: Six-Minute X-Ray (Hughes) — Hughes's elicitation work disciplines the elicitor to keep conversations anchored to a single temporal context. Targets who are asked to jump across timelines (how did you feel three years ago?) often produce defensive or evasive responses; targets who are kept in the present (what's happening for you right now?) produce more authentic disclosure. The structural mechanism is parallel: temporal jumps consume cognitive resources that could have gone elsewhere. What neither domain produces alone: Dicks teaches the storyteller to avoid jumps to preserve audience attention; Hughes teaches the elicitor to avoid jumps to preserve target disclosure. The same cognitive-load principle, different applications. Cross-orientation, the discipline travels: stay in the moment in any live-craft interaction where you depend on the other party's sustained engagement.
Eastern spirituality: Prolonged Attention as Poetic Method (Whyte) — Whyte's poetic practice is structurally a stay-in-the-moment discipline taken to its extreme. Whyte's pieces refuse to time-travel even within their own duration — they hold the present moment for the entire piece. Dicks's default rule is a softer version of the same principle: most stories should stay; Whyte's poetry all stays. Both crafts recognize that temporal-stillness produces a different aesthetic experience than temporal-motion, and that the cost of motion is real. Working storytellers can borrow Whyte's articulation of why staying matters to understand why Dicks's default rule produces better pieces.
The Sharpest Implication The stay-in-the-moment rule implies that most amateur storytellers over-engineer temporal complexity. The cultural default — particularly for ambitious storytellers — is to show off with non-linear structure: time-jumps, flashbacks, parallel timelines. The principle reveals this as usually counterproductive. Most pieces are better served by single-timeline construction with bounded structure. The ambition that produces temporal complexity often comes at the cost of audience-engagement. The fix is anti-ambitious: stay simpler than you think you should. Most pieces don't need time-travel. The pieces that do are exceptions, and the exceptions are recognizable when they appear (the spoon-of-power's pandemic year was singular and substantive). Default to simplicity.
Generative Questions