How To Write a Golden Time

What Is The Golden Time?

The Golden Time is a narrative moment when the protagonist experiences success, love, happiness, or any sense of accomplishment and contentment. This period creates a stark contrast to the struggles and conflicts that follow. It feels like the battle is won; but it’s not.

The Golden Time is a very useful trick novelists use around this point in a novel. It is a period (usually after the Midpoint, but it could be elsewhere after some triumph or breakthrough) when everything seems to be going well for the protagonist. It is a moment of respite and triumph, it seems to point towards the good times that are ahead. But as we have noted before, the Golden Time is a fake–out. It is a trick performed on your characters and your reader.

In novels, at least until their Denouement, happiness is almost always short–lived.

Purpose Of The Golden Time

1. By providing an emotional high point in the story, the Golden Time makes subsequent setbacks more poignant.
2. Character Development: This phase can reveal new aspects of the protagonist's personality, goals, and relationships, especially if the Golden Time is based on achieving intimacy and contentment. It increases the richness of what the protagonist has to lose.
3. The Golden Time often marks a turning point, the completion of a significant goal or the achievement of a temporary victory, apparently opening a new phase. But again, this is a fake–out. The antagonist or antagonistic force will return.
4. Although it feels positive and might focus on a love interest being pursued happily, the Golden Time often adds a new risk or tension to the Quest. It feels like a good thing, but maybe...it’s complicated. In my novel in which the cynical politician fell in love with the King’s new lover, doing so brought tremendous risk, firstly, because the Quest is threatened and secondly, because it will bring danger from the King himself.

Manipulating Your Reader

Some new writers are shocked by the idea that novelists must manipulate the reader’s emotions. But you must. It is your job to do this. Moreover, the reader expects you to. Giving the hero a Golden Time and then taking it away from them is both a manipulation and a necessity. Remember, you are not really manipulating the reader. You are actually giving them what they want. Sure, in a real friendship or relationship, this would be as toxic as hell, but in a novel, it’s what makes you such a great writer.

Using The Golden Time Effectively

1. Ensure there is a logical emotional build–up to the Golden Time.
2. Highlight the contrast between the Golden Time and the anticipation that went before and the struggles that will follow to manipulate the reader’s emotions.
3. Use the Golden Time to develop relationships between characters, especially romantic ones. New lovers linger in bed or go for a stroll in the sunlight. Allies are feeling bonded and triumphant. Investigators feel that they have the case licked.
4. Create scenes that have a blissful, joyful feel. Even if the characters’ problems are still a real, present danger, it must feel far away.
5. You can either foreshadow or seed the conflicts to come after the Golden Time or completely deny them so that when things go wrong, it blindsides the reader. However, you must be clear in your strategy in order to make it most effective.

The Golden Time will probably only last a couple of chapters, before it is shattered or undermined, usually around the next mid–act pinch point. The next phase is called ‘The Bad Guys Close In,’ which we will cover more in the next chapter.

Do I Need A Golden Time?

No, you don’t. If you were writing a novel about some particularly tragic event in history, you probably don’t want to have a couple of chapters of blissful joy in a war zone or a concentration camp. And yet, it is a very useful trick to pull off in a novel, and it might be possible to use it effectively. Often, you will hear the editorial advice ‘Give him/her/them a Golden Time,’ when something is not working in a relationship in a novel. It is very commonly accepted – and much loved – in the publishing industry as one of the core tools of the accomplished novelist.

This is an excerpt from How To Write A Novel Chapter By Chapter available here: https://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Novel-Chapter-Outlining-ebook/dp/B0DJ8TMVWL?ref_=ast_author_mpb

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