My novel doesn't time-jump too much. It starts pretty linearly, where my hero gets fired, find a new job opportunity, applies, and is accepted. However, he then has to go to a 16-week-long academy, which I want to spend a bit of time on, but nothing too crazy, since it's a minor part of the story. How would you guys go about compressing this? I mean, think of cramming a police or fire academy into one chapter.
I think it depends on whether anything important to the plot happens. If it doesn't, I might throw it away in one sentence. If it does...well, it depends on what it is. What important things happen there?
I did a three month time jump in my latest book, Gravity, when my MCs went on a European concert tour. I just did a brief overview of how the tour went overall, then picked a couple of character-driven flashback scenes as a focus. All in all, I squeezed three months into less than half a chapter, and I think it worked pretty well.
I think it is possible to just denote the highlights (important bits) in a short amount of a chapter. Granted I opted out of the standard tradition of chapters, and went for time/space jumps, I covered basic training for one of my MCs in between the other two taking care of business. (And no body knows that they whole book takes place over the course of about 8 months or so.)
If you stick to your POV character and just let him 'sum up' his impressions of what happened during that 16-week academy experience, then you should be okay. If you stay very strongly in that character's head (whether you're writing first person or third) and give us his feelings about the experience, you should be okay. Was it fun? Was it difficult?
