No doubt Mr. John C. Wright’s version of this would look very different. But regardless, Fandom Pulse has an intriguing article by a Stargate writer about the idiosyncracies of writing effectively about time travel:
In distilling the formula of a time loop story, you can readily identify key elements that appear in almost every version, tropes that can – in some instances – be subverted to the delight of most genre-savvy viewers : In television, the opening tease always concludes with a colossal Holy Shit moment (the Enterprise is destroyed, Mulder and Scully are shot and killed) or the completion of an initial loop, establishing the story conceit from the get-go.
Our protagonist lives the loops long enough to realize what is happening (while establishing a string of repetitive beats for the viewer, which can be twisted and turned in future loops). Our protagonist must attempt to convince others of what is happening to them (as they are ALL caught in the loop, but, for some reason, only our protagonist is aware). These attempts at an explanation build, as does our protagonist’s frustration with his inability to convince the others until, by some stroke of unexpected brilliance, the solution presents itself.
Inevitably, multiple characters become cognizant of the fact that they are trapped in the loop.
The means by which the loop is initiated should never feel cumbersome. Ideally, the device (and I don’t necessarily mean a literal device or instrument) that initiates the loop shouldn’t be readily obvious or, if it is, should be hidden in plain sight. Don’t front-load exposition. Make the discovery a natural progression of the story, part of the investigative pursuit that sees our characters putting the pieces together with each subsequent loop. It’s always more rewarding for viewers to be on the journey with our characters rather than one or two steps ahead, waiting for them to catch up.
A fairly obvious rule, but if your characters loop, they go back to Step 1, Day 1. They may have the memories of their experience, but they wouldn’t carry over any physical consequences of their actions because they are, in essence, rebooting. This is a fundamental law of theoretical time looping. I remember having someone pitch me an idea for a time loop series that involved our protagonist ending one loop by shooting himself in the head. He awakens at the start of yet another loop, but his mind has been damaged by the bullet that killed him in the previous loop. “What bullet?”I asked. “The bullet from before,” I was told. I explained the theoretical impossibility given that time had reset and that when time resets, EVERYTHING resets, including your physical form. There would be no residual damage from a bullet wound that never happened. To which he replied: “I always felt rules were meant to be broken.”
In most time loop stories, time loops in general. At the end of Groundhog Day, our characters leave and return to the big city, where they presumably pick up their lives, uninterrupted, because the rest of the world was caught in the loop as well. But there are rare exceptions where the time loops within a temporal bubble (i.e., Stargate’s Window of Opportunity is an example).
The key is at once retroactively obvious and much more subtle. Either way, it’s an insightful analysis for both the creative and the consumer. I don’t happen to be much interested in writing time travel myself; I think my short story in THE ALTAR OF HATE, “The Lesser Evil”, is the only one I’ve ever written.