Time Always Passes

In any world that has a continuum, time is passing everywhere. Simply put, just because the audience only sees the action of one person in one place doesn't mean things aren't happening elsewhere. Knowing this, there are certain ways we as writers can deal with the passage of time.

One method is to have time constantly moving, but looking at it through different cameras. Basically, if in a story, the end of one chapter is at 3 PM, the beginning of the next chapter is at 3:01. However, the focus of the story has shifted from northern Oregon to central Italy. The positive side to this method is that the audience always knows when things are going on. The negative side is that we can never know when things are happening simultaneously. We can only be told that things happened at the same time.

Another method is to cover the same period of time over several areas. If, in the period of time from 2 PM to 3 PM, the protagonist is interrogating a suspect, the antagonist is causing a riot, and a third party is trying to figure out what has been going on since the beginning of the story, then each group would need its own coverage during the same period of time. This technique is useful because it explains everything that happens clearly, but it comes at the cost of potentially confusing the audience. Unless you explicitly say what time it is during each scene, you need to give cues. If one chapter ends with the protagonist seeing an airplane flying over the city, maybe the next chapter would end with the same image seen from a different place. That would indicate that the two chapters occurred at the same time.

Of course, if you really wanted, you could just break the rules and have the whole world wait for you. This doesn't work very well outside of comedy, and even then any comedy that has a flow of time can do well to have events occur simultaneously for comedic purposes. (While you were trying to win the grand prize to afford a new television, I sold your video game system.)