Basic Trope: A novel, film, or other work of fiction covers the events of a very short period in time.
- Straight: All the events in a novel take place during one evening.
- Exaggerated: All the events in the novel take place during the same ten seconds.
- Downplayed: Half of the events in a novel take place in the same 48 hours. (The rest of the novel covers a far longer period in time.)
- Justified:
- The story is in real time, and it shows multiple POVs.
- The protagonist has a short lifespan.
- Inverted: The events in the novel cover a thousand-year span.
- Subverted: The first two-thirds of the book cover only one night's worth of events, but the pace suddenly picks up and by the end the story spans over two years.
- Double Subverted: ...Except the last two-year segment was actually another character's imagining how that future might turn out as he takes his shower on that same night.
- Parodied: An elf in the story had written a story about a period of a year which is described in this fashion.
- Zig-Zagged: Due to large amounts of time traveling, nobody's really sure anymore of the series' technical timespan.
- Averted: The events in the series cover a few weeks or months of in-series time.
- Enforced: "We can only afford to shoot at one location on this budget. Let's have the whole thing take place during one party, okay?"
- Lampshaded: "The last ten minutes feel like they've taken so long..."
- Invoked: The police can only legally hold a clearly-guilty suspect without evidence overnight. Thus, the work takes place over a twenty-four-hour period as our heroes Alice and Bob seek out that evidence.
- Exploited: Bob has about a week to live, and so decides to wrap up his many affairs. Each of the seasons collectively depicts one of his remaining days and the drama his efforts cause.
- Defied: Emperor Evulz's plan takes several months to come to fruition, so that if something goes wrong, he has plenty of time to come up with a fix.
- Discussed: "Ever notice how all our problems are solved within one or two days?"
- Conversed: "I just wasted six hours of my life reading about... one day? Come on!"
- Deconstructed: Bob experiences time at a slower rate than other people, and the whole TV series is shot in slow motion to capture the agony he goes through; as a result, each episode only covers a few minutes' worth of events. This eventually drives Bob mad.
Back to Extremely Short Timespan
