11 October 2013
Timelines
There’s
so much good advice about writing available on line that I hesitate to add to
it, but one topic I have hardly ever seen mentioned is timelines. If you’re
like me the excitement of having a novel accepted for publication makes you
think that the scutwork that’s remains to be done will be pleasurable, and
often it is. But not always. You can save yourself a lot of headaches by
getting a timeline in place early on and keeping it up to date.
Even
if your story focuses one person and you tell it in chronological order, your
character will have a past, and this ‘past’ can come back and bite you in the
ass if you’re not careful. Say you want to give a sixty-year old character a
stint in the army when he was younger, and say you want him to get married at a
certain age, and say you want him to spend a year abroad on Rotary Scholarship,
and say you want him to meet his wife when they’re both in graduate school.
Fine, but when you line things up you may find that you don’t have time for him
to do all these things. Okay, so you skip the hitch in the army. But then you
may have to explain why he wasn’t drafted. You have to get the dates of your
wars straight, and your information about the draft. If you want Grandpa to be
in WWI and Grandson in Vietnam, you’ve got to watch your step.
If
you’re dealing with several characters and with multiple storylines over a long
period of time, the need for a timeline becomes more imperative. Does one of
your characters (Call her “Grandma”) recall hearing the news of the Japanese
invasion Pearl Harbor? You have to have your dates straight and the ages of
your characters straight, and you need to coordinate them with events in the
“real” world of history. If Grandma was ten years old in 1941 then she’s got to
be eighty years old in 2011, it’s as simple as that. But you have to forget
about her son being drafted in the Vietnam War unless he was born when his
mother was only ten years old. (He’d have to be born before 1951 or he wouldn’t
have been eligible for the draft.
This
advice seems so obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning, and I’ve hardly ever
seen it mentioned. I’ve never been able to follow it myself, however. I always
start out with a good, clear timeline. You don’t need any fancy software, just
a table with a separate small columns for the age of each character and larger
columns to keep track of (a) events in the story and (b) events in the “real”
world. But then I start changing things around, making one character a couple
years older, another a bit younger. I start rearranging events, but I’m in too
much of a hurry to keep my timeline up to date. I figure I’ll take care of the
details later.
Better
to take care of the details sooner. If your copy editor points out that if your
protagonist was born in 1954 he couldn’t have been drafted in the Vietnam War,
you’re in trouble. You can, of course, just let it go. The reader probably
won’t notice anyway. Or you can go back and make some difficult changes in a
manuscript that you thought was finished. Very stressful.