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The Importance of TRACKING Timelines in Writing: How to Keep Your Story Straight
Today we’re going to talk about timelines, what they are, why they are important, why timeline issues are detrimental to your story, and how to track your timeline to ensure the reader has a great reading experience.
What Exactly is a Timeline?
A timeline refers to the passage of time in a novel. It could take place over the course of years, months, weeks, days, or even just a few hours, depending on your genre and type of story you’re telling.
Why Timelines are Important
Timelines are vital to the reader’s comprehension of a novel. The passage of time anchors the reader and keeps them fully engaged in the story as it unfolds. As an editor, I’ve read books with simple timelines, with the book taking place over a period of a week, for instance, and I’ve read books with very complex timelines, spanning months or years.
Unfortunately, frequently, I find that the timeline doesn’t make sense. Sometimes, it’s just an issue of forgetting that it was Wednesday in the last scene, and now it’s “the next day,” but the character mentions that it’s Friday. Sometimes, days flow like fluid, just going every which way, until I feel like I need to get out a scientific calculator to try to get a grasp on what’s going on. I mean, the author didn’t say this was a time travel novel, but that’s the only way this jumping around could possibly be accomplished.
The problem with timeline issues is that, if the reader notices (and believe me, they will!), it’s going to yank them out of the story. And once that happens, if they have to drag their own scientific calculator out to try to figure out if they’re losing their minds or you are, you’ve lost them. Chances are, the timeline issues are going to keep them frustrated and noticing every single mention of time, date, or anything else timeline related, which means they aren’t paying attention to the story.
Types of Timeline Issues
A lot of different things factor into issues with timelines. I’ll discuss them in greater depth, but here’s a quick list:
Time/Date: Time of day, days, weeks, months, years
Seasons: Winter, spring, summer, fall
Weather: Dependent on time of year and location of story
Holidays: Dependent on location of story and observation of characters
How long something takes: Like the length of a pregnancy
Character Age: Timing of significant life events
You may be asking, what does the weather have to do with the timeline? Believe me, it’s relevant! We’ll look at some specific issues below.
Time/Date: Time- and date-related timeline issues can range from losing track of the passage of weeks or not honoring references to something happening “next week” or “on Saturday.” Or maybe you don’t notice that, based on the times mentioned in the book, your character has been awake for more than 56 hours without sleeping or eating. Common occurrences, like school years, for example, can also get a little wonky if you don’t pay attention to timelines.
Seasons/Weather: Not considering time of the year can cause issues with seasons and weather. I once edited a book which started in the “middle of the summer,” but “a week later,” the character was talking about their first snowstorm of the year. Clearly, the author hadn’t been tracking their timeline carefully or considering the weather and seasonal changes where this particular book was set.
Holidays: Another way losing track (or not paying attention to) time passage can affect a story is by missing holidays. If certain months pass with no mention of particular holidays that are celebrated nationally, it can seem disconnected from reality. Of course, this isn’t going to be the case with every book, depending on where it’s set and the religious affiliations of characters, but pay attention to time of year if it is relevant to your story and your characters and where your book takes place.
How Long Something Takes: If your character is three months pregnant but gives birth to a full-term baby just two months later, it’s not going to make sense to the reader, and they will either be confused about how much time has passed or know that the timeline is messed up. This opens you up to bad reviews, stating the writer didn’t pay attention to details.
Character Age: Finally, timelines are important when it comes to character ages, backstory, and significant life events. Unless you’re writing a soap opera, when a baby could be born one day and three months later be a teenager, keeping track of a realistic timeline is important. Got a 25-year-old character? Chances are they graduated from high school about seven years ago and from college about three years ago. If you want your character to be a doctor, you should research exactly how long it takes to become a doctor. You might find that your timeline doesn’t work and you need to age the character up or change their profession. Timeline affects every bit of a character’s life, even before the story starts, and believe me, readers will notice if it’s wrong.
A lot of timeline issues stem from the author not keeping track of the timeline and just arbitrarily mentioning time passage in a way that serves the scene, but isn’t consistent with the whole. Tracking your timeline will solve this problem.
How to Track a Timeline
So how, exactly, can you keep track of time? When I’m editing, I keep a Style Sheet for the book I’m working on, and I keep a timeline on that.
For example, sometimes, for simpler timelines, I just insert “(SUNDAY EVENING)” or “(TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2022)” in the chapter/scene summary in the appropriate spot (bolded, so it’s easy to see). Other times, particularly with more complex timelines, I’ll actually keep a separate timeline.
If you’re a more visual person and/or you know exactly what time of year your book takes place (with or without specific dates included), try an actual calendar! You can print off blank calendar sheets from the internet or even set up a calendar in Google Calendar just for your book. This allows you to mark on the calendar that Chapter 1, Scene 1 took place on Tuesday, November 1, 2022, for example, with a notation of what time it takes place, if that’s important.
Using this method makes keeping track a lot easier, particularly when the book spans over a month, say, and you can easily see that the US holiday of Thanksgiving falls in the third week of November, so you likely can’t ignore it if you’re character is living in the US. (Of course, there are exceptions to this, but you get the picture.)
Even if you don’t know the exact dates in your book, you can use a blank, undated calendar, to track days of the week. In the example above, if you know Chapter 1, Scene 1 takes place on a Tuesday, you just put it on a Tuesday on the calendar, and then keep track from there.
If your book takes place over a very short amount of time, say 24 hours, your timeline may be more about keeping track of the hours, or even minutes. Regardless of whether your book makes big leaps or baby steps through time, keeping track is vital.
Track significant events in your characters’ lives in whatever way makes the most sense. The calendar method probably won’t work, unless you’re tracking the timeline of an infant, which is also important, as I’ve read books where the infant would have been considered highly advanced based on the speed with which they were reaching milestones.
If you’re tracking an older character, maybe you just need a list the years of significant events, such as birth, graduation from high school, college, etc. Spreadsheets can also work really well for this type of tracking. I also highly recommend knowing how old the character was at the time of those events and making sure it’s realistic. Stating that your 30-year-old character is attending their ten-year high school reunion, for example, is likely to make the reader wonder why the character didn’t graduate from high school until they were 20.
Past events are important to track, too, not only in terms of the character’s age at the time of the event, but how long has passed since the event, which needs to add up to the age they are now. There’s a tendency for characters to mention how much time has passed since they graduated or got married or started a job, only to have that not add up with other mentions of time passage at other places throughout the book.
As you write the book, make notes of any mentions of “time” or even implications of time passing, like “next week” or “tomorrow” or “six years ago.”
If a character is working on a long-term work project, for example, or time is more vague (like, “over the next few months”), you’ll still need to keep track of the timeline, so that everything makes sense in the end. For example, if “over the next few months” takes them into a different season, particularly holiday season, you have to be aware of that and ensure the book reflects that.
Fixing Timeline Issues
So, what happens if you discover halfway through the book that you’ve somehow messed up the timeline? Or worse, you’ve written the whole book and your editor points it out to you? (Sorry!) Now what? Don’t worry. Everything is fixable. I tell my clients all the time—the fact that an issue can be identified, means it can be fixed. It just might take some work.
If you didn’t keep track of the timeline in the first place, the only way to fix it will be to do so now. That means rereading your manuscript and making notes about every single mention of time or day or date or passage of time. No matter how vague. You’ll need to make notes about the character’s life events if they are relevant or mentioned. From there, figure out where you went wrong.
I recently edited a book where a character, on a Wednesday, mentioned she had two events coming up, one “tomorrow” (which would be Thursday) and one on “Friday.” But, after that she talked about how the “rest of the week went by,” and what she did during that time. Then, she attended the event that had previously been noted would be taking place “tomorrow,” on Thursday. My guess is, the author just hadn’t considered that “the rest of the week” couldn’t take place between Wednesday and Thursday. It’s easy to lose track, particularly when you’re not starting every scene with “Tuesday, November 1, at 9:00 a.m.”
You’ll need an eagle eye to find these issues in your manuscript, but once you do, you’ll be able to see how “the rest of the week” can’t pass overnight, and you’ll need to rethink the wording and what activities the character could have done during that corrected passage of time. Highlighting can help, too, showing you where things need to be adjusted.
Sometimes, it’s just a matter of changing a word or two in the manuscript, such as stating your 30-year-old character will be attending her twelve-year high school reunion (do they have those?). Or, if the reunion isn’t involved in the equation, just that she graduated twelve years ago, instead of ten.
Sometimes, you might have to change the time of year your story takes place to make weather behave the way you need it to for your particular story. For example, if the plot hinges on being caught in a snowstorm in the continental US, it’s not likely to happen in the middle of July, no matter where they are in the States.
Sometimes, you’ll need to make your character older or younger than you originally planned, but be careful that that doesn’t set off a whole avalanche of other issues!
All that said, timeline issues can be fairly easy to fix, or they can require a whole revamp of your novel. I recommend finding all the mentions, making notes, and then devising a plan of action prior to changing things willy-nilly.
Again, though, don’t gloss over the importance of your timeline. Even if you don’t think the issues are noticeable, because they don’t seem “that bad,” readers will notice. Some of them may be able to ignore the problems if they are fully engaged in your story, but other readers will be less forgiving. And you don’t want your book to get 1-star reviews for an issue you could have resolved by keeping track in the first place.
Communicating Your Timeline Clearly
Aside from just ensuring that your timeline is correct, you need to communicate your timeline clearly to your readers. I mentioned above that wonky timelines can yank your reader out of the story (something you want to avoid at all costs), but not knowing the timeline can be just a bad.
If a child of the main character is suddenly attending school, when a chapter ago it was early summer, this can throw off the reader, who wonders where the summer went. I once read a book where years were passing between scenes, but I often had to get several pages into the scene before I noticed that and then I had to calculate how many years had passed based on the age of the child in that scene. Yikes!
You don’t need to beat the reader over the head to get the passage of time across, either. There’s no need to start each chapter with “Today is Monday, November 14, 2022” or anything like that, though, depending on the importance of the timeline to your story, some authors do actually include dates as part of the chapter headings.
Sometimes the indications of time passage are quite simple, like “A few days later, I was feeling better and headed back to the office.” Or “James waited for three weeks to hear back from his dad before he finally decided to take matters into his own hands.”
It doesn’t have to be complicated or in the reader’s face, but it does need to be clear and accurate. I’ll harp on this in many articles…you don’t want the reader to have to guess, if guessing isn’t part of the book…and typically, how much time has passed is not something the reader needs to waste brain cells on trying to figure out.
Now that you understand the importance of timelines, take a close look at your book’s timeline and see if you need to get your story straight or whether you need to do a timeline review.
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