If you don’t have them, you might end up with a story that looks like this paragraph. In most stories, they reach the end, start with a beginning, and go through the middle. Timelines are important. They set out to tell the story in an order that makes sense.
Let’s try that again, shall we?
Timelines are important. They set out to tell the story in an order that makes sense. In most stories, they start with a beginning and go through the middle to reach the end.
But they don’t have to follow the three-act structure in order to tell the story in a specific order. The confusion with timelines comes in when a writer forgets the story he’s trying to tell, and starts to jump around, mixing up scenes and events within the story. The scenes on their own will still make sense, but much like the first paragraph of this post, when you put them all together, they’re jumbled and give the plot away long before you’ve hooked the reader.
As a writer, you have the power to change time itself. You also have the power to confuse the time stream to such an extent that you create multiple time warps and end up on a stage with aliens in drag doing a funky chicken dance. If you’re a pantser, you’ve probably time warped a few times while writing.
Last week I spoke about making scenes, and creating the titles for them so that you roughly know what’s going to happen throughout the story.
I found that when I did this exercise, I created the scenes from where I imagined the story would start, adding odd bits here and there before reaching what I thought would be the end.
The problem I discovered while doing this is that I’m never sure which scene I’m going to be writing next. Part of being a pantser means that you just write, sometimes with a vague idea of where you want the scene to go, but mostly, you’re just writing until something hits a chord and you get a small part of the story that sits right.
Of course, this means that by the end of having written 50 odd scenes, you’re left with a whole lot of time warps. Which is where timelines come into play.
First of all, we need to define what a timeline in novel writing is NOT.
- A timeline is not an A to Z layout of events in your story.
- A timeline is not always structured from the beginning to the end.
- A timeline is not necessarily in date order.
- A timeline is not set in stone.
That said, it’s time to delve into what novel timelines ARE.
- A timeline is a layout of events that happen in your story.
- A timeline can be structured to include flashbacks, journal entries, dreams, or if you’re writing a time-travelling novel, future and past events.
- A timeline is set up to help you keep track of all your important scenes, so that you can be sure to write bridging scenes between Big Event A, and Big Event B.
- A timeline is a device to make sure that Betty isn’t pregnant with Bob’s baby two months before they meet.
- A timeline can be changed to help the story flow better, so don’t be scared to mix it around a bit.
If you’re working with Scrivener, you have the lovely option of viewing your scenes on a virtual corkboard. This makes creating a “timeline” extremely simple, because you just click and drag the index cards into the order in which you’d like to tell the story.
Liquid Story Binder is free to use for 30 days, after which you need to purchase the software. It comes with a timeline feature, in which you can sort your timelines by date, character, events, etc.
The Timeline app from ReadWriteThink is free, and allows you to create a straightforward A-Z timeline of events, which is useful if you just want to know when things happened if not where they’ll appear in your story.
Timelines are a Pantser’s best friend, for the simple reason that if you’re writing your scenes as they pop into your head, you can write them all, and then place them into a semi-coherent order - your novel’s timeline.
Once that is done, you get to play with writing bridging scenes, and editing, making sure that your story flows smoothly from one scene to the next, whether you’re jumping ahead to the future, or tripping back to the past. Just make sure that unless you meant to do it, you don’t create time warps and funky chickens.
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| Ninja Chicken from play.google.com |
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