…and it involves some ideas I’ve accumulated over the years.
Getting facts and dates straight in a narrative matters. You bet readers notice. Maps. Floor plans. You need these things.
I keep a nice little Laurel Burch book OSG gave me some time ago which is my notebook particularly for the Foreigner books. And that lets me keep track.
One of my discoveries is the value of old calendars. Or just doing a calendar form in your word processor and plugging it in. The combination of a detailed outline with a calendar, or an outline ON a calendar, is a very good way to keep things straight. When there’s a calendar, you’re not going to have things that aren’t set up, (a note several days prior), and you know where various people are at the time, which can suggest ideas, or at least make it sound as if you actually know what you’re doing. Can’t recommend it enough. Just jot notes down in the date squares, and tie it to the outline, and you will not later discover you have things in there twice (this can happen when you go to a convention and come back convinced you haven’t mentioned something but have) or that you’ve forgotten to do a set-up for something that happens, say, on the 15th of said month. It doesn’t matter that months may not have the same number of days: you don’t have to go crazy—just get the sequence right. This also helps you in fantasy stories where moon-phase may govern who can see what at night (no few fantasy writers are guilty of a perpetually full moon, which is the devil to explain).
It’s all part of that internal consistency thing.
Ooo, I like the paper calendar thing. I keep track via a list of dates in a file separate from the chapters, but a paper calendar *would* make it much simpler. (And I was once guilty of the perpetual full-moon thing, until one day I read through the whole mss and realized every time I mentioned the moon it was full. And figuring out the moon phase made it more interesting sometimes, because I’d discover that I had very low visibility during key events, which made things just that much more difficult for the characters to deal with. 🙂 I like doing floor plans too — I did a floor plan of a two story building after writing the first draft, and discovered that all the windows in the upper rooms were on the wrong walls…
Readers love to analyze books and see if they can work out these kind of things, that’s for sure. I don’t think that’s just me.
Some authors seem to care more about keeping these kinds of things straight than others — or perhaps those authors simply have a better system of keeping track of things?
What I’ve been doing for my current work-in-progress is to keep a Wiki for it, kind of a personal Wikipedia of my fictional world.
Oh, what a fabulous idea. I’m working on something and don’t know if I’ll get anywhere with it, but it’s a long-spanning timeline and it never occurred to me that I could note the major plot events on the calendar…
*goes off to make a calendar*
I know that writers are only human, but I must admit that sometimes there are some small errors that crop up in some books and they bug me out of all proportion. Then there are the really annoying ones, in which a character changes gender from one book to the next, or is suddenly married to someone else, or the time line gets re-written.
When it comes to using the calendar to keep track, one author got it really, really right – a Mr. Tolkien of Oxford. Following through LOTR you can track it day by day and phase of the moon etc. In fact there has been at least one book written about his use of it.
I keep a cork bulletin board leaned up against the wall right by my desk. Any time I name someone or something, I grab a scrap of paper and pin it there. I do notes on things like injuries. I pin maps there, as well and descriptions of places. Eventually, a lot of it goes into a database. This is because I have two main story universes (one science fiction and one fantasy) with overlapping material within each group. I really need to spend more time updating that database — but I want to write instead.
Even with all the precautions, I still make mistakes. I think some of it comes when my mind makes corrections on things the way I should have done them from the start — and I don’t see that little leap. For new print editions of a trilogy, I hired someone to help edit all three so I can hope to catch more of those problems. The books were written over a 25 year period, and it shows. I still don’t expect perfection.
I still can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing. I might, someday, even get it right!
For my writing dalliance (I really can’t claim to be keeping at it seriously) based in an early-16th C. Edinburgh, I have set events to Saints Days and other popular celebrations or calendrical happenings. It’s quite fun and your entry today helped me realize that it is also keeping me chronologically accurate. I also have drawn a map of my fictionalized Tounis College (aka The University of Edinburgh but some 70 years before it actually came into being). The map is great for figuring out what way the light would be shining and where I have plants growing (ok, my heroine is the college gardener’s daughter and I indulge in a lot of garden porn I try to convince myself is relevant to the plot). I have been accused by friends of writing this very historically-based fantasy because I really want to wander around pre-reformation Scotland and see what would have been like to live there.
A Outlining Calendar which lets the user design the date system. Hey, just the project to learn a new programming language on. Watch out SourceForge.
Now THAT would interest me! Let us know how it goes – if it’s useful, I’d be willing to toss a few bucks your way in recompense.
What helps me: I created a scale map to go along with my fantasy world. This allows me to track different characters movement and location as I write in real time. It also allows me a more realistic way to judge distance and time.
There is research and creativity involved. Like how many leagues can a man cover in a day/hour. Or Wagon, horse, dragon etc.
The calender is good too for straightening time lines.
Another thing I have been doing is keeping character profiles: A crude sketch followed by a brief grouping of words the best describe the character’s personality, mannerisms,taste,and appearance.
Figure the more you put into something the more you will get out of it.
I did figure out once that an oxcart is good for 10 miles a day in good weather. A good old-west style Conestoga wagon was good for a bit more than that. 😉
Having wrestled a real world timeline for years, anyone who
creates one has my sympathy.
I made the mistake of wondering how all these groups known
to the Romans moved around.
I now have a giant Ptolemy map marked up with tribal names.
Also a composite timeline from various sources that gets
added to as I find more information.
A couple of nasty human habits haven’t helped much. Destroying
the records (one example left Beowulf as the only survivor)
and active exterminations of other groups without a record
have made an incredible jigsaw with lots of missing chunks.
Expanding this kind of problem across a starmap boggles the
mind, when you want to make sure characters know things
when it is possible for them to know them.
I am amazed to find that we know a lot more about Romans and
Greeks than we do about pre renaissance europeans who were
Christians.
Anyway, anyone who juggles all of these factors for
reasonable veracity is to be admired.
When I got into genealogy, I got diverted into the relations of the post-Romans, the Goths and Visigoths and the Merovingians. Fascinating reading. It’s like baseball: to really appreciate the game, you have to take sides, pick a team, and follow them. That way you’re following people whose motivations you can begin to figure. Alaric is a case in point. That whole mess makes sense if you follow Alaric and Athualf and crew and ask what’s in it for whom. Same with the Merovingians. Trying to memorize it just as dates would be crazy-making. The dates follow the where and the why quite tamely, once you’ve figured that.
CJ, you’ve hit a couple of times on this recently but it really is important to a lot of things. As an engineer, I am asked many times “what” (“What’s the max temperature seen? What is the min spacing? What is the stress? The efficiency?”) in order to implement a design… but the more important question that is only implied is “Why?” If you understand *why* the max temperature is here and of this magnitude, you can alter the design to change it in the proper direction – instead of treating a symptom, you can cure the disease, eliminate rather than compensate for a problem.
“What” is so much easier. “Why” is not only more important, it’s more fun as well.
“Why” is the more important reason when you’re designing software, computers, and websites, too. Yes, “what” the client wants is important, but it’s easier in the long run to ask “why” they want “what” they want. Why does it have to incorporate web-based timekeeping if none of the employees you want to track have access to computers with internet access? Why must the website be based entirely on two shades of green? Why do you need four DVD drives in one desktop PC?
When I have my students select/design their research topics and, more specifically, their question about their topic, I tell them they can’t ask a “what is” type of question (ex. “what is a variable star”). Those simple questions lead to parroted, simple answers with not a lot of thinking involved. Instead, I encourage them to ask “why” questions (“why do some stars’ energy outputs seem to vary regularly?”). While the what/why dichotomy doesn’t completely hold (you can ask “what is the difference between X and Y?”), why requires much more critical, dynamic thinking and that is the skill I am really trying to teach/get students to learn.
A useful tool when outlining anything from my own experience is Microsoft Project. I can put in the high level events, then expand on the scenes and I can workout what happens when and who knows what! And I always know when!
If only project planning was as easy
I like this freeware for a timeline template in Excel
http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelArticles/create-a-timeline.html
You can set it for days, years, centuries. It helps me keep track of multiple character lines, subplots, etc., and get all the dates right.
Thank you, and welcome in!
(blinks) Holy Cow! You mean I can actually put to good use all those old calenders I keep forgetting to throw away??? 😛
Seriously though, this is a WONDERFUL tip. Thank you so very much!