Time, there’s no escaping it. Indeed, until fairly recently in human history, we believed it was constant. And it sort of is, unless we’re getting into things on a cosmic scale. Or magic. But that’s for later.
But time has an interesting relationship with storytelling, because the storyteller has the licence to manipulate time in a way that suits the story. You’re all familiar with the concept of a flashback, or a story showing the same event (at the same time) from different perspectives. You may even have watched a Christopher Nolan film! Wonderful tools to have at one’s disposal, but if you’re going to muck about with time, you need to be aware of it, and have control of it. Your readers are simultaneously smart, and easily confused.
We talk a lot about character, plot, and structure. Time transcends all of those things. Keeping things simple, actions take place at a point in time, and time is the thing that joins those dots. We talk about character development, which happens over time.
How long do these things take? How do they interact and depend on one another? This is, of course, a timeline.
I take issue with it being called a line, because in reality, there are lots of dots and lines, and time in stories is often non-linear. But let’s stick with convention.
What does a timeline look like? At its simplest, you have a main character, going from one event to the next, in a linear fashion. There may be breaks for less interesting things like travelling, sleeping, eating, etc.
If we start to break out, we may have two POV characters, and it’s important to understand what the other person is doing when they are off-screen, and when they are doing it.
We may have a flashback, or a flash-forward, and again, we need to understand how far we’re moving in temporal terms, and how it relates to the present.
All of this helps to orient the reader. But here’s the crucial part: Like any element of a story, the reader doesn’t need to know everything, only enough to prevent confusion, or only as much as the story needs. Generally, when the reader can see the cogs, or the mechanics behind the story, it loses its magic.
So, how to do this?
Most of the time, it happens naturally. Your character may be having breakfast, or dinner, and that gives the reader a rough idea of time of day. Even if its a case of just picking up from the previous chapter, the reader intuitively will grasp that little or no time has elapsed.
It gets trickier if you’re moving POV. Or if you’re writing otherworldly stories where things like watches don’t exist. But you still have things like sunrise, sunset, noon, meals, and so on to work with. Another way to do it is to reference an event. By way of example, there could be a fire that one character is close to, and you can orient the reader by having another character see the smoke.
There are levels to how overtly you might want to do this. Personally, I prefer stories where it’s subtle. And I’m a sucker for a poetic line or two about a sunset or a sunrise.
There are also situations where you might want to withhold the time from the reader to ramp up the mystery. Or if you’re deep in POV and the character you’re writing doesn’t know the timeline.
There are, of course, pitfalls. If, like me, you like to throw in a line about the vista, be careful about mentioning things like ‘lengthening shadows’ or even just ‘moonlight’, weather events like rain. You can easily run into consistency issues where more discerning readers will think: ‘Hang on, it was raining in the last scene!’ or ‘I’m pretty sure it was evening, why is it suddenly noon?’
The other thing to be wary of is getting scale right. An example of this is how I had two characters walking towards a city over the course of about four days. Without thinking, I had them covering about 100 miles, which wasn’t my intention at all, and I had to revise their journey down to just over a day. You can have blind spots like this, so always worth having someone read your work.
But before we move on, I should say that your timeline isn’t everything. It doesn’t need to be planned down to the last minute, but it’s important to avoid those showstoppers, because it’s easy to lose credibility if your work has them. As a storyteller, time can be fluid, and even a little bit confusing/loose, but don’t fall into the many traps laying in wait.
I believe planning your timeline out is as important as all those character bios every writer swears by.
To keep all of this organised, I use a program called Aeon Timeline. I’m not here to sell it or anything. Really, a (big) piece of a paper and some coloured pencils will suffice. And an eraser. You’ll really need that eraser!
Here’s now it looks. I get quite a neat plan of how it all fits together. I can colour code things depending on which group of characters are in the scene. Each scene has an elapsed time and I can see the dependencies between scenes where they exist.
I should say it’s not that intuitive to use, and it took me a fair amount of time to get things working to even a basic level. But, easy enough to do something similar on a piece of paper, or other software.
And there it is. I’d love to hear how other people do it, and feel free to share those embarrassing timeline mishaps.