The Importance of Timelines

Mika detects a disturbance in The Force.

Last night I was having a great time in the Deep End of the Revision Pool.  The additional three chapters had been written and the revisions were going well.  The dialog was humming along in my head, the actions were clear and concise, and my main character was showing, not telling, his growth in the scene. 

I was in that rare writing Groove.  I even remember thinking that I was actually enjoying the work.

Then came a Disturbance in The Force: a little voice in the back of my head started trying to get my attention.

"Say, um, Tom.  I think I've found a problem here."

"Can't this wait?  I'm in a Groove here."

"Well, sure.  It's a pretty big problem, though."

"Is anything that can't wait until I'm done here?  I mean, did I forget that one of my character sprouted a third arm that I haven't refered to in these chapters?"

"No, no.  Nothing like that.  Tell you what, let me just say one word, okay?  One word so you won't forget?  Okay?"

Sigh.  "Fine.  One word."

"Great.  Here is goes: Timeline."

"Timeline?"

"Yep, that's it.  See ya, bye!"

Oh, sazzafrazzarazzamatazz*.

Several years back I was one of two people reading through the final edit of a book by Vance Briceland before he send it off to his editor.  The book was "I Went to Vassar for This?"  I remember my work on this book for three reasons:

1. I completely misread the race of a key minor character, thus several of my comments made no sense whatsoever.
2. I argued stringently against his fictional/poetic license of moving the night "What's My Line?" aired -- from, as I recall, Sunday to a Saturday 
3. As a result, Vance has never asked me to read another of his books before it's gone to press.

Oh, wait.  There was a point to that aside:

1. The one valuable contribution I made to that pre-read was in spotting a timeline error.  It was easily fixed and much appreciated.

Ii had just finished reading a book on Place and Setting that had a full chapter on Timelines.  The book recommended making a timeline of your story, especially if you have mulitple characters who are all off doing different things throughout the story.  Do they all  have time to accomplish their tasks?  Is the time too short?  Too long?  Can they all get to where they need to be in the time you've allotted for them?

I resolved then and there to always make a timeline for my books.

Except I didn't.

I mean, my book takes place over just a few days, okay?  The primary action takes place under a 48-hour deadline.  Honestly, who needs a timeline for that short a period of time?

Still, if I caught a timeline error in Vance's book, and that nagging voice in my head had left me with that one word... okay.  Sheesh...

I surfaced from the Deep End of the Revison Pool when I was finally happy with the last chapter.  We ate dinner.  I had a glass of wine or two.  We watched the second episode of Cosmos.  I sat down and wrote out by hand what happened on Day One, Day Two, Day Three and Day Four.

Only, there wasn't anything left to do on Day Four.  And an unrealistic amount of work done on Day Two.  Unrealistic as in just about everything takes place on Day Two.

Oh, sazzafrazzarazzamatazz.

I had hoped to have all of Revision II done by yesterday.  Now I'm looking splitting up the days, adding in some details for what happens in between those hours and still sprinkling in enough Sights, Smells and Atmosphere for the overall World Building.

So, learn from my mistake, kids: Always create a Timeline for your character and your book.  Otherwise, at best, you'll get tossed back into the deep end of your own revision pool by a helpful beta reader or CP.  At worst, you'll have a vaguely annoyed agent/editor/paying-customer-as-reader point out the timeline error in your manuscript and you really don't want that happen.


-- Tom


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* It's pronounced just like it's spelled.  It's also significantly more socially acceptable than the phrase that is usually bounding around in my head when I say this.

For the Record and For When I Forget

Not to jinx anything, but...

For the past two (three? four?) weeks I've sat, diligently, staring at my computer screen during the evenings.  My WIP has been open and I'm at the end of the document -- you know, that place where the rest of the story needs to be typed out.

And I've stared.  And stared.

It's not like I didn't know what came next -- I did.  It's not as if the next scene was particularly tricky or nuanced or needed a different POV or anything like that.  I knew what my characters were going to do, my characters all agreed that, yes, that is exactly what they would do, all I had to do was bang on the right keys and get the words into the document.

Only they would not come.

Oh, sure, I pecked out a handful of words each night.  Stilted, angular words with elbows and knees sticking out all over the place.  Uncomfortable words that formed even more uncomfortable sentences.

In between watching episodes from the complete DVD collection of Daria* and The Amazing Race Asia † I wondered what had happened to me as a writer?  My WIP is a humorous, Steampunkish adventure whose characters have very clear and distinct voices.  Writing them is easy.  In fact, while ago when an old friend asked on Facebook commented on  how difficult it was to write comedy, I answered

i just write what the voices in my head say.

then i clean it up in during the edits.

But where had those voices gone?  They sure weren't talking to me.  Even when I tried to engage one of the main characters in a conversation, there was nothing.  My characters had simply stopped talking to me.

After a long Saturday of not writing much of anything useful for the story (and doing a spectacular nose-dive into the wallowing end of the self-pity pool) I woke up on Sunday feeling much better about things.  I have no idea what changed, but something had tangibly changed.  And when I sat down at the laptop, I picked up the story right where I had left off and suddenly found myself Back in the Groove.  My characters were speaking to me again!  They dictated the dialog, I typed it in and filled in the descriptors.  The action moved right along, problems became bigger, reactions more telling of the characters.

The side of my left arm started itching and I knew I had some anti-itch lotion in the bedroom, but getting it would have meant getting up from the laptop and leaving the story.  After so many weeks of nothing, I wasn't going to risk losing that Groove for a stupid itch.  (I ended up scratching it so much that a co-werker looked at me on Monday and said, "What happened to your arm?")

Two thousand plus words later and some editing on a chapter section I could stitch into the current version from the old, discarded version later, I went to bed.

Yesterday, after getting home from werk and watching an SNL All Commercials show (thanks to streaming Netflix) I sat back down and banged out another 500 words, stitched and edited the leftover chapter segment into the story and dove into the next chapter.

The only problem with The Groove is that when I hit it my mind doesn't stop racing.  That river keeps right on flowin' and it's all I can do to keep afloat and type fast enough to keep up.  Unfortunately, when I do have to stop -- for things like sleep so I can go off and do that Steady Paycheck and Health Benefits daytime job -- my brain doesn't get the message to head for dry land for quite a while.  Half an  hour after I'd gone to bed I got up again to scribble some quick notes for the remainder of the chapter I'd stopped in the middle of earlier.

Undoubtedly, I'll lose the way into the Groove again and be moping around, certain that I'm just kidding myself that I'll ever be able to write a good story, much less be published.  Hopefully, I'll remember to take a look at this entry and remember that writing is a marathon, not a sprint, even if the rush of the Groove makes it feel that way sometimes.


-- Tom



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* Having seen only the occasional episode of Daria when it first aired, I've been disappointed to see how the second season wasn't quite as consistent as the first and how by the third season it had jumped the shark.  (That shark jump came well before the introduction of Tom as Jane's boyfriend.  I'd spot the Official Daria Jump as the hideous All Singing episode early in season three)

† Hard to believe it's taken me eleven entries before making an Amazing Race reference.  I watch very little television these days but The Amazing Race is a notable exception.  I'm one of those TAR junkies who has applied to the show numerous times.