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| Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash |
Hi Audra,
I love crunchy technical questions like this. Keeping track of "everything" is a tall order, and I don't think there's any one tool that can do it all, so I'm going to make a few different suggestions, that can go together or be used separately to give you a handle on what's going on. My first recommendation is for your timeline.
Use a Spreadsheet
When you're tracking multiple characters or storylines across the same period of time, the best tool I know of is a spreadsheet with dates (or other time markers) down the left-hand side, and the different characters or storylines across the top, as well as one for general world events that aren't specific to any one storyline. I helped maintain one of these for my husband when he was working on his thesis, and we had things like in the "World" column like, 2012 "Year Of No Good Things". We also used color coding to indicate the time of year for events in different columns in the same year so they could be in the same row. If the month or date mattered, we put that in parentheses in the cell. The project was four stories that took place over the course of almost two centuries, so years were a good unit for the rows. If your story is set over a shorter time span, you might do better to use months, or even weeks or days, as your basic unit. I also mention that we were dealing with 200 years of plot (from 1870 to 2063) because I want you to understand that I speak from experience when I say this: Do not over-systematize this. You will already have some empty space, because not everyone will have stuff going on at every row. Don't freak out and feel like you have to fill this in. At the same time, do not exacerbate this issue by adding rows that don't have anything in them. This may mean that you have some abrupt jumps, but that's better for a readable, usable timeline sheet than leaving empty space where you don't need it. Get very comfortable with your "add row" function so you can add things as you go. Below is a screenshot of the one I put together for my setting, which I was planning to do one of these days anyway, so thanks for the motivation.
You'll notice that I used years for events that are history in my setting, then split down to months when I get to the places where stories start happening. If I wanted to write a story about, say, vampires emigrating to the US, I would probably break a chunk of the 18th Century into months as well. This is a world and timeline shared between stories when don't overlap often, so for your more intertwined stories, you may need more sophisticated ways of marking where different people's storylines interact.
Notes and Outline Document
I say "Notes and Outline", because that's what I call it. I'm a kinda flashlight method writer, so I am mostly outlining things I've already written and, if I'm really on it, the next couple of scenes I'm planning to do. You don't have to include an outline of any kind. Basically, this is a single document, divided into sections, where I can keep a lot of different kinds of information that I might need to refer to while I'm writing. I keep the one for Pointlessly Contrarian in a Google Doc, with horizontal lines separating the sections, bolded headings, and a table of contents at the top which uses in-text links for navigation. The automatic contents sidebar thing they have now is cool, but it isn't yet reliable enough for our purposes, and Word doesn't have an equivalent as far as I know. (They also didn't have it when I started working on Pointlessly Contrarian). Some of the sections are information I want to be able to find without searching, like Carson's class schedule and short bios for all the secondary characters, but others are more process oriented, like a list of "open questions", things about the characters, setting, or plot that I need to figure out or decide at some point. I also have a "bits and ends" section, so that when inspiration strikes for a line, scene, or description that doesn't fit anywhere, I have somewhere to put them.
Note Cards
Writers use note cards in a lot of different ways, and at some point I should probably do a post just about that. What I'm suggesting here is a technique that I think originally came from screenwriting. Write a short description of each completed or planned scene on a lined 3x5 card, You can give each scene a name at the top, but you don't have to. (I do suggest numbering the scenes in the order in which they appear in the story). Sometimes it helps to split the information up into:
- Who is in this scene
- What happens
- What does it accomplish (e.g. "this is where Protagonist gets his magic sword", "update on the villain's plans", "protagonist realizes love interest likes him back")
But you don't have to do that either. You can use color-coding here to differentiate plot threads or types of scene. If you can't write small enough or clearly enough to put anything useful on a 3x5, you can type something up and glue it on, but be careful with this. You're not trying to fit the entire scene on a notecard!
Once your cards are made, you can pin them up on a cork-board or spread them out on a table or the flood. This should allow you to kind of get the whole story up in front of your face so you can see what's there, what's missing, what needs to be rearranged. It's a way to get a top-down view of the book.
Even when you're not in a places where you can spread the cards out, if you carry them around, you can flip through them to remind yourself what's happened in what order, and where everyone is. In addition to its logistical function, this technique can help you see parallels or connections between your plots and characters that aren't always obvious when you're in the thick of it, and thus suggest new directions you could take or ways to deepen and complicate what's already there.
Reread Regularly
This is a good habit to get into for a longer piece even if you aren't having trouble keeping track of it. At set intervals of time or word count (like, ever 2 months, or every 10,000 words) reread the whole story from beginning to end. You can edit while you do this, or make notes of things to go back and change later. This is not when you generally want to be doing serious revision – if it' more than a sentence-level edit, made a note and move on. The idea here is to make sure there's a reasonably up-to-date version of the story in your head, and to give you regular opportunities to catch inconsistencies or places where the plot threads might have gotten tangled. This is sort of the opposite of the strategies I described earlier for getting the whole story shrunk down or zoomed out enough to see and move all the pieces; here, you're making sure you remember what all the pieces actually are. If you switch between different perspectives throughout the story, it is worthwhile to occasionally mix up these rereads and read all the sections from perspective A, skipping over the rest, then go back to the beginning and do the same with perspective B, and so on. If you have other clear section types, like by major storyline, or time period, try doing it that way too. Also, every 50,000 words or so, reread the whole thing out loud, or get someone else to read it out loud to you. It will help you figure out whether you're actually making sense.
This is sort of the broad version of several of the points above. What you have in your working draft is a large body of complicated knowledge that you need to be able to understand, apply, and explain. (The "explanation" here is that you will sometimes need to make references in the text to prior events - at this stage,no one reasonable will ask you to explain a first draft work in progress of this length). That means you need to study it, the way you would study a textbook, or a subject you're interested in. If you have existing study skills that aren't covered by any of the previous suggestions, use them. Read through and take notes on separate paper. Mark up a printed copy with a highlighter. Make flash cards. Make an 8.5x11 notes sheet like you're gonna have to take a short answer exam about your story. Whatever already works for you to run all that information through your brain in a new direction to help you solidify it, and get the key points into a form more accessible than The Whole Thing.
Disclaimed the second: This has the potential to be a truly massive time sink.
Most authors who use this technique talk about it as a thing for series bibles, to keep book-to-book continuity straight, but I think it's valid for any story big enough that you're having trouble keeping track of it. Basically, you use one of several free or low-cost options to create a fanwiki, but only you can see it, and you put everything you know about the story in there, with pages for characters, places, special items, whatever, all nice and cross-linked like Wikipedia. Brandon Sanderson and Seanan McGuire have both said they do this, although neither has written about it in detail anywhere that I could find.
I lieu of talking about how best to go about this when I have no personal experience on which to base advice, here are the two best articles I found about it.
https://www.tor.com/2019/01/07/how-to-create-a-wiki-to-support-your-fantasy-worldbuilding/
https://heartbreathings.com/using-a-wiki-for-your-series-bible/
I would recommend breaking the normal rules of the internet and actually looking at the comments on the Tor article. Lots of good suggestions, and the author was actually in the thread for a while, answering questions.
Do you know, the working title of this post was "August advice column"? Audra, I hope something in here is useful to you. Everyone else, remember to keep sending me questions. Until next time - be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things.
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