What Is A Timeline? How Using A Timeline Can Help You Plot Your Novel

What is a timeline in writing? Learn how using a timeline can help you plot your novel, track events, and create a more organised story.

What Is A Timeline?

A timeline is a chronological sequence of events – they happen in the order they occur. We see the results of cause and effect when we show sequences that are related to each other. We watch the events as time passes. We see patterns, turning points, and progressions. History is neither simple nor linear, but when we show events in a timeline, they seem to make sense.

How Using A Timeline Can Help You Plot Your Novel

One of the main reasons we read is to make sense of the world. A timeline suggests a past, present, and future.

Using one for plotting allows us to see a beginning, middle, and ending. Linking units of time to events allows writers to plot a book in a graphic way. We are able to see the book from the reader’s perspective. Is there a pattern? Does it make sense?

A timeline helps us choose what to include in our story. It also gives us a map to follow. It is the big picture of a novel – a place where we get the chance to see the overarching storylines and how they intersect.

Seven questions that will help create a timeline:

1. How old are your characters when the story begins?
2. Where are the characters in the story?
3. Why does the story start? What is the inciting moment?
4. What are your main characters’ story goals?
5. Who are their co-stars?
6. How old are your characters when the story ends?
7. Where will it end?

Remember that a time-span has nothing to do with the length of a book. We can cover a lifetime in one paragraph. A week, a month, or a year could span an entire book.

A timeline helps us to include only events that are relevant to the plot in our novels.

P.S. You can also use a timeline for plotting out a memoir.

Beginnings And Endings

1. We should never start our novel on the day our characters take their first breaths – unless that moment is important to the story. We are not writing our characters’ biographies. Try not to bore the reader with a factual re-telling of their first years.
2. A timeline can help us remove unnecessary backstory. We get to see how much information we tend to dump in the beginning of a book. It can be used as a tool to help us work through where we should start our stories. We can use this part of our timeline to help fill in a character questionnaire.
3. Start at a point of crisis or change. The reader will immediately want to know what happened before and after that point. Start when the reason for writing the story begins. [Read The Importance of Inciting Moments]
4. Carry on by inserting the events needed to get us through the middle of the story to the end. We tell a story in (action) scenes and (reaction) sequels. We usually have 60-80 of these in a novel. You can use these to create the events on your timeline. [Read Why Writers Should Always Make a Scene]
5. Stop when the main character reaches their story goal. [Read The Sense Of An Ending]

There are also online timeline tools you could try, including Timetoast, and Preceden.

The Last Word

A timeline helps you see your story clearly from beginning to end. It keeps your plot, characters, and events connected and organised. When you understand the flow of time in your novel, it becomes easier to build a story that feels strong and complete.

by Amanda Patterson
© Amanda Patterson

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