Making Time: 5 Ways Writers Prepare for Success With Timelines
Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Aeon Timeline, a 2022 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is a visual hub for your entire story. NaNoWriMo writers can try out a free trial of Aeon Timeline through December 15! In this post, the folks at Aeon share a few ways that making a timeline for your novel can help your story:
If you are like me your story has been gnawing inside you for months. An intriguing premise; a character to explore; a surprise twist; a cliffhanger ending—something is telling you that you are the person to write this story.
Yet every year, only one in ten Wrimos make it to the end. Over 200,000 promising novels are abandoned—typically in the sticky middle stages.
At Aeon Timeline, we believe that visual planning with timelines can bring purpose to your writing, add depth to your characters, and sustain your creative energy until the end.
With help from authors David Williams and Andrew Hanson, let’s look at why so many stories fail in the middle stages, and the planning you can do now to avoid those mid-novel traps.
1. Steer your story in the right direction
Writing a novel any time is tough; finishing one in a month is crazy. To get to the finish line, you need to make sure every scene is pulling in the right direction.
I find it easier to maintain momentum when I have the lure of a compelling climax to write towards. Creating this sense of direction is what building a visual story timeline is all about.
Don’t worry: 50,000 words provides abundant room for creativity. Planning a few signposts won’t change that, but it will make writing less stressful.
“I like to write fast and I like to write loose. Aeon Timeline allows me to do more of that, because it encourages me to be spontaneous in the space in-between. It’s actually going to enhance your creativity, and give you more freedom.”
– David Williams
2. Perfect your pacing with the right time frame
We writers talk a lot about setting, but stories live in time as much as they live in space. Time is crucial to controlling pace and tension.
Ask yourself:
What is the chronology of my story? What are the key moments and when do they need to happen?
What if I compressed my timeline? Would it increase tension, and force my characters to act impulsively? Or do my characters need more time to grow?
You could use pen and paper, but using a digital timeline encourages you to freely experiment and find new possibilities:
"Looking at this on the timeline, I thought, that's actually the beginning and end of the story. I’ve taken 20-odd years of information, and reframed it around a single weekend. Just the freedom to be able to throw these events around made me realize I had been getting it entirely wrong.”
– David Williams
3. Cultivate characters with purpose
You determine every choice for your characters, but you want them to bring their own goals and motive to every scene. To pull off this magic trick, each character’s stakes need to be high enough that they can’t simply walk away.
To ensure authentic choices, it helps to build thorough backstories for your characters and your world. What recent events instigated your story? How are they compelling your characters into action? Which historical scars and social pressures provoke their reactions in each scene?
By plotting these histories visually, you can cross reference personal and world events—prompting fresh insights about your characters.
“I start with the characters, and then flesh out the backstory events to make sure that the story logic makes sense. By story logic, I really mean that the events leading up to the present day of the story make sense to the reader.”
– Andrew Hanson
4. Amplify tension throughout your middle chapters
The first quarter of your book is done—your characters have taken that first irreversible step. The final chapters are whispering to you with the siren call of crisis and resolution.
But first, you have half a novel to increase stakes and layer pressure on your characters. That is a lot of empty space to fill with complications that don’t feel repetitive or contrived. You can drop another dead body, but can you really drop five?
It is easy to see why so many stories are abandoned in the middle. Why not plan your escalations in advance, while you have time to experiment and your story feels fresh?
If a better idea strikes while writing, that’s great! But if it doesn’t, your story timeline can keep you on solid ground:
“The timeline is my barometer of story. It gives me an idea of where the pressure points are in a story, whether the story is working or not. It’s my eyes and ears on the story.”
– Andrew Hanson
5. Plan scenes as agents of change
We have all stumbled on that one scene that doesn’t want to be written. You can’t wait to throw yourself at the next crisis point, if you could just get that one scene right. But until then… Everything. Just. Stops.
Often, this block is surprisingly simple: your scene isn’t doing anything:
“The most important thing that every single scene has to have is change — external plot change or internal character change, but ideally both. If I am struggling with the writing of a scene, I can go into Aeon Timeline and fill in the details to work out where the scene has gone wrong.
– Andrew Hanson
Aeon Timeline is a flexible visual hub for planning your entire story. You can find detailed case studies describing how David and Andrew use Aeon Timeline on our website.
Download a free trial on Mac, Windows and iOS. Discounts are available to all NaNoWriMo participants until December 15. To claim, log into your NaNoWriMo account and visit the Offers page.
I've seen the screenshots you shared of your outlining/plotting process and I'm curious- what software do you use to keep track of all the story and character details?
Could you be referring to Plottr?
This one? ☝️
I've actually stopped using Plottr. It's a great app, probably one of the best out there, but I found that it was feeding a lot of my bad habits. I have a tendency to get stuck in the pre-writing stage (as well as the editing stage, but that's a separate issue), and I found that I was wasting a lot of time messing around on this app. I can't afford to do that anymore. My writing time is too limited.
So I decided to strip-down my approach.
Currently, I've limited myself to three apps/devices:
Aeon Timeline for my plotting/planning
my smart typewriter for freewriting/early drafting
and Ulysses as my main word-processor
Out of all the plotting apps I've tried (and I've tried just about all of them), Aeon Timeline is the only one I've used consistently.
It’s basically a giant database. You can use it to store your characters, locations, events, whatever you want. And you can view this data in a number of ways, including of course, as a timeline. It’s a great reference source for your fanfic, novel, or book series. I’ve been using it for years.
There’s so many things I should be doing, but what I’m actually doing with my life is fusing my two current obsessions into an absolute monster of a Miss Fisher timeline that merges evidence from the episodes with my collection of historical steam ship timetables.
Continuing to sort out plot threads in Prince, and I've gotten to the point where I've identified the major plot threads (and am currently listing the points where they fall short/what needs to be added to them/what is unnecessary).
Anyway, plugged just plot arc data into Aeon with the relevant events, switched her on over to Subway, and now I've got the cheerfully spaghetti-like outline of my plot and the event interactions! It's neat seeing where things converge and separate, and is actually quite useful for what I said I was doing in the first paragraph.
[image id: a subway stop map with the "subway lines" in various colors representing plot arcs, converging and diverging at plot points /end id]
So I am trying out a new toy and it is amazing. So I want to share.
Aeon Timeline is a downloadable bit of software that enables you to create timelines.
Create beautifully organised, data rich timelines
You can use it for work and things like that, but! It also works for writing fiction.
As in, they let you create your own calendar and decide when the start date is. Does your world have 18 months each with 3 weeks of 9 days? Aeon has got you covered. Of course, you can also name your days and months. Also, eras. You can name the eras. Want to start from 1 each time a new emperor ascends the throne? You can do that. (You do need to set that up first, though, so keep that in mind).
That alone would have sucked me in, but that isn't all Aeon does to support writers.
When you add items to the timeline, you can note if it is an event, a flashback, or a flashforward. There's more options than that and if that isn't enough, you can add more.
And it lets you have 2 timelines. One timeline is for the actual order of events. The other timeline is for how those events show up in your narrative. The flashback is scene 6 in year 3021, but actually took place in 3010? On the regular timeline it shows up at 3010, but in your narrative timeline, you can list it after the events that happen earlier in 3021.
When you add an item to the timeline, you can group it under a parent event. So if your main plot spans the entire length of the book and then you have an early subplot and a late subplot, you can put those three things as parent events on your timeline. They'll show up as long, empty boxes. Then, you can organize every other event to show up in the proper box. Two things happen on the same day, but one is main plot and one is subplot B? Put them under the correct parent node and they'll show up on different rows of the timeline.
You can, of course, color-code all of the events.
Aeon also lets you add People and Places to your timeline. For people, not only do you type in their birth and death dates (or ongoing if they're alive at present day in your world), but you also include data on them such as their relationships to other characters, the locations they're associated with, their character type (protagonist, antagonist, ally, etc), their goals and motivations, etc. You can also attach files to the characters such as pictures. And when you update one character, it auto-updates the others. So, if you load in Susan first, you don't have any characters to associate with her. But then you load in her mother, Ellen, and best friend, Marcus. When you associate Ellen with Susan saying that Susan is Ellen's child, it automatically adds Ellen to Susan's card as her parent.
If the basic character card doesn't fit your world, you can go into settings and completely change what fields it offers you and what drop-down menus say. For example, default gender offers Male, Female, and Other. You can go in and change that, though, to have as many genders as you like.
Oh! Since you put in character birth dates, you can always check to see how old they are in comparison to other characters and when certain events happen.
The timelines are easy to navigate, too. You can throw in pins to take you to key events right away. You can also filter by color, event type, character, etc. That means you can let the timeline get as complicated as needed and then easily filter it by what matters to whatever you're working on at the time.
And this is all just the stuff I figured out last night. There's more to it like themes and more stuff with narrative structure that I've not even touched yet. Like being able to arrange events by chapter and scene.
The major downside is that this program is not cheap. It costs $65 upfront. Then, if you want access to the yearly updates, it costs an additional $35/year starting next year.
But, like I said, this isn't just good for fiction writing. It can also be used for project management and Gantt charts. It lets you use it for free for 2 weeks as a trial, but then you have to get a license to continue using it. The license is good for up to 5 devices. And, though I don't use either program, it also will sync with Scrivener and Ulysses.
I still get notifications from this post that it was a year ago and... well, I went and reread and I noticed that my method has changed a bit. So, here’s the update!
Characters
In last year’s post I didn’t talk about characters, so... here it goes. This is all after I have an idea of what the story is going to be about (and ofc after I decided what kind of character I want for protagonist).
Usually I think about my characters when I’m doing something else, so when I sit to write their profiles I already have a global concept of them.
First, I complete the character profile. What do I have there? These things:
Name
Physical description
Place of birth
Birthdate
Age (at the start of the story and at the end if it takes place over several years)
Personality type (I use the 16 personalities types)
Biggest fear
Top three thing they value more in life
Occupation
Sexual orientation
Family
Whatever specifics about the story. Like, if is a fantasy, type of magic
Backstory (this I don’t always fill, sometimes I just put some notes to not forget certain things and that’s it)
Then I make a chart with all the important characters where I put this:
Want: pretty obvious; this is what they want, what push them forward in life and the story, what they think they’ll need to be happy
Need: this is what they actually need, and is usually different from the want, because they don’t know that they need it, this is something I know they need to be happy
Lie: this is something they believe about themselves or the world that is somehow not true. It can be literally anything and is often what makes them believe that they want something that they don’t actually need
Truth: this is what they’ll find out at the end of the story (or near the end), what they’ll discover when they stop trying to get what they want and get what they need, that thing that I as the author want the reader to get of my story... like, to use some cliché thing, the true power of love (?)
Plot
After I have my characters, I take the lie and truth of the protagonist and think about the “steps” they’ll have to take to go from the lie to the truth, and so I write that down.
And that’s the skeleton of the story, the basic plot points that need to happen. But that’s not the complete story, because there’s more that one character, so I do the same for the other important ones. I usually have three or four important characters, so I end up with three or four “timelines” of events.
Then, it’s time to join all those events together and that’s where I order them all in a (kind of) coherent outline. What I do to order them to make sense is think about the cause and effect law. We all here the famous phrase “for every action there’s an equal opposite reaction”. It’s about physics but I apply it to stories as well because is complete true. Everything that the characters do or experience has a cause and an effect and when you have in mind those concepts is a lot easier to order the events.
For example, if I want a character to learn that they need to tell the truth to their friends, first I need them to experience what lies can do to friendship. The cause might be that their friend gets hurt by a lie they tell, the effect is that they realize how bad lying is. Of course, their friend getting hurt is also the effect of another cause (them saying the lie) and so on...
After that, I usually have a good solid outline, but I like to compare it to the three act story structure, just to make sure the flow is good or that the tension is in good places. So I get the structure template and I start putting the events in every story bit. If some story bits end up empty or some events are together it doesn’t matter, because it’s a template, it’s not a solid thing and it can be blend to the kind of story you’re telling.
Timeline and chapters
And then it comes the fun part (not really). I took that outline of events, I too Aeon Timeline and start to put those events in the timeline, I assign them a date, a place, a type and the participans. I like to use Aeon because is designed for writers and it had a lot of fun stuff to put, you can create character profiles, places profiles, arcs and link them to the events. I like to use the colors to indicate if the event is a personal thing, a military thing, something global, local and that, but I’ve seen people use the colors to indicate the acts of the three acts story structure. Is a very flexible tool.
The best part tho, is that it can be synchronized with scrivener. And honestly it saves so much time. I synchronize with the project and just put every event in there to be a chapter. The date, the characters, the place, everything gets into the metadata of the scrivener text files. And so when I open scrivener again, I have every chapter of my novel in place with all the information I need!
That last part is the only thing that stayed the same from last year, I think lol
The last thing I do is when I’m not sure how to write some chapters, I write a mini outline in the document notes of scrivener so I know what to write. But I don’t do it for every chapter, usually only when I stuck or when is a fight scene and I feel kind of overwhelmed by it.
And… I think that’s it. That’s how I outline now.
I like to do this posts so I can see how my method changes over time and so if it’s helpful for someone, here it is!
Here’s my posts about worldbuilding, which I do… well, kind of all the time? I usually start after I get the idea for the world and keep doing it even when I’m writing.
What timeline software do you use? Because I could definitely use that.
Aeon Timeline.
I do not half-ass my timelines, and it’s integrated with Scrivener, which is one of the three word processors I use (I have a process, shh).
There’s a fairly decent free trial to check it out. I tried to find something free when I was originally searching but I need to a. have it offline and not hosted on the web and b. have a comprehensive feature set.
