Let's do the TIMESTAMP again!
a strategy for keeping track of where your characters are in time and place
Raise your hand if names, dates and places get all knotted up while you’re drafting your novel. Maybe you’ve changed the names of some characters, but the wholesale search/replace function has foiled your clean manuscript1. Well, friends, you’re not alone. As someone who tinkers randomly with drafts, I’ve discovered anachronistic errors, repeated events, forgotten features, and pacing irregularities in my work as I proceed through versions and revisions.
Even more common, say your are writing a novel in multiple points of view, and there’s an event you wish to address from more than one character, but the characters are not in the same scene. When I was a couple drafts into Faultland, I wanted to address the onset of the earthquake from each of the three siblings perspectives. That created a time-looping, and my astute editors suggested that, rather than revisit the rumbling from the same location and point of experience, I stagger the event by shifting the “clock” just slightly. Here is the actual note, followed by the process that Ooligan editors created for me as I navigated the revision:
. . . the earthquake is told in almost instant replay from multiple characters’ perspectives, and the reader gets a play-by-play several times. While telling a narrative from multiple perspectives can be an engaging way to tell a story, in this particular instance it almost takes the reader out of the high-stress situation. Instead of retelling the beginning of the earthquake, perhaps zoom in and detail one character’s experiences with the beginning of the earthquake, another character’s experiences as it is happening, and another character’s experiences when it has finally ended. This will still incorporate all of the characters, but it will piece the earthquake together in a less repetitive way.
The time chart acted as a tool not only for me during final revisions, but also aided the final reader experience, grounding their understanding of time, place, and character.
Just in case you want to see the final product, and how the spreadsheet morphed into the subheads of the actual novel, Portland folk, there’re a couple copies at Broadway Books, or, other folks, you can locate FAULTLAND wherever you hunt for your next read.
Oh, good old search/replace. Embedded names that are also word fragments can result in some unfortunate typos. Let’s say you’re changing a character’s name from Ladonna to Cher. Somewhere in the manuscript pops, belcher, accidentally morphed from belladonna. You know what I’m talking about.
Suzy, you are SO singing my song! Looking at a few specific scene/section rewrites for my journalist novel, I'm acutely aware I need to keep track of the main characters' movements and tendencies. Thanks to your original developmental edits, I think I can do it!