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Timelines

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Michele Viney:
Hi All
I feel quite nervous starting off a topic but here it goes.

I've had an idea about a story, but it has two different time lines one in the present and another 20 years in the past. Most of the characters will appear in both time lines.

What is your advice about maintaining the story in each time line? In a recent 'Meet the Author' thing Peter Robinson was asked the same question and he said that he ended up writing each time line on its own (I think he wrote the 'past' story first and then the 'present' one) and only interwove them in subsequent drafts. I'm not sure if this would work for me as I find that I write very organically. Sometimes I fear too organically letting the story lead me around by the nose and not necessarily where I had initially intended it to go! I must learn to be more disciplined!

Any thoughts and observations gratefully appreciated

Cheers
Michele

Bob Mueller:
I'm not sure what you mean by writing organically.

The way I write, I'd probably just write each timeline as it spoke to me. That is, if for several days, the early timeline characters were speaking to me, I'd write that, until the later one popped up to talk to me.

Not sure if that makes sense, but that's the my my mind tends to work. :)

Leon:
Michele,

Timelines are a general concept, relation, or fact of continuous or successive existence, capable of division into measurable portions of duration in which something develops, or fails to develop, or has developed, or will develop. Timelines may be measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, decades, generations, centuries, etc.. Timelines help keep events in logical order, and help develop suspense.

   Date. 1-8-78
   Time. 1:30 pm.
   Event. Gun shot.

   Date. 1-8-78
   Time. 2:15 pm.
   Event. Detectives investigate.

   Date. 1-8-78
   Time. 2:30 pm.
   Event. Gun is found.

   Date. 1-8-78
   Time. 3:00 pm.
   Event. A body is found.

The format may be used to develop a timeline for any character(s) and/or any thing(s).

Leon

Kathy Wendorff:
Michele, have you read Louis Sachar's "Holes"? That book is a tour-de-force of integrating multiple storylines taking place at different times.

I don't know how he did it, but each storyline proceeds logically and pretty much chronologically, and when you switch from the past back to present-day, what you just discovered about the past drives or explains the present day narrative forward, and often vice versa. (There's one slightly jarring out-of-synch scene toward the end. Just one.)

I'm not explaining it well at all -- just read the book if you haven't already. It's a kid's book, and a quick read, and a wonderful book.

Kathy W.

Lance Charnes:
I've done this twice, now. What seems to work best for me is to outline each story seperately, as if they were going to stand alone, then bring the two outlines together in parallel (spreadsheets work well for this) and make sure the plot points line up the way you want them to. This second step may require that you move things around to make the two stories line up.

It was much easier for me to write each story seperately, especially since they have different narrators (first-person in the modern story, third in the backstory) and are set in wildly different eras. It helped make sure each storyline flowed and maintained its internal logic.

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