A Time to Remember: Good Timeline Management for Any Genre

The first book genre I fell hard for was mystery/thriller. As for many of my peers, this included the Baby-Sitters Club mysteries and Nancy Drew, before moving on to Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine. More recently, this past summer I spent time with my latest fascination, the Shetland Mystery series by Ann Cleeves.

While Cleeves does an amazing job of making her setting a character, she gets something else right, a trick that dogs many a writer: managing the passage of time.

The thriller/mystery writer always needs to know whodunit, and moreover, all the details of how they dun it, including when. We get time of death, time of alibis (or not), how much missing time we need to account for among the various suspects…in short, time gives us the parameters of the possible.

But time isn’t important only for thrillers. All writers need to pay attention to time. As any good time-travel story knows, time is a tricky beast—one you can use to your advantage, or one that can flatten your story under layers of boredom and confusion.

Don’t confuse, but don’t overexplain, either

Confusing your readers is one of the cardinal sins of writing. Why is confusion so terrible? Confused readers can become ex-readers (leaving negative reviews online) in a flash, so unless you’re deliberately creating chaos—and you’ve thought this through, have excellent reasons for it, and the rest of your story is captivating enough to counterbalance this choice—you want to avoid confusing them as much as possible.

With regards to time, readers get confused when they can’t tell when events happen in relation to each other.

Don’t be this storyteller.

Readers get confused when they can’t tell when events happen in relation to each other. Don’t be this storyteller. #writingtip #writingcommunity #authorlife Click To Tweet

Have you left enough clues so that they can figure out what’s going on?

Note that I’m using the word “clues.” I’m not saying “flashing signs with loud sirens to get their attention.”

You don’t need to timestamp everything. In fact, please don’t. This only works in certain genres, such as a police procedural. Beyond signaling a genre that you’re not writing, timestamping can be tricky to do consistently, and inconsistency breeds confusion.

How to show the passage of time

You can do a lot with a little.

The best thrillers and mysteries do a good job of planting clues so that they read innocuously as we race through the book, trying to figure out what’s happened before the book tells us—but which seem obvious later.

It’s more pleasant to be guided than to be yelled at. Be a good dance partner—and writer.

Suggest.

• Use description to associate events with holidays, seasons, or the weather
• Invoke days of the week (or other associations to your story’s timescale)
• Show how events are related to each other inside of the story (“before the fateful party was even a glimmer in Susie’s eye…”)
• Peg the timeline to life events: kindergarten, graduation, marriage, retirement
• Use transitional terms such as “yesterday,” “a few weeks later,” “five years before”

And some of my favorites:

• Scene breaks
• Chapter breaks
• Book sections (Part One, Part Two, etc.)

The gap between scenes and chapters succinctly suggests a break and a jump in time and/or place. So elegant.

Keep it simple, and do a separate revision check to look for issues relating to time.

Believable versus boring

Certain things take time. Long journeys, a properly-simmering blood feud, forgiveness, the school year, getting to the South Pole on skis, growing up, learning to play an instrument, and any true character or personal transformation.

Which means when you’re writing about such arcs, you need to take into account two different parameters: what is believable and what is interesting.

For instance, is it believable that lifelong enemies party to a long-simmering blood feud forgive each other right after one side has committed an act of aggression against the other?

Yet, is going into the entire backstory of the blood feud interesting?

Alternatively, would you believe a story in which a journey by foot across the Siberian steppe in the seventeenth century took place over only one or two pages?

What if nothing much happened on the journey, and the most exciting moments came right at the very end?

We all have that friend who can’t tell us about something that happened to them without first saying, “But actually you should know this first,” and giving us a whole lot of other information we don’t need to understand or appreciate the story.

Don’t be that friend. Er, storyteller.

Make yourself a Venn diagram: keep your story in the zone where the two circles overlap into both believable and interesting.

Bottom Line

Time is important for books of any genre. Showing the passage of time involves an awareness of what readers will actually believe and the skill to leave out what’s utterly boring. Avoid long passages in which not much happens, but don’t skip the important bits, either. Be clear, not condescending, and use effective techniques such as scene breaks, descriptions, and transitional phrases.

And know that if you’re struggling with how to make the timeline clear to your readers, chances are, you need to make it clear for yourself, first.

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CC image “Time” courtesy of Sean MacEntee on Flickr. Some rights reserved.