Picturing the when of my story has become complicated or maybe I’m making it more complicated than it actually is. Every event is set but I can’t see them in any sort of order. I tried to write them out list form but it didn’t help. So, I tried another approach.
I never wrote down all my characters’ exact ages. I had them set in my mind but never on paper. (Seems like an obvious thing to do first but I’m still learning). This helped a lot. I had to change some things. In my timeline, I set a character around 13 at a certain event but that couldn’t be the case because I’d pictured her around 60 during another event happening at the same time.
It’s also helping me determine exactly what’s happened before the story. I’d written a simple scene where “Tom” was talking with “Susan”. But, according to the ages of my characters and my timeline, “Susan” was gone well before the story started. It’ s unlikely “Tom” would have a conversation with her in the present. Well all right, not unlikely but it’s not happening in my story.
My timeline is starting to sound like math problems but it needs to be done. “Mary” is 28 at the beginning of the story and her brother “James” is 21. If “Mary” was 10 when they were taken from their parents, how old was “James”? 3. But, in my mind, I had him at a much older age. James being 3 was a complete shock! I had to take chunks out of my story!
There’s still a lot to sort out but writing down the ages helped me better picture my story.
2 thoughts on “The When of My Story”
It sounds like it is definitely necessary for you to plot out the events and how old the characters are when they happen. You might even find you have to adjust ages to make it work. But you sound like you are on the right track now. Good luck!
I know what you mean – the ages of a character can make such a difference. For the project I'm on, my character is fairly young, like 25, and so it's important because her naive quality will become essential later in the book.
Comments are closed.