Timing It To Perfection.
Using Timelines In Your Planning.
I’m not a plotter.
I’ve said this before. I start a book with only the most basic of ideas about where it will be going and some key scenes. I also write out of sequence, typing scenes as they come to me, before stitching everything together in a logical order at the end.
Because of this, I don’t start a book with a detailed timeline – how could I? I have no idea what’s going to happen, let alone when!
But the keyword here is start I don’t start a book with a timeline, but I invariably have several by the time I have finished.
Why are timelines essential for police procedurals?
My books are split into sections with a day and date for each section. This is my personal stylistic choice and it works very well for me. Other writers may not mention the date at all; you have to start reading that next chapter for clues that a new day has dawned. Again, it works absolutely fine. However, even though that author has not explicitly written the date or the time, they probably have a pretty good idea when that chapter takes place. They may even have a detailed timeline.
Timelines serve multiple purposes.
They help you keep track of what different characters are doing.
Is DC Blogs doing three things simultaneously, whilst DC Doe hasn’t been seen or heard from for two days – an absence apparently unnoticed by all of the other characters (but most certainly noticed by Amazon reviewers)?
They maintain the story’s internal continuity.
One of the most useful things about timelines, is that they help you see at a glance logical inconsistencies. For example, your SIO can’t receive detailed forensic results for a crucial piece of evidence before they’ve found it and submitted it to the lab…
They make timings realistic.
I’ve written before about the custody clock (TuesdayTips#63) and alluded repeatedly to the time taken for results to come back from the lab. If you want to write an accurate police procedural, you need to keep timings in mind. Custody clocks start ticking the moment someone is arrested and they are inviolable, so make certain that your story takes this limitation into account. You can fudge the time taken for forensic results to come back from the lab to a degree – authorisation to ‘fast-track’ them as a priority, or a backlog at the lab can help you time your revelations to make the story dramatic, but there are limits. These days, with quick access to a modern crime lab, a simple crime scene and the budget and clout to push them through the system you may get DNA results overnight – a timeline helps you avoid stretching the limits of credibility. On a more basic level, if you need a character to be in Edinburgh in one scene and Cornwall in the next, leave enough time for them to travel there!
They help control pace.
Even the most blood-pounding thriller needs to give the readers (and the characters) time to catch their breath. Similarly, those beautifully written pieces that give vital character information, or fill-in crucial backstory, may be essential to the book, but tiresome to readers if they pick up a so-called crime thriller and the first fifty pages are all about the character’s missing pet.
I’ve heard of thriller writers colour coding scenes in their timeline according to the action and pace. From there, they can easily tell at a glance if they need to adjust things to keep readers hooked.
They help you spot redundancy/missing scenes.
A good timeline will have a descriptive title for each section; it will be almost like a table of contents. This means that you can see quite quickly if there is anything missing, or anything you can get rid of because it’s repetitious.
For example, in a serial killer book, things can become a little formulaic if you aren’t careful.
Person Killed –> Police Called –> SIO calls Forensics –> SIO attends autopsy –> Forensics find a clue –> etc etc etc.
A timeline can help you identify this and also highlight areas where there is redundancy. An autopsy would be an essential part of any investigation, but if there are five deaths, do you need to drag your reader to the morgue five times? Can later visits by the SIO be summarised or mentioned in passing?
They help you rearrange your book.
See all of the above! It’s also a Godsend for those of us who don’t plot, and write out of sequence. You can rearrange your timeline before you start cutting and pasting your chapters into a new draft of your document.
What sort of timelines might you use?
I have a number of different timelines for my books. The most common one is a day-by-day listing of the key events. This starts off pretty blank. For convenience, I tend to work out a starting date, so that I can pin events to this. To this timeline I add in some important dates, eg bank holidays, birthdays, clock changes, school holidays etc.
As I write the book, I find that I also build more detailed timelines for individual days. My current work in progress has several, ranging from the night of the murder and how it was planned, to the police’s investigation of a suspect’s alibi.
I also have a series timeline that places the books chronologically and notes key events. This helps me be consistent – for example I have a significant birthday that can’t be ignored during an upcoming book.
Tools for constructing a timeline using common Office programmes.
There are a plethora of programmes and writers aids available these days, many of which are highly recommended. I have yet to bite the bullet and install Scrivener (although I will be doing so in a few months). So instead I am going to make some suggestions based on my own experience using MS Office. Most of these functions are also available in comparable office suites, such as Google Docs.
The simplest way to do it is an Excel Spreadsheet: a column of dates, with a second column containing a description of events.
Excel has a lot of formatting options, so you can easily colour code your timeline. You can even add additional columns, such as which characters are in a scene.
A glaring limitation of Excel is that it won’t easily tell you the day of the week for a given date.
If you are confident coding in Excel, this link details how to have it calculate the day for you.
https://exceljet.net/excel-functions/excel-weekday-function
Of course, typing in all that data is a bit of a chore.
I have previously spoken about how useful a descriptive section heading is for navigating your Word document.
These descriptive headings will appear in the Navigation Pane if you have formatted them with one of the heading styles from the Style Gallery. If you go to the end of the document and insert a Table of Contents (found on the Reference Tab), these headers will be listed.
You can then copy and paste the TOC into Excel. Voila! All your section headings are in your spreadsheet, with each section heading on its own row.
I’ve said this before. I start a book with only the most basic of ideas about where it will be going and some key scenes. I also write out of sequence, typing scenes as they come to me, before stitching everything together in a logical order at the end.
Because of this, I don’t start a book with a detailed timeline – how could I? I have no idea what’s going to happen, let alone when!
But the keyword here is start I don’t start a book with a timeline, but I invariably have several by the time I have finished.
Why are timelines essential for police procedurals?
My books are split into sections with a day and date for each section. This is my personal stylistic choice and it works very well for me. Other writers may not mention the date at all; you have to start reading that next chapter for clues that a new day has dawned. Again, it works absolutely fine. However, even though that author has not explicitly written the date or the time, they probably have a pretty good idea when that chapter takes place. They may even have a detailed timeline.
Timelines serve multiple purposes.
They help you keep track of what different characters are doing.
Is DC Blogs doing three things simultaneously, whilst DC Doe hasn’t been seen or heard from for two days – an absence apparently unnoticed by all of the other characters (but most certainly noticed by Amazon reviewers)?
They maintain the story’s internal continuity.
One of the most useful things about timelines, is that they help you see at a glance logical inconsistencies. For example, your SIO can’t receive detailed forensic results for a crucial piece of evidence before they’ve found it and submitted it to the lab…
They make timings realistic.
I’ve written before about the custody clock (TuesdayTips#63) and alluded repeatedly to the time taken for results to come back from the lab. If you want to write an accurate police procedural, you need to keep timings in mind. Custody clocks start ticking the moment someone is arrested and they are inviolable, so make certain that your story takes this limitation into account. You can fudge the time taken for forensic results to come back from the lab to a degree – authorisation to ‘fast-track’ them as a priority, or a backlog at the lab can help you time your revelations to make the story dramatic, but there are limits. These days, with quick access to a modern crime lab, a simple crime scene and the budget and clout to push them through the system you may get DNA results overnight – a timeline helps you avoid stretching the limits of credibility. On a more basic level, if you need a character to be in Edinburgh in one scene and Cornwall in the next, leave enough time for them to travel there!
They help control pace.
Even the most blood-pounding thriller needs to give the readers (and the characters) time to catch their breath. Similarly, those beautifully written pieces that give vital character information, or fill-in crucial backstory, may be essential to the book, but tiresome to readers if they pick up a so-called crime thriller and the first fifty pages are all about the character’s missing pet.
I’ve heard of thriller writers colour coding scenes in their timeline according to the action and pace. From there, they can easily tell at a glance if they need to adjust things to keep readers hooked.
They help you spot redundancy/missing scenes.
A good timeline will have a descriptive title for each section; it will be almost like a table of contents. This means that you can see quite quickly if there is anything missing, or anything you can get rid of because it’s repetitious.
For example, in a serial killer book, things can become a little formulaic if you aren’t careful.
Person Killed –> Police Called –> SIO calls Forensics –> SIO attends autopsy –> Forensics find a clue –> etc etc etc.
A timeline can help you identify this and also highlight areas where there is redundancy. An autopsy would be an essential part of any investigation, but if there are five deaths, do you need to drag your reader to the morgue five times? Can later visits by the SIO be summarised or mentioned in passing?
They help you rearrange your book.
See all of the above! It’s also a Godsend for those of us who don’t plot, and write out of sequence. You can rearrange your timeline before you start cutting and pasting your chapters into a new draft of your document.
What sort of timelines might you use?
I have a number of different timelines for my books. The most common one is a day-by-day listing of the key events. This starts off pretty blank. For convenience, I tend to work out a starting date, so that I can pin events to this. To this timeline I add in some important dates, eg bank holidays, birthdays, clock changes, school holidays etc.
As I write the book, I find that I also build more detailed timelines for individual days. My current work in progress has several, ranging from the night of the murder and how it was planned, to the police’s investigation of a suspect’s alibi.
I also have a series timeline that places the books chronologically and notes key events. This helps me be consistent – for example I have a significant birthday that can’t be ignored during an upcoming book.
Tools for constructing a timeline using common Office programmes.
There are a plethora of programmes and writers aids available these days, many of which are highly recommended. I have yet to bite the bullet and install Scrivener (although I will be doing so in a few months). So instead I am going to make some suggestions based on my own experience using MS Office. Most of these functions are also available in comparable office suites, such as Google Docs.
The simplest way to do it is an Excel Spreadsheet: a column of dates, with a second column containing a description of events.
Excel has a lot of formatting options, so you can easily colour code your timeline. You can even add additional columns, such as which characters are in a scene.
A glaring limitation of Excel is that it won’t easily tell you the day of the week for a given date.
If you are confident coding in Excel, this link details how to have it calculate the day for you.
https://exceljet.net/excel-functions/excel-weekday-function
Of course, typing in all that data is a bit of a chore.
I have previously spoken about how useful a descriptive section heading is for navigating your Word document.
These descriptive headings will appear in the Navigation Pane if you have formatted them with one of the heading styles from the Style Gallery. If you go to the end of the document and insert a Table of Contents (found on the Reference Tab), these headers will be listed.
You can then copy and paste the TOC into Excel. Voila! All your section headings are in your spreadsheet, with each section heading on its own row.
Excel is great, but it has its limitations. Most irritating is the fact that reorganising your timeline requires you to cut and paste and insert or delete empty rows, rather than dragging and dropping.
A different method that I heard about recently involves MS PowerPoint. You give each new scene its own slide. If you switch to Slide Sorter View, you can easily rearrange slides into whatever order you want. By using large enough fonts and colours etc, you can encode a lot of information into each slide. You can even write a summary of what happens, which will be a readable size if you double-click the slide to make it full screen.
A limitation is that you can’t easily export a table of contents from Word, so that each slide is a new row from the table of contents. However, if you are detailed planner, this might be the method for you.
What information would you include in a timeline?
Do you have any recommendations for simple methods for generating one?
Until next time,
Paul.
