in Editing
Keeping a timeline: days, seasons and ages
A novel can survive a slow middle. It struggles to survive a Tuesday that follows a Thursday. Here is how to keep time straight.
Time in fiction is easy to lose. Writers draft over months or years, move scenes around, add and cut chapters. At the end, a story that feels coherent in the writer's head may contain a week with two Sundays, a pregnancy of eleven months or a child who ages three years between summers. Readers notice these things, and some of them notice with great interest.
Why timelines go wrong
Timeline errors usually come from revision rather than from first drafts. A scene is moved from chapter four to chapter nine and still refers to "yesterday". A subplot is cut, taking with it the passage of a fortnight, and the next chapter still says "two weeks later". A character's age is set early and never revisited as the story's span changes.
Flashbacks and multiple timelines make this harder. So does a story with several viewpoint characters, where each strand has its own clock that must line up with the others.
Build a timeline document
The most reliable fix is a separate document that tracks time explicitly. It can be as simple as a table: one row per scene, with columns for the date or day, the time of day, the season, and anything time-dependent that happens in it.
It does not matter whether the dates are real. Many books never mention a specific date. But the writer should know them, because knowing them makes it possible to check everything else: the day of the week, the weather, the length of daylight, whether shops are open, whether a school is on holiday.
Seasons and daylight
Seasons carry details that readers expect to match. Blossom, leaf fall, snow, long evenings and dark mornings all tie a scene to a time of year. A scene in which characters walk home in daylight at nine in the evening is set in summer, at least in the UK. If the timeline says November, one of them is wrong.
It is worth checking the practical details too. Harvests, school terms, festivals and sporting seasons all happen at particular times, and a scene set around them needs to fit.
Ages
Ages are among the most common errors. A character's age affects what they can do, what they remember, who they went to school with and how others treat them. Record each important character's date of birth, even if it never appears, and calculate ages from it at key points in the story.
This matters especially in books that cover long periods or multiple generations. A parent and child need a plausible gap. Two characters who were at school together need to be close in age. A character who remembers an event must have been old enough to remember it.
Once the draft is stable, read through with the timeline document open and check every reference to time: "the next morning", "a week later", "that spring", "since last year". Each one should agree with the timeline. Where it does not, decide which is right and change the other.
A copy-editor will look for timeline problems, but a writer who hands over a timeline document makes their job faster and more accurate. It is also a document that will be useful again for any sequel.