Do you know, without looking, how much time your novel covers?

If the question has just pushed you into the predicament of either scrunching up your face or staring at the ceiling in an effort to tally up your various scenes and arrive a reasonable figure of days, then the answer is probably an unqualified, “Err… no.”

Surprisingly enough, the timeline is a facet of storytelling that is often overlooked. I overlooked it myself for years, until I happened to read an anecdote in a magazine article, in which the author mentioned he had once written a story with an eight-day week.

Whoops.

Whenever I’m caught up in the grand whirl of plotting tragedies and travesties galore, I find it much too easy to get carried away and stop keeping track of time (in more ways than one). When writing A Man Called Outlaw (affiliate link), which features a dual timeline, I remember leaning back in my chair on numerous occasions and counting on my fingers, trying to remember on which day of the week a certain event was supposed to have taken place. It could get frustrating to say the least.

Dreamlander (Amazon affiliate link)

My portal fantasy Dreamlander (affiliate link), features a timeline with its own particular challenges: namely, my hero’s existence in two parallel worlds, ergo his having to live each day twice—once in each world. In the early stages of the outlining process, it became clear to me that I would need to take steps to organize my timeline, lest I lose all control and find my characters struggling through their own spate of eight-day weeks—or worse. Following three easy ways to keep track of time in your novel.

Step #1: Control Your Story’s Timeline

Generally speaking, the less time a novel covers, the more suspense and intensity the events therein will project. For instance, let’s say you need your hero to save the world. If you fail to put a time limit on that saving, then despite the grandiose scale of the hero’s task, the lack of a time crunch is going to translate to a lack of suspense. On the other hand, if you give him only thirty minutes to accomplish the impossible, his every action takes on new meaning.

Shortening the timeline also has the added benefit of cutting unnecessary scenes. If the hero is rushing all over the world, trying to save the day, he’s probably not go have time to stop by Aunt Mary’s for a cup of tea and a chat about the neighbor’s new pit bull. But that’s a good thing, ’cause chances are, the reader isn’t going to be too interested in either Aunt Mary’s tea or the neighbor’s pit bull.

Step #2: Record Your Story’s Timeline

Using an old calendar (banks and other businesses often provide free calendars upon request), choose an appropriate month for your novel’s events and start blocking out days.

Unless your story covers several months and therefore provides the risk of your mixing up, not only the days, but the months also, it really isn’t important to match up the month in which in your story takes place with the correct page in the calendar. In most fiction, the actual dates won’t matter; however, if you’re writing historical fiction that does require adherence to certain dates—and therefore agreement between dates and days of the week—it’s wise to choose a calendar page that accommodates this. For example, when I was outlining a story that took place during the Battle of Britain in September 1940, I took care to pick a calendar page in which the first day of the month fell upon a Sunday.

In each appropriate calendar block, scribble a brief phrase pertaining to the main event of that day. Your notes might be only a word: Blitz; Church; Escape; Party, etc. The notes need not be extensive, since you can refer to your outline for more details whenever necessary.

Step #3: Calculate the Hours and Minutes in Your Story’s Timeline

For the most part, I’ve found the calendar trick entirely sufficient, but depending on your story and how quickly events transpire, you may need to plot your timeline even more extensively. In Dreamlander, the first few days in the story involve only one or two major events a day and didn’t require me to map out every hour and minute. However, as my characters and I delved further into the story and the events began spiraling faster and faster, I ran the risk of trying to make my characters accomplish more than was humanly possible in a single day.

This is where I discovered the value of using yWriter to calculate the hours and minutes in my story. At first glance, this sounds a bit obsessive, not to mention time-intensive. But, in a story that demands the author to know what his characters are doing at practically every moment of the day, yWriter’s helpful “Time” feature comes in handy.

As you can see, the program allows you record the exact time at which a scene takes place, as well as how long the scene is supposed to cover. This has been particularly useful in regard to various journeys my characters have been forced to undertake. yWriter’s Time feature forced me to maintain consistency, instead of running the risk of having the character ride from one city to another in two hours on one day and then ride back in just one hour the next day.

All three of these steps are easy, not to mention fun, and they go a long way toward organizing the sometimes unruly timeline of a fictional story.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you keep track of time in your novel? Tell me in the comments!