A serious question...

[hbquikcomjamesl]

As an obsessive timeliner, I can genuinely say *do not try it*.

Hmm. While I never wrote an overall outline for my novel-in-progress (I basically just let it write itself), I did, practically from day one, develop a timeline for it, and for all the short stories that have spun off from it, in order to make sure everything in the milieu lines up with everything else in it, and that all the technology and pop-culture references are completely air-tight.

 

[Greg Cox]

Confession: In general, I don't finalize the timeline for a book until after I've written the first draft and have a better sense of the overall pacing. Indeed, I often use placeholders -- "TIME?" -- in the text to mark places where I need to figure out how much time has passed between events, after the first draft is done.

Then I sit down with a calendar and a pencil to figure if that one bit was "three days later" or "yesterday" or "a few hours ago" or whatever. And to synchronize the A plot, B plot, and C plot, which is often the trickiest part.

This often applies to the larger Trek timeline as well, since, if I'm a middle of writing a scene, I don't want to lose momentum by pausing to look up, say, what year Chekov graduated from the Academy or how much time has passed since he broke up with the space hippy. I'll just insert a "TIME?" placeholder until I can find time to dig deeper into whatever the current timeline says.

 

[Christopher]

Confession: In general, I don't finalize the timeline for a book until after I've written the first draft and have a better sense of the overall pacing. Indeed, I often use placeholders -- "TIME?" -- in the text to mark places where I need to figure out how much time has passed between events, after the first draft is done.

When I wrote Star Trek: Ex Machina, I realized in revisions that I'd accidentally had a couple of days pass in one subplot in between scenes less than an hour apart in a parallel subplot. I had to do some hasty rewriting to fix the discrepancy. Ever since then, I've taken care to keep running chronologies in all my novels so that I don't make such mistakes again.

Usually I just keep track of the days on which the scenes take place, but since my Tangent Knights audio trilogy was set on near-future Earth, I kept track of the timing down to the hour, so that I'd get things like time of day right, or the time in different time zones at the same moment. I chose the timing of one scene in Book 2 so that I could get the phase of the Moon I wanted. I also had to keep track of things like when baseball season started (I had to delay it by a week from the usual date, but that's not unprecedented) and when college semesters would start and end (I almost screwed that one up by not considering it until late in the process, but I lucked out).

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I chose the timing of one scene in Book 2 so that I could get the phase of the Moon I wanted.

At one point, I contacted the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra's archivist for old scheduling information, so that I could time my protagonist's first visit to Hollywood Bowl correctly, and know exactly who and what were on the program that evening.

 

[Zarm]

Hmm. While I never wrote an overall outline for my novel-in-progress (I basically just let it write itself), I did, practically from day one, develop a timeline for it, and for all the short stories that have spun off from it, in order to make sure everything in the milieu lines up with everything else in it, and that all the technology and pop-culture references are completely air-tight.

Oh, I don't think that's a bad idea at all; in fact, I laud it.

I just mean, don't try and rationalize the chronology of the shows themselves, especially in relation to one-another. :-)

 

[Greg Cox]

I tend to obsess over time zones when writing globe-trotting adventures of the Earthly variety, and over the days of the week when writing kid's books, so as to keep track of school days and weekends.

Indeed, I once moved a scene from California to Florida just to make sure the time zones stayed in synch with regards to the A plot and the B plot . . . .