Forum: Author Hangout

The title says it all here, really. When you're either plotting out or writing your story, how much attention do you pay to the timeline, by which I mean the calendar rather than the sequence of events.
Does it, for example, matter to you if you start a story in "spring" but just a few weeks later it's the summer? Do you, for example, find yourself saying "if this thing happens in the 2nd week in April, then this event must take place in the 3rd week in May"?
With the book I'm currently writing I find myself consulting the calendar I've set up in Excel to make sure I haven't skipped too many days/weeks ahead. But I'm wondering if I'm just being anal about it and how much the readers will care.

I also use a calendar for the appropriate time period (1850, 1900, 2020) to make sure days are correct.

It depends on the story. Ghost Images,, which is being posted now, is set right after school gets out in early June and I did track the days while writing it, but they don't show up in the story that much.

In contrast, What Happens in Europe is ambiguous as to when it occurs. The only thing I tracked was the relative days, so that if I said they were going to Amsterdam in two days, it was actually two days later when they went.

For Drawing the Line (currently being released to my Reamstories patrons), I have every scene tagged with the date it occurs in Scrivener. Again, it doesn't show up in the story much, but since it's set in a real time frame (1986) I wanted to make sure that the number of weekends between holidays was correct and that real events (like the R.E.M. concert) were in the correct place.

My story / series (Variation on a Theme) is a do-over / alternative history, which sets it at a very specific time in history. Thus, each scene is tied to a specific day, one that generally correlates to the same day in our universe. Given that sort of story, it feels very necessary to be completely accurate with the passage of time.

If I was writing, say, an action/adventure story set in the future, I would want to make sure things that take a month took a month, pretty much, but that might be accomplished by skimming or saying 'a month went by' or 'when the thing was ready' or whatever.

Personally, I would care if, say, you had a scene at Christmas, then a scene at Valentines, but it seemed clear that a month and a half had not passed otherwise. There needs to be some sensation of time passing and things happening for the characters in between those events.

In a very popular SciFi serial, the protagonists have to leave within half an hour if they're going to save their allies.

The protagonists then have a debriefing meeting, an orgy and then a meal and they still have half an hour before they have to leave!

So being sloppy with the timeline doesn't stop you having a very popular and highly rated story.

AJ