An Easy Trick for Tracking Timelines
Crucial craft advice from the novel-writing trenches
Talking about those dual time lines.
Recently on Twitter, I was asking…oh okay, I was really whining in panic…about how to make dual timelines work. I have tried Post Its (they get lost). I have tried index cards (I cannot read my handwriting.) I tried Scrivener Corkboard, which looks like cork and makes a satisfying clunking sound when you move your virtual index cards around, and I loved that up until Scrivener ate two days worth of work.
To my delighted surprise, the writing community came out to help! Celeste Ng told me to think of “hand-offs” when you go from one timeline to another, i.e. something in the present will trigger something in the other timeline. A mother, for example, mourning her dead brother, might be followed by a chapter about the dead brother, alive in the past, doing some action or another.
So, do I have it figured out? Ask the ten cups of coffee, the chocolate, the bitten fingernails. But I press on!
