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BY PETE FORD

Or, why you need to timeline.

Here’s how I develop a story: I get an idea, roll it around in my head for a while, adding more and more detail until, eventually, I reach a point where I can write the story, one short paragraph per scene, from beginning to end. I use software that makes it easy to capture that in the form of a storyboard, which lets me see the overall structure fairly clearly.

So far, so good. That’s my process—for the first part of building a story, at least—and it works for me.

The way I used to do things, the next step would be to use that storyboard as a guide to write the manuscript proper. I would look at each scene—which, at that point, tells me the essence of what it must achieve to move the plot along—and write the complete scene from that seed. I do that for every scene, and at the end, voila, I have a first draft.

And that first draft is, of course, awful. It’s badly paced, with scenes that don’t do much to advance the plot. There’s little or no development of secondary characters. And there are inconsistencies—characters in two places at once, for example.

So, at this point I could tear the story to pieces and fix those problems. But doing that after writing the first draft is painful, and hard work, and not guaranteed to produce a good, polished end result.

What’s needed is a way to fix things before going to the writing stage, so that the first draft is cleaner on the very first pass. And there is such a way. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce: The Timeline.

What’s a timeline?

One major problem with the storyboard as I’ve described it is that it can only cope with a single thread of story. But good stories—interesting stories—don’t have just one thread.

Just like real life, every character has their own thread—their own story, or their own perspective on the whole—weaving its way through from beginning to end, crisscrossing and interacting with those belonging to other characters.

A timeline, in its simplest form, is a way to represent those multiple perspectives in a concrete form that you, as a writer, can use to enhance and enrich your story.

That’s a bit vague. Let’s get real.

Building a timeline.

The way I do it these days, a timeline is a spreadsheet on my computer (but I’ve seen it done using hand-written notecards pinned to boards, or to long sheets or rolls of paper—a bit old-school for me but, hey, whatever works). I have a column for every character—protagonists, antagonists, secondary characters, anyone who has an impact on the storyline.

Each row on the sheet represents a point in time, and that doesn’t have to be set by a clock; all it means is that whatever happens on row 12, say, occurs after the events in row 11. Seconds later, years later, there are no rules; whatever’s right for the story.

So each cell in the table represents an event happening around one character at one moment in time. Two cells in the same row tell us about two characters at one point in story time.

When do I timeline?

Back to my original process, as I described it earlier: I’ve worked my idea into scene-by-scene description, and I have it as a storyboard. This is when I timeline. I take that storyboard and copy’n’paste it, one scene at a time, into my spreadsheet. Which column do I put a scene into? Easy: the one for the character whose perspective I want the scene to be shown from. Which row? Again, easy: the same row as other scenes intended to happen at the same time, or a lower one if it happens later.

And right away, as easy as this sounds, I can almost guarantee that I’ll find inconsistencies and conflicts. Scenes out of order; events that were supposed to happen at roughly the same time, but one occurs at dawn and another at dusk.

Filling in the blanks.

So, now I can clean those conflicts up and get to the next step, and this is where things get interesting. I go into each row of the sheet, and start filling in the blanks.

Let’s say I have a scene where Alice arrives in Chicago on the train and meets Bert. Straight away I know that the cell above that one on the sheet might mention that Alice got on the train somewhere else.

Meanwhile, the cell for Bert in the same row is blank—but I know he meets Alice at the same time and place, so I can fill that in (and if Bert’s cell isn’t blank, that could mean another conflict to fix). Meanwhile the antagonist is off doing something else, in preparation for another scene that’s coming up, so I can fill that cell in to say so.

That’s not to say that I have to put something in every cell (you simply don’t know what Alice is doing at every single point of the story), and not every cell I put something into will end up being written as a scene. It just means something happening, possibly “offstage,” that supports the story in some way. The events in that cell might be referred back to later, for example.

I colour-code the cells to distinguish these; green, say, for cells that will end up as scenes in the draft, and grey for “support” events that won’t actually appear (and those aren’t final; I might decide later to change a “green” scene to be “grey”, for example, because it adds too little or slows down the action too much).

Filling in the blanks like this does something else, too: it points out interesting events happening to secondary characters. Those events suggest new scenes to include in the story (in other words, change them from grey to green), and those new scenes can build into subplots that add depth to the story. And they deepen your secondary characters—by giving them more screen time, as it were, and even generating their own development arcs.

Refining the timeline.

Building the full-blown timeline takes, um, time. I might get a first cut of one, then spend days or weeks going over it and refining it.

(“Does this green cell actually push the story along? No? Make it grey.” “Charlie only has six scenes in the entire story; let’s see what I can add in for him.” And so on. You get the idea.)

At the end, I have a much better idea of which scenes are going to get written, and in what order. Resist the urge to rush the job so that you can get to the actual writing; every hour spent getting the timeline right at this point will save you more than that in repair work on a broken first draft, and improve your chances of a draft that shines on the very first pass.

So, you ask, is the next step to start writing those green cells as full scenes for a first draft? No. The next step is to lay them out and work on peril and tension . . . but that’s another story.

Pete Ford was born in England and lived in Wales and Switzerland before moving to Texas. He now lives in Colorado with his wife, Kate. They have two grown-up sons and two not-at-all grown-up granddaughters.

He spends his days as a software developer, and his evenings color-coding spreadsheets when he’s not endearing himself to his editors.

Pete’s first book, Dr. Gunn and Mr. Bohemia, a Steampunk action/adventure, will be released October 13, 2013.

Follow Pete on his website, Facebook, and Twitter.