Over this past year, I’ve shared a number of how-tos as they relate to worldbuilding. I’ve discussed what worldbuilding is, when it’s necessary, and some basics on how to go about it. I’ve given insight into map-making, finding a character’s core, and designing settings to complete and enhance your worlds.

And while there remain innumerable items that might be discussed regarding worldbuilding, today’s article will wrap up this particular series.

Today, I’m talking timelines. Think of them as your ordered ‘To Do’ list. Timelines establish the sequence or schedule for your story. Everything on them should be necessary to the world or your characters and must be done in a precise order so that what you create makes sense in story form.

Timelines might seem small or even insignificant at the outset, especially if your story is shorter or takes place over a shorter period of time, but I guarantee you, if you don’t have a realistic schedule established for your world, regardless of its size, your readers are going to know it. Here’s a look at some of the things timelines give you:

• Stability: Timelines ensure a stable basic sequence and flow for your story in terms of the classic beginning, middle, and end. Every story must have a plot arc, and timelines provide the guiding line so this can happen in a way that readers can follow.
• Trackability: A timeline can incorporate as much or as little detail as you want and ensures quick visibility in conjunction with everything else. You can monitor how long different activities will take relative to the rest to ensure the timing and placement of your story elements stay believable.
• Consistency: If your story takes place over a long space of time or in a specific time period, timelines will ensure that the world stays coherent. They are especially vital if you use flashbacks or include lengthy backstories.
• Surprises: Flesh the timeline out enough and you’ll start to find some unexpected things. Sometimes it’ll reveal gaps in your story progression that need to be filled. Other times you’ll discover unlooked-for but pivotal cause and effect.
• More! As your timeline grows, you may realize there are more stories hidden in your world than you initially thought. Timelines permit you to play with story branches and also to save spots for new, related story nuggets.

In essence, timelines ‘Hold All The Things’. No timeline = poor order = potential chaos. Sure, you might eventually pull enough strands together on your own to reduce the chaos a little, but until it’s written down in that short, quick-glance format, you’re wasting a lot of your time going back and forth. So focus, start the timeline, and be happier for it.

A Stable Sequence

In terms of worldbuilding, sequence references not just what occurs in the story itself, but also every key item of history leading up to it. Sequence includes backstory for your characters, important locations, and major world events, and ensures everything stays in order and can have the appropriate impact where said impact belongs.

You’ll want to pay your closest and first attentions to the aspects of your world that have the greatest effect. So for example, if you’re writing a story about World War I, you’ll need to make sure to get the sequence of important battles or world news listed out before you ever commit your characters to one or another of those locations.

Once you have the overarching forces of the world nailed down (as much as such forces can be), you can start working on the more individualistic portions. These might be details within certain events or responsive changes in your characters, and they might be local or global. There’s usually more freedom of choice within these smaller timeline pieces.

What’s important to remember is that these secondary portions are simply responses to the first events. Often these details will spawn further sequential details that you’ll need to spend time marking down, too. There are plenty of methods for keeping track of all this (we’ll get to that), but the key is to be as brief as possible in whatever notation system you use.

The more you can get out in this shortened format, the easier it’ll be for you to reference. Instead of trying to skim through pages and pages of story, you’ll have all the essentials there on just a few pages, ready to serve as the quick-glance reminder that our all-too-often tired brains require.

Tracking Your Timing

How long does it take for a horse to cross a prairie? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Every one of these questions is missing specifics, and every one of those specifics (or the reasons for their lack) should be included in the timeline portion of their stories’ worldbuilding.

Timelines improve the overall flow of your story, enabling readers to follow the when no matter how often that might change or how long it might take. They also help track that flow, ensuring that you don’t miss vital timing pieces.

Here are a few key pieces where this tracking comes into play:

Long Journeys: I’ve seen it happen — A character spends three weeks slogging along a forest trail and only two days crossing mountains that, on the map, are the same size relevant to each other. Many readers will recognize the discrepancy right away and cry foul. Determine just how long it takes to move through different terrain and plan your story accordingly.

Longer timespans: If your world’s story (not necessarily the same as your actual story) takes place over the course of a few months, a few years, or potentially even thousands of years, timelines will enable you to track the details. Whenever you have something new to add, you can just plop it down wherever it goes in the timeline.

Other Time Periods: If your story references or takes place within periods that are different from other portions of the story, timelines will ensure consistency between both. You can keep these periods fluid but connected by highlighting or color-coding similarities, significant disparities, and other major events.

Multiple Story Branches: If your story involves multiple characters doing things at the same time but in separate places, you absolutely need to visually align one character’s actions with all the others. Otherwise, you are dead sure of getting lost somewhere. While all timelines rely on a time-reference point of some kind, this sort will likely require the most detailed reference.

Chronological Consistency

Most of the time, readers can follow a story as its chronology bounces around, but they don’t always enjoy it. It forces their minds to move in starts and stops, which may cause unintended breaks with the emotional bonds they’d otherwise develop for your characters.

Unless you can create a consistent rhythm or an emotionally-charged reason for this bouncing, it will eventually wear on the reader. They may choose to drop your story for something that doesn’t involve so much brain power, and then your carefully crafted timeline won’t mean much.

What it comes down to is readers need a certain level of predictability. They shouldn’t know everything or be totally unsurprised at twists, but they do need to know that you won’t send them flying into some memory or past event at random. The connectivity of your timeline’s elements should dictate the shift in chronology, not your preconceived intentions.

You can play with chronology. Thousands of books and stories worldwide across all genres incorporate non-chronological scenes. This finds the most success in stories where it’s crucial to the plot. It’s not just for suspense or backstory expository, but for the consistent development of key insights that ultimately build the story to its climax.

Memento is one of those movies that everyone (over 17, it’s rated R) should watch just to understand how to play with time. You’ll soon notice how it’s not just time that’s being played with. The film toys with viewers’ emotions, experiences, expectations, and eventually even their sense of reality. But every piece fits together, both in the movie’s format and in true chronology.

So, what does this look like when one is worldbuilding? It’s not too complicated. Step one: Craft a consistent, connected timeline in chronological form. Step two: Mix it up and see how it holds. The stories that need non-chronology will show themselves as stronger and more emotionally appealing when they’re standing in that mixed-up form.

Warnings about Flashbacks

Flashbacks are useful for in-the-moment backstory that readers need to understand something that will happen later or that is happening in the current story’s present time. They’re a part of your world’s history, whether or not they’re character-centric, and thus exist in a different portion of your story’s timeline.

But, any time you write a flashback, it must be in immediate scene form. This means avoiding the use of ‘had’ as much as possible.

You might lead with one or two ‘had’s to help the reader understand that they are now in a previous time, but after that, go back to whatever regular verb tense the rest of your story uses. Then, when it’s time to return to the story’s primary time period, you can demonstrate that with a simple ‘now’.

Trust your readers to follow this, but don’t overuse it. They’ll either get bored or fed up.

One final caution: If you find yourself looking backward too often, it may be because you’ve begun your story too late. In those cases, back up your beginning to the moment of one of your key flashbacks and fill in the rest from there.

Always consider carefully: Do your readers need to know this information? Or are you merely overly-excited by your worldbuilding savviness?

The Unexpected

As with any worldbuilding tool, it should come as no surprise that the more you work on your timeline, the more it will grow and develop and appropriately mold your story. Sometimes it grows in predictable patterns with few surprises and a logical but interesting outcome.

But other times you’ll add a line about some bland but necessary event and realize that it connects to something you dreamed up and jotted down half a lifetime ago. Or it requires a completely different, new string of events than you had originally plotted. Or it proves to be the unexpected lynchpin you’ve been racking your brain unsuccessfully to find.

Timelines fill in these gaps. They also show where gaps still lurk. They may remind you of promises made to the readers in earlier portions of the story, and they will demand a clean story copy in a way that no other portion of worldbuilding does.

If you follow those cues and find ways to fill them, you’ll find your story fleshed out to a fuller and more satisfying end. Once the first draft is finished, you can use your timeline to go back into the story and add the hints that bring a final cohesion.

Timeline-Making Options

When I first started trying to set down my timelines, I kept it simple and used handwritten notes. Then I transferred them to Word Perfect (hey, it was better than a typewriter!) and began building bullet point lists. 

When I upgraded to Word, I started another list. Then I tried using tables, but it just kept growing. In short order I found that simple was, well, not enough for me.

Index cards, handwritten lists, or Word processing programs are generally just fine for smaller, contained, or less complicated timelines. Mine was not this. So, not having other alternatives in those days, I switched to Excel.

I still find Excel to be a most serviceable tool for my purposes. Some advantages:

• You can have as many timelines running concurrently on it as you want, either in different spreadsheets or all on the same one. You’re not limited by page size.
• Your timelines can be as long and complicated as you want, and they’ll still be easy to search or scroll through.
• You can color code, add comments, re-sort or move items, and even orient words in different directions as your needs require without destroying the format of anything else.
• You can calculate and/or keep track of any numbers automatically. If you need to track populations, distances, or even scientific data, Excel will do that easily.

The only real con to Excel is that sometimes it will try to auto-format. A little fiddling can usually resolve it, but sometimes I have had to turn to the help button and internet. So far I haven’t had an issue that couldn’t be solved, one way or another.

But today’s world also includes many online offerings, and you may find one or more of those to be more applicable to your needs. Many of them come with similar features as Excel in terms of sorting, color-coding, and limitless size.

The catch: Most come with a cost, either via a one-time payment or a subscription, and you will have a learning curve to deal with. These are sophisticated and specifically-developed programs with loads of options to sift through.

Scrivener is probably the most well-known option, especially if you’ve done anything related to NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month. One of the most popular sponsors for that group, it provides all manner of assistance tools for large worldbuilding, including several different methods for displaying timelines.

Scrivener requires a one-time payment for its current version (discounted if you win NaNoWriMo), and then it’s yours to use for as long as you wish. If they produce a major update that changes the version and you decide you want it, or if you change your operating system, you will have to pay their fee again.

Aeon Timeline can be synced with Scrivener and provides more detailed options. It’s designed specifically for stories or series that span large amounts of time, and provides additional resources for character development, personal intersections, and calendar creation in the grand scale.

You have an option for a one-time payment for a single version of Aeon Timeline or a smaller annual subscription (about half the price) to keep your version continually up-to-date.

Finally, Trello is a project management program involving cards that are highly editable and movable. While not designed with story creation in mind, it lends itself perfectly to the task. You can add links for your individual story portions or even whole stories to these cards, move and sort them as needed, give yourself deadlines, and share with others for feedback.

Trello offers a relatively simple solution for those who are more visually oriented. If you work offline, it will sync any new material as soon as connectivity is re-established. And unless you find that you need the extra bonuses of the paid version, it is completely free to use.

In Sum

Readers choose stories for any number of reasons. They may be curious about an author or tale they’ve always heard about but never read. They may enjoy the genre. They may be bored and up for anything. Titles grab, book placements in the shop or library catch the eye, and the feeling of ‘what if’ causes the hand to reach out.

What holds a reader, though, is what you place in those first few lines, paragraphs, and pages. Do your worldbuilding correctly, give these various key elements we’ve discussed the attention they need and deserve, and you’ll find your readers sticking around and coming back for more.

Happy writing!

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