Time Table

One of the fundamental building blocks of any story is the passing of Time. Because Time is what proves things, is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Anything can be said about anything, but it’s only through our observations over a certain length of time do we come to accept for ourselves an opinion as true. There’s no prescribed length of time - this depends on what we’re being asked to believe. But Time holds us steady as readers, underpins the credibility of character’s emotions. And a writer’s management of Time also controls our perceptions of the events in a story, signalling to us what is important and what is not.

A Time Table is a powerful tool you can use when creating a unified Story.

And you can do this early, if you like. As a kind of story-ideas generator. Don’t feel you have to commit to anything at this point, but just decide, randomly, to get things moving – okay, I think I’m going to try setting this story over a time period of six months, or in the course of one afternoon, or an hour, or from the year the character was born to the day he dies. 

First, get a piece of paper. On the top left corner write down the time the story begins - this can be a very specific date, or it can be something like Morning, Autumn, the protagonist’s 5th birthday. Then. on the top right corner write the end date - if you’re not sure yet, the point is to try something and see how it feels, what it does to the story.  

Next, start writing down any of the events or scenes that happen in your story. I want you to create boxes to contain these events - if the time between them is continuous, then put them in the same box. What I mean by that is of course there are always a million little time cuts we make in any scenes, otherwise every book would be a mile long, but if a scene in your story basically follows directly after another and is linked causally, then put it in the same box. The box should look like this:

Sam brings home a stray dog.     The dog, who’s been doing well in the

His mother tells him to get rid of it.     cellar, gives birth to puppies.

Sam hides the dog in the cellar.     Sam’s mother discovers them.

Each time you sense there’s a significant - small or large, depending on the total span of your story  –  jump in time, start a new column in the text but still within the same long rectangular box. Leave a little space between the columns for something else we’re going to do next. When you run out of space at the right hand margin, just start a new row below this first one and so on.

As you go along keep referring back to your start and finish times in the top corners, and make notes about where these events sit in between; are the seasons changing, what time of day is it by now, what traditional landmarks in the year might the characters have passed through during this time, i.e. Christmas, start of the school year, summer holiday…anything which might add temporal details to your scenes which you hadn’t yet considered. The sort of details which will ground your story in the reality of time passing. 

Now it’s time for the gutters. This is where we concentrate on the time in between (and around) the scenes we are giving our readers, the moments in which we immerse them. This is where we separate the chosen time of your specific story from the more general time in which it is embedded. 

Another crucial choice to explore when it comes to Time in any story, is the moment in time from which the story is being told. As Matt Bell writes in his excellent book on the process of drafting a novel, Refuse to Be Done, ‘a ten year old telling a tale in real time as it happens is constrained by their limited experience and faculties. But a hundred-year-old person looking back on these same events would bring a lifetime of experience and education to bear on the telling, with the added complications, perhaps, of unreliable or failing memory’. As you construct your story you will eventually need to make some decisions about what Bell calls time narrated  - the amount of time the action of your novel covers - versus time of narration – the moment in time from which the story is told. Each of these choices offers different options for reflection, exposition and authority, so as you construct the time table, also consider testing different times of narration to see what possibilities exist for your story.

So, getting back to the gutters. In between the columns of text you made denoting the various events of your story, as far as you know them thus, I want you to take some notes on the things that happen (or could or might happen) between. These things will not be scened. (Unless your imagination comes up with an action which you think the reader does need to experience first-hand.) The contents of the gutter are like the implied actions between different pictures in a graphic novel; we learn by implication, through juxtaposition, without actually being made to see the in-between. Or, in prose, the contents of these gutters might be told to the reader in a summary, especially if you are moving on a large passage of time and there a few key things you need the reader to understand as having occurred.  The row should now look like this (gutter in italic):

Sam brings home a stray dog. Sam starts a new school year. The dog, who’s been doing

His mother tells him to get rid Sam’s mother has a birthday. well in the cellar, gives birth

of it. Sam gives his mother a to puppies.

Sam hides the dog in the rhinestone brooch Sam’s mother discovers

cellar he’s saved up for.  the puppies.

What filling these gutters will help you do, hopefully, is imagine more clearly the smaller things going on in parallel or around the main spine of your story, events that can sometimes be affecting in a lateral way, and also sometimes generate new ideas about new complications that enter the character’s lives. This is also a good place in which to explore the supporting character’s lives (the non-POV characters), what might be happening for them in this time, and that can also end up generating new ideas for your main storyline. 

Finally, let’s look at what people call Back Story. It’s important to remember that keeping the start and finish time of your story to tight parameters (often a really useful decision in terms of organising the whole) does not mean you are limiting yourself to only what occurred in that time. Also includable are the moments in your characters’ lives from outside your story’s overall timeline which are nonetheless relevant because of what they reveal to the reader. Things like memories, that reveal character, or scened flashbacks to significant events in the past, directly causal to the events in the main story. 

In the Time Table you can make a note of this content in the form of little speech balloons, that float around the perimeters of the main rows of storyline, connected but free-floating. And the exciting thing about these ‘out of time’ moments is that they are move-able. Create them as they come to your imagination, but it is ultimately your choice where you end up placing these moments in the book. They could be shown to the reader at any point, but what you are looking for is an entry point that feels right, either because the memory is directly related to something in the core-story scene that’s just occurred, or for a more subtle emotional effect that connects us more fully with the character at a critical time. 

A Tip: if you find you have way too much of this Back Story material and you are ending up with more flashback than present-time story, this may mean you have set the starting time of your Time Table too late. And you could make life a lot easier by choosing an earlier starting point, so that some of this Back Story will move into your core timetable. 

So…good luck! The central point of all this Time-Tabling is to never lose sense of the time that runs without stopping through your story, the time that is its heartbeat and gives many of its events meaning. 

If you can keep that element clear in your mind, so will your readers. And they will thank you for it.