I’ve been a calendar person since early childhood when the Brookfield Zoo calendar featured, for my birthday month, Olga the walrus—a creature so great that there’s now a statue of her in that same zoo.
Just look at her. She’s beautiful.
In recent years, I’ve embraced the flexibility of an online calendar. We’re sadly missing the walrus component now (Couldn’t Google or Apple please let us add feature photos to each month?), but despite that flaw, I live with a calendar permanently open on my laptop.
And I have outlined my last three novels in my Google calendar. I highly recommend it.
Here’s what happened: In 2015, the year I first adopted the online calendar for regular life, I was working on The Great Believers and kept tripping up on the math. I’d learned long before to make a timeline of characters’ lives—their birth years, and so on—so I didn’t have to constantly do little subtraction problems on scrap paper. But this plot required a different kind of math: The earliest tests for what we now call HIV had two different components, and results took weeks. There was also the window between someone’s last possible exposure and the date they could get a definitive test result. Anytime I moved any of these events in my draft, everything else had to follow. And when I messed one thing up, I messed up absolutely everything.
So I went back to the my empty pages for 2013 and 2014—years that happened to match the days of the week for 1985 and 1986—and filled in everything I had so far.
It served its original purpose beautifully. If I needed to move the date of the test, I could also scan down and move the date of the test results. I could confidently say something like “It was Thursday” without having to stop and make sure I hadn’t given you three Thursdays in a row.
But I also started to visualize the whole novel differently. I saw gaps, tensions, places where events overlapped. I started to notice ways different events could be compressed into one day, one scene. Because this was a historical novel, I also looked up what was happening in the world, the weather, and sports, and dropped those in. I didn’t end up using all of it—Chernobyl, for instance, doesn’t get mentioned—but the Challenger explosion came at a really interesting point in my plot, so naturally I built an extremely awkward sex scene around it.
For my next novel, I Have Some Questions for You, I had different challenges. The first two-thirds or so of the novel happens over just a two-week span, and the calendar again became hugely useful. This time, I was writing about 2018 (in 2020) but those pages were full of my actual appointments. So again I went back in time, and micro-scheduled those two weeks.
I put all that plotting under a calendar heading that somehow no longer exists, so all that remains are my absolutely fascinating notes on the weather in New Hampshire in 2018. Please enjoy.
I really should figure out a way to give myself similar challenges for every novel (perhaps that’s a benefit of writing a series), but instead I invariably start over knowing nothing.
The novel I’m revising right now is about real events in the life of a real person, and it takes place over several months in the 1930s. This time, I was working with loads of research material, and over five-ish years of writing needed to keep track of real events both personal and national, plus my fictional plot.
While I’ve tried not to force myself to follow the real timeline tediously, it helped a lot to know what really happened when, as well as to jot down whatever direct accounts I’d found. Sometimes those were brief, as seen here, and sometimes I stuck pages of information into the notes.
(I promise you, by the way, that no bread crumb chasing from this screen grab will get you to my exact subject. But please knock yourself out assuming this novel is about someone slathering lotion on Walt Disney!)
Eventually my own fictional plot points came into the calendar as well (how someone woke up on the 29th, for instance, is not a matter of public record) and in the editing process I’ve tried to let myself move or combine events for the sake of the story.
One ancillary benefit of all this: If I had to keep referencing my source material or pages of my own notes, I know that I’d get drawn back into unnecessary research. (Ooh what exact kind of wristwatch did the British actor Basil Rathbone wear? Let me spend five hours researching it so I can insert a sentence into the one paragraph where he appears, and then edit it out tomorrow.) And I’d also get drawn back into the real, unaltered timeline and confuse the hell out of myself.
Hey, kids, try it at home!
Use a paper calendar, start a brand new electronic one, scroll back to empty years in the online calendar you already use. Color code things, if it helps. Put in your research, or your scene details, or other notes.
In the process of completing and revising a full novel, you’re likely going to outline many times, in many different ways. Even if you’re “not an outliner,” you’ll probably end up needing to make a retroactive outline as you revise. The more complicated your timeline, the more you’re going to be glad that you have one, or sad that you don’t.
When I say the word “outline” to students, their eyes tend to glaze over. They’re picturing something they learned in fifth grade that involved Roman numerals and capital letters. I’m talking about maybe going to the closest indie bookstore that sells calendars, buying a bunch of outdated ones at half off, and plotting out your novel under a photo of your favorite walrus.
I mean, come on. How perfect was she??