Welcome to week two in our 2018 Writing a Novel Blog Series!
Identifying the when that your story takes place in as the first step in your book’s outline allows other aspects of the story to fall into line more easily. Not only does it guide you toward the clothing, behaviors, and speech patterns that will allow your characters to blend into the story seamlessly, it will also save you time by directing you to specific areas of research.
Remember our sample from last week? Consider the section in bold print.
“Viago skulked in the dank, dimly lit alley behind the Bow Street Runners headquarters of London’s Bow Street Number 4, as it was known through the seedy underbelly of the city. He’d been crouched in the same spot for what seemed like hours, waiting for the flood of thieves and pickpockets that he knew would be coming. The air around him was wet. The mist that would become the morning dew already thick in the air. It clung to his wavy, shoulder-length hair and dripped down the back of his neck to saturate the thin t-shirt inside his cheap fake-leather coat, making him wish he’d thought to grab the thick woolen scarf he’d received for Christmas.
He bounced on the balls of his feet, his toes barely cushioned against the stone roadway by the worn rubber soles of his shoes, trying to increase his body temperature as he waited for his mark. He was still alone – of that he was certain – unless one considered the occasional clop-clop of the horse’s hooves as the delivery men made their early rounds through the city streets or the even less-common backfire from a horseless carriage.”
Creativity is a fantastic tool, and one of the joys of writing fiction is that the author is not restrained by rigid boundaries. That said, creative license can’t be used to alter real life facts unless the author is clearly creating a unique universe. Specifically to this point, automobiles did not exist in London at the same time as the Bow Street Runners. This may seem nit-picky and unimportant, but the smallest detail can ruin a book for a reader.
In Viago’s story, the author had chosen the time frame as eighteen-hundreds England. However, by not settling on a specific time frame before the author began writing, they allowed themselves a bit too much freedom to imagine, and it resulted in the research not being narrowed down far enough. Had they narrowed it down further to a specific year, or even decade, a google search would have allowed an excellent starting point.
If your story is centered in a real-life event – two athletes from warring nations falling in love while competing in the 2012 Summer Olympics, for example – identifying your when presents no challenge and you can move on. Ditto for authors who are creating their own universe. But if your story is set in a real time and place, you’ll want to decide on a century and then make a second list to help narrow it down.
When:
Length of time?
This might seem silly, but it can make a huge difference. Does your story take place in a single day? Over a long weekend? Through the course of a year? Or over the lifetime of one or more of the characters?
What decade, century, year is it? (Hint: you only need one answer!)
From one year to the next, there have always been changes in the clothing styles, the type of work that people undertook, and the leisure activities that they engaged in, but for stories set in modern times, you will actually do the longevity of your book a favor by not leaning too heavily on social details. For example:
“Brian shifted in his Batman sleeping bag. The lumpy cotton stuffing was doing even less to protect his forty-year-old back from the racks in the concrete sidewalk than it was to keep the twenty-degree weather at bay. Still, he reasoned with himself, once the store opened and he held his newly-released iPhone 6 in his hand, the discomfort would all be worth it.”
You see how the addition of the iPhone’s series (6) immediately points out the lag between when the story was published (or written) and when you read the passage? With one little change – the deletion of the detail – the story becomes timeless. After all, it’s not like iPhones are going away any time soon!
“Brian shifted in his Batman sleeping bag. The lumpy cotton stuffing was doing even less to protect his forty-year-old back from the racks in the concrete sidewalk than it was to keep the twenty-degree weather at bay. Still, he reasoned with himself, once the store opened and he held his newly-released-and-long-awaited iPhone in his hand, the discomfort would all be worth it.”
Once you move past the pesky social lives of the time, there are also legal, political, religious, and economic variances to consider. Throughout history, these have usually been spread more widely apart on a timeline than the social changes.
Depending on the country, political changes can be anticipated at somewhere between two and ten-year intervals, whether that is a 4-year presidential upset in the United States or a modern-era English Parliament election every five years. The more significant economic changes usually begin within a year of political transition, whether that is a new democratic leader or a death in a monarchy or dictatorship.
Legal changes can be harder to anticipate, but a good rule of thumb is to anticipate them within a year of significant political changes and within six months to two years of a major criminal event or social tragedy (think a terrorist attack or a plane crashing due to over-tired pilots).
Religious changes are the most widely spaced events on a social timeline. I am not aware of any generally accepted algorithm for anticipating them, but they tend to slowly evolve over decades or longer.
All of that matters for one reason. Once you have narrowed your when down to your specific time frame, you can pinpoint the significant events that took place before, during, and after it and use that information to bolster your setting, your character’s backgrounds, and your sub-plots.
When you fill in your when list, don’t limit yourself to the events of the country, hamlet, or town that you are anticipating your story taking place in. Your main character may be a Texas mail-order bride from Russia, but its always possible that the reason she allowed herself to be sold was that her husband was killed in the terrorist bombing in Moscow’s Metro in 2010, right?
When you prepare your when, you can do it in any format that you like, but my preference is to start with a simple outline:
When:
Duration:
Year:
Political:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Legal:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Economical:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Religious events:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
This list can also come in handy when you’re working on character backstories, you might want to hold onto it until we reach our who post! Up next week, it’s all about location, location, location when we decide where the story takes place!
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