#Aeon timeline 1 adding birthdays how to
#Aeon timeline 1 adding birthdays full
#Aeon timeline 1 adding birthdays professional

Needless to say, this background does not end up in the novel. No guarantee to prevent plot holes, but it should force the author to at least consider the unmentioned family influences and life events. They existed before the story interrupted their lives. A good exercise asks what the character was doing 5 hours earlier, 5 days earlier, and 5 years earlier – the idea is that characters are always transitioning. Index cards have no space or resolution limit, and mapping the plot in the real world may help 'fix' problems through spacial memory.Īnother writing tool is to compile a cheatsheet about each character, including their age and general history. Computer screens are limited by pixels, at some point of complexity information will not be legible and you're left with an abstract, graphic flowchart that is not a story. Having used both, index cards on the floor is better.

#Aeon timeline 1 adding birthdays full

It can be converted to display multiple parallel timelines – each card is in order but confined to 'tracks' allowing to plot (for instance) the POV of each individual character within the chronology of the full story. Scrivener has an index card view where the 'cards' can be re-arranged on screen. I feel sorry for authors in the post-wordprocessor era who've never sprawled a entire package of index cards across the floor in an attempt to organize their plot timeline. Skip to the end if you value this person at all. That doesn't give you the right to be condescending or insulting. However, I assume you know the author and your assessment is correct: she just didn't do her homework. Maybe she didn't realize there was a problem you are forced to solve. Maybe the real issue is the author's request has extended beyond your generous nature – it seems they expected you to provide worldbuilding and history for their novel. As a reader, I wouldn't need it explained – any look at a real genealogy chart will have a shocking number of deceased children and remarriages. These factors are plausible to me in historic or a religious context, an insular ethnic or immigrant community, or 'boss towns' where laborers are exploited in dangerous jobs (mining, early aviation, girder walkers, soldiers, mafia). My frame challenge is there might be author-intent in that 'bad' timeline, and the genealogy chart is their attempt to clear that up.Ī 25yo widow marrying a 25yo widower becomes more plausible in an era where mothers died in childbirth, general life expectancy was in the low-50s, and society validates only legal unions that result in fertility (pressure to remarry) – also a lack of modern medicine, contraception, women's rights to retain their deceased husband's property/business, etc. You've decided (for the sake of the question) the author just didn't do the plotting homework.

#Aeon timeline 1 adding birthdays how to

(a small frame challenge)Īlthough this is not your question (which has been edited), I think there's a component missing about how to give feedback to the author. She will fix it, or tell you the reason she wants it that way. If you feel she's made a mistake, just point out the mistake. There is no magic wand that prevents a plot hole. Especially if you have them on a chart that might enable the reader to recognize impossibilities. Suggestions?Īll the dates and places of birth, marriage, and death should be planned in advance to be plausible, so that they can be consulted to prevent saying something in the narrative that makes no sense.

#Aeon timeline 1 adding birthdays professional

I am not a fiction writer, so I don't know where to look for professional or semi-professional advice on avoiding implausible events in such a story. (Like a character who had to have died in 1880 homesteading in Oklahoma-which didn't happen before 1889.) Especially if you have them on a chart that might enable the reader to recognize impossibilities. My thought is that all the dates and places of birth, marriage, and death should be planned in advance to be plausible, so that they can be consulted to prevent saying something in the narrative that makes no sense. My suspicion is that she just hadn't thought that deeply about it. Others seem to require two people to be married and widowed and remarried before they are 25 (possible, but going to raise eyebrows). However, a couple of the details she did give are hard for me to fit into the historical context without it seeming weird. I assume the details she didn't give me are not important to the plot.

Someone asked me for a genealogy chart to put in the novel she plans to write.