Completing Your Writing Toolkit with Aeon Timeline

Are you getting ready for Camp NaNoWriMo? Every year, our amazing sponsors offer all kinds of prep tools as you pack for Camp. This year, Elizabeth Haynes, bestselling author and NaNoWriMo participant, shares how sponsor Aeon Timeline completes her writing toolkit (Want to try Aeon Timeline yourself? Get 20% off using the code CAMPWRITER):

Let me begin by sharing with you some sample conversations with Linda, Genius Copy Editor who worked on my first three novels.

Linda: “I’m working on the assumption that you did use a tide table to work out when the boat’s floating, and when it’s resting on the mud, right?”

Me: “Um…”

Linda: “Do you realise he gave her the flowers on Saturday 12th, and now it’s Friday 9th and she’s saying the flowers smell lovely but actually it’s 27 days later?”

Me: “Oh, right…oops…”

Linda: “You said on page 24 that he visits her on Fridays, but this can’t be a Friday because yesterday he went to the evening class, and on page 122 you said that he goes to evening class on a Tuesday.”

Me: “Okay…”

I love writing. I love not knowing what’s going to happen, and letting my characters have free reign to find out things for themselves. First drafts for me—and this means November—are not without stress, but generally thrilling. Editing, on the other hand, is shudderingly awful. This is because, whilst writing with joyous abandon, I open up great plot chasms, tie characters in impossible knots, and instead of stopping to untangle them and build bridges, I trot onwards because one thing I don’t do in November is edit.

At some point I have to go back and peer into the chasms and gaze in horror at all those impossible knots, and wonder how on earth I can resolve things. And, partly because they are written so freely, my plots are notoriously complicated, with multiple narrators, often more than one timeline running side by side, and additional material like documents, maps and charts.

And that’s why, when I first worked my way through the Aeon Timeline tutorial, I felt a real fist-punch, jump-up-and-down-and-hug-the-dog moment. Let me explain why. If NaNoWriMo is the SuperTurboBoost engine that gets me writing, and Scrivener is the virtual organiser briefcase full of documents, then Aeon Timeline is having Linda the Genius sitting with me as I write, holding my hand (let’s stop that analogy right there because I can’t type and hold hands with Linda at the same time, but you get the picture).

By entering events on the timeline as I write my draft, I can see the plot chasms and fix them. I can see the timeline conflicts—that this must be a Tuesday, for example—and make sure everything else lines up accordingly. I can prevent characters being in two places at the same time. I can see that if my character is fifteen in 2003, then she must have started secondary school in September 1999, when her sister was nine (ashamed to say that, previously, I would have guessed).

Most importantly—I can let the story unfold in a linear fashion, for each character—and then I can rearrange the narrative to reveal the story in a more interesting way, confident that the timings don’t conflict.

Scrivener has helped me organise the structure of my novels a great deal, so I can find key scenes, isolate certain narratives, move things around—but even Scrivener can’t solve the problem of how to keep track of everything that’s going on. More importantly, Scrivener doesn’t help when I can’t even see the plot chasms that I’ve accidentally opened up.

By using Aeon Timeline early, when I’m writing my first draft and planning how the plot’s going to unfold, I save so much time (not to mention my sanity) later on, when it comes to correcting things. I’ve always looked forward to the copy-edit stage but only because it’s nearly the end of the process. This time I’m looking forward to Linda the Genius getting her hands on my manuscript and not having to weep tears of frustration at the chasms and the knots…

Elizabeth Haynes is a writer living in Kent, in the South East of England. She started writing fiction in 2006 with the annual challenge of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the encouragement of the creative writing courses at West Dean College. Her novels include Into the Darkest Corner , Human Remains , and Under a Silent Moon .