IF THIS IS SUNDAY…

The other day I was yanked out of a book right in the middle of a sentence. No, the phone didn’t ring, no one was knocking at my door, and nothing was boiling over on the stove. What wrenched me out of the story was a timeline malfunction. But I wasn’t reading a time travel romance; I was reading a contemporary romantic mystery. The jolt to my personal time continuum occurred when the heroine mentioned that it was Sunday night. The problem was that it had also been Sunday night three chapters ago, and only two day’s worth of plot had unfolded between the first Sunday and the second Sunday. In all fairness to the author, and to make sure I wasn’t sloughing off brain cells, I skimmed back a few chapters, searching for the remainder of the week. I was relieved to find I wasn’t going crazy but annoyed that the author had goofed and none of the various editors who handled the book had picked up on the error. And for this book, it was a MAJOR error. I’m sure the publisher has received reader mail about it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve read a book and found glaring timeline errors. I remember one book which opened with the hero’s birthday approaching. At the end of the chapter, several days had passed, but the same number of days remained until the hero’s birthday. I could site a dozen other examples I’ve come across in the past few years. I understand how this happens. The author revises one part of her manuscript and misses something as she adjusts the remainder of the book to fall in line with the revision. If she misses something, the copy or line editor will surly catch it, right? Apparently not. My theory is that so many of these errors slip by because the copy and line editors are overwhelmed by staggering work loads.

Because you can’t depend on others to catch your mistakes, it behooves you not to make them in the first place. After all, it’s the author’s responsibility to present her manuscript in as perfect a form as possible. So how do you prevent timeline malfunctions? As you work on your manuscript, keep a calendar alongside the keyboard. On the calendar note the date your story opens. If your book doesn’t begin on a specific date, pick one in the appropriate season. Then as your story unfolds, note the various scenes and plot points on the days they occur. When you go back to revise, double-check your revisions against your timeline. Remember, most people won’t notice when you get it right, but they will notice when you get it wrong, and none of us wants to yank a reader out of our story.