We’ve arrived at that point where one year is beginning to wind down and we start to look to the next. It got me thinking about calendars, and more specifically how I use calendars as a tool to help my writing. I want to share with you two of my best tips for plotting a novel with a calendar. The first way helps you to keep a story on track, and the second helps preserve you as a writer! While these aren’t necessarily mind-blowing tactics, I know that I went a long while in my writing life before I started using them, and things have greatly improved for me ever since! My hope is that they’ll help you, too.
Two Tips for Plotting a Novel with a Calendar
As I was working out my plot for my third novel, Frostbite Hotel, I realized I was getting muddled when it came to the passage of time. In terms of story timelines, Frostbite Hotel, set in a contemporary school during the winter months, is a pretty straightforward tale. There is no subplot set in a different era. No one is time-shifting through history. Even still, I needed the story’s events to unfold in a way that felt realistic to my readers. I needed to allow enough time for certain events to take shape, find the perfect moment for specific turning points to occur, and work all of these things around special events that happened at fictitious Huddleston Elementary School. I also wanted to keep the snowy season in mind, particularly the best time for blizzards and winter celebrations in the Canadian prairie location I was imagining. (Pretty important to a story about a schoolyard overrun with snow fort entrepreneurs!)
So, I turned to the calendar app on my computer. I created a dedicated Frostbite Hotel calendar, chose an icy blue highlight color, and began to plot the key events that I was planning to include in my story across a couple of winter months. Because I could look at my plot points all at-a-glance, I quickly realized where I needed to stretch some action over more time, or rein things in where I was dragging.
After dragging and dropping things around on my calendar to make some tweaks and adjustments, I soon saw a logical timeframe emerge—a flow and order of events that made sense. I worked to this “fictional schedule” as I wrote my draft, calling up my calendar whenever I needed reference points. It certainly helped! And there was something about seeing story events in my calendar that made my story feel even more real; though it was fiction, it felt more rooted in real time and in my real life—so, that was fun! Also, I think it’s interesting to note that I don’t actually state any dates in this book, but it was helpful for my own “author logic”. And those little transitions we sometimes use, like “a few days later” or, “on the following Monday” had a real reason behind them!
My next two novels were even more firmly in need of a calendar when it came to planning plot and story world. The action in My Best Friend is a Viral Dancing Zombie all funnels toward a school project deadline, with the need to balance all the conflict and incidents that happen along the way. Also, my two best friend characters are splitsville for a time; so, using two separate, color-coded character calendars, I was able to figure out what each of them was doing over the course of their separation (even when the secondary character wasn’t involved in the main action, he was doing something behind the scenes that would become important to the story…and I wanted it to make sense!). Meanwhile, Mermaid Warrior Squad, a hybrid novel/graphic novel, takes place at a two-week summer day camp. When the story’s events occur are so important, I actually inserted a camp schedule into the book! (But it was of course first planned in my own digital calendar.)
All of my books so far have been straightforward, that is, in linear time and over the course of a relatively short time frame (a couple of weeks to a few months). I’m working on something with a more complex timeframe at the moment, set in a world with fantasy elements and a fictional history that I need to account for. I can assure the fantasy and timeline-conscious writers out there that a calendar is a GREAT help for more complex stories! You can even use two, three or more calendars in parallel. Different colors can represent different characters, or eras, or timelines for parallel worlds if that’s how your story leans! It’s a great tool to keep your story world straight for yourself, whether you lay out “dates” for your readers or not.
Of course this can all be translated to a paper calendar system. A wall calendar or one of those great big (physical) desktop or “family planner” type calendars can be brilliant—highly visual—and right in front of your face at all times if you choose! It’s also easy to get creative with color and organized with handy handwritten notes.
Use a calendar to save your writer’s self!
You don’t need me to tell you that you can use your calendar to make a writing schedule, and set writing goals and deadlines. Of course you can and it can be a great idea!
But if you’re a story-planner type (and if you’re using calendars as a tool, you likely are!) there is one date that I encourage you to mark on your calendar and stick to no matter what: a planning deadline. And by that I mean the day you commit to stop planning and start drafting.
A pitfall for planners, one that I know too well, is spending too much time planning. So much so that it comes at the expense of writing. I get it—we planners want to get our stories worked out to airtight degree of detail…but because of that, we often put off actually writing our draft! In the most extreme cases, but far more common than we might want to admit, we deplete our creative energy and even our own interest in our tale through excessive planning, and never start writing at all.
As I say in my book The One Week Writing Workshop, a certain alchemy occurs in the writing itself. To enjoy the writing experience and to let your story become what it’s meant to be, you need to actually write. So, commit to a planning deadline—marked boldly on your calendar!—after which you start to write no matter what. Don’t worry if you’re not quite sure how long your planning will or should take—estimate it and run with it. You can always return to do a bit more planning if your writing stalls or you hit a dead end. But I’m guessing you’ll be delighted by what you discover in the drafting process once you step beyond the calendar and into the actual world of your story.