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5: Plotting — Part Three

By October 29, 2025No Comments

Knowing your plot allows you to build the bones of your book.

This is the third blog exploring plotting, which turned out to be a much richer part of the writing process than I initially expected! Looking back, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I lean more to being a plotter than a pantser, and so I have views…

Having determined the POV of a scene, which was discussed in the Plotting-Part Two blog post, I now work out the timing of the events within the story. I also check that I’ve wrapped up and resolved all the plot lines or story arcs by the end of the narrative. No one likes a hanging plot line! :~)

Timing is everything

In some stories, the writer doesn’t need to know much more about the timing within their narrative beyond when the first scene starts. The story unfolds from that opening in a linear and chronological fashion as it follows one or more characters.

Other more complex tales follow a non-linear approach. Some are deliberately vague about dates and time for artistic effect. Other include flashbacks and flashforwards, so events are not presented chronologically. Even though they jump between different times, some of these stories can be pretty loose in terms of tracking dates and time—such as, five years earlier…

And then there are stories that follow multiple characters doing a range of things that take differing lengths of time, and all those things need to come together for a narrative climax or resolution. In this type of story, one with multiple plot lines, you need to have a firm grip on start times and durations to make it believable. 

I learnt this the hard way.

In one of my earlier books, I took a fairly relaxed view on the timings during story development. Then, deep into the writing, I realised I needed to work out exactly how long something took. The result of that event impacted multiple characters, which meant I needed to make sure that the action synced with what was happening in other parts of the narrative. It took a lot of time and effort to work back from that one event and adjust the affected scenes. In some parts, I had to move the scene sequence around to address the issue.

In short, it was a lot of work. A life lesson I’ve picked up is understanding that it’s far better and easier to alter your design at the blueprint stage than after you’ve started building your project!

Although addressing timing takes effort, getting it correct really matters. Timing acts like the plumbing or electrical wiring of the story you’re creating, keeping things moving along without pulling any attention to itself. Get it wrong, however, and it becomes very apparent that something is off.

Here are some exaggerated examples to illustrate what you want to avoid:

  • characters saying they’re going on a two-week journey, and then have them turn up at their destination the very next day. 
  • Characters who vanish from the story for a time as things unfold without an explanation of what they’re doing and where they’ve gone.
  • scheduling issues where event two is discussed by characters as happening after event one, but event two actually occurred before event one. 

These sorts of mistakes damage the readers’ suspension of disbelief, reduces their immersion in the story, and leads to confusion and frustration. All of this reduces your credibility as a writer, and that’s bad. :~)

To work out and track the timings, I manually enter the completed and refined mind map into another app called Aeon Timeline. If you were to be very reductionist about it, Aeon Timeline could be viewed as a specialised type of project management tool. It helps you to create events within your story and allocate time to them. This allows you to work out when an event starts, how long it takes, and how it relates to other actions happening around it.

This is very useful when working out how the scenes should be sequenced—including identifying where events overlap—and in calculating how much time has passed between different story milestones. This helps me see how all the pieces should fit together in a way that is both logical and has the maximum impact as I increase the story’s pace and tempo.

Tracking characters and plot lines 

Aeon Timeline also brings additional clarity to the story development process. I don’t use all the app’s functionality, but it allows me to define each of the characters and give them their own entry so I can assign them to scenes. This means I can build on the work done in the mind map, and not only see who holds a scene’s POV, but who else is involved with the event. This helps me to develop and capture more details within a scene.

Assigning characters also enables the subway view within Aeon Timeline, so I can see where the story’s characters interact with each other across different scenes. For example, if a character is brought into the story, but their subway line doesn’t intersect with any other character, are they actually needed in the story? If they don’t advance the narrative, consider what role they should play or if they should be removed. This is the Chekhov’s gun principle at work (although that applies to a lot more than characters). 

I find the subway view particularly helpful when assessing how plot lines or story arcs are introduced, unfold, and then resolve themselves. To take a simple view, plot lines and story arcs fall into two main categories: those that directly move the main storyline forward, and those that focus on the personal motivations and needs of the characters within the story. This secondary group of developments is not necessarily central to the main plot, but they enrich the story and help the reader believe in a living, more vibrant world.

As an example, the steps in a thriller’s main plot line could be: target the data repository to rob, steal the specialised tools for the job, execute the plan, and escape the vengeful billionaire oligarchs out for revenge. Subplots could include the main character’s reservations about taking the mission, including worries over her family’s security, and her desire to run a successful last job to remove the pain of a failed heist in the past. Even better, the main character’s last failed mission was for, and failed because of, one of the oligarchs that are now after her.

As you can see, the subplots add a richness and verisimilitude that make the main story more enjoyable, believable, and engaging, But only if you close them off!

You can’t start a subplot, story arc, or plot line without resolving it before the end of the story. If you don’t, you’ll have a group of unhappy readers who were invested in your characters but then feel let down because something they were interested in wasn’t satisfactorily answered. By that, I mean, the character’s needs or motivations have to somehow be addressed through developments within the narrative. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending, but it needs to be brought to a close.

Syncing the narrative structure

But all this work doesn’t yet result in how the narrative is structured—the arrangement of elements such as the scenes and chapters. These need to be created and sequenced to form your prologue, body, and epilogue—or whatever elements work for your narrative. I’m not going into the three act structure, the hero’s journey or anything like that—there’s already been a lot of discussion from people a lot more qualified than me on this! I’m just focusing on how I build my stories.

While the timeline view in Aeon Timeline helps you see all a narrative’s events—showing them as different entries on the timeline—this only provides insight into their temporal sequence. The entries don’t have any further organisation, such as being arranged into scenes or chapters. For example, I may want to have an entry as a single chapter, or join several entries together to form scenes within one chapter.

The timeline view also doesn’t help me determine which events occur within the book, and which occur “off stage”. These off-stage events are ones that you know about as the author, but are only referred to within the story instead of being directly experienced by the reader. Integrating and organising on-stage and off-stage events within your narrative further enriches your story while helping you control its flow, focus, pacing, and tension.

To manage what’s actually in the book, and the order in which the events appear, you need to build the narrative structure. I use Aeon Timeline narrative view’s to arrange the scenes—grouping some into chapters while others become a whole chapter in their own right—and place them in the right sequence. This is how I can have something like a flashback in the book, while still seeing where that event actually occurs in the proper timeline.

As a final step of the plotting stage, once I’m happy with the narrative sequence, I sync the Aeon Timeline file to a new project within Scrivener. That’s where I do my writing. The sync process creates the new scene and chapter entries within Scrivener. It also adds all the metadata I captured or defined within Aeon Timeline—such as a synopsis, start date, end date, characters, locations, and more— to each of those entries. This is great and saves me a lot of work. 

Finishing all these steps means I’m now ready to start writing. And that’s what we’ll talk about in the next post.

Footnotes

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