Day By Day

[marycatelli]

The characters are plugging along on the events of the plot, and there's the little question of how long does it all take?  In story time?

You can see some truly fantastic plotting carried about by playwrights who adhered to unity of time with what Aristotle would have thought absurd.  Probably best to put them in as small a compass as possible, but then you have to worry about travel times on the road, and how plausible it is that two characters fall sincerely in love in a time, and whether a student can really master an art that quickly, and whether a character has time enough to reflect on events and so come to a new conclusion.  And if you need to have a pregnancy progress, or a sowing and harvest, or any other sequence of required time, it can get interesting.

I like magical geography that doesn't add up.  But there's no denying that one reason for liking it is that you can finesse travel times to fit the story.

Then you have figure out some way to clue the reader into it.  Events like the moon's waxing and waning, or the progress of the seasons, can be useful in that.  But it can always be a trick.

Comments

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

I generally have to run multiple separate edit readings to check on such things. I do passes through the work, checking for specifics like continuity on timelines, or picking through the actions of each secondary character by turns (like swapping a chessboard, or as if you were thinking of writing a draft from their VP instead) and checking how practical that would be.

[marycatelli]

Yes, it's definitely too complex to manage in a single pass.

Sometimes a calendar helps.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Now that is a great idea, will have to remember to do that.

[marycatelli]

Gregorian calendar works even if they have a different one or they don't have one at all that you know of -- it's just needed to keep track of days.