writing

Way With Worlds: The Power of Timelines

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Clockwork

So let me be honest upfront. I love timelines in worldbuilding, in writing, in game design. I love history in general, so I’m biased, but there’s many reasons to love them in your creative endeavors.  Mine is probably just a bit more irrational.

When I write, I often create timelines as a form of writing, and in worldbuilding they’re very important to me. So I wanted to cover their value for you as worldbuilder, writer, game designer, and so on. Also it sort of justifies my love so I don’t feel weird.

(Oh, and yes, I’m a Program Manager so you can guess I’m really biased towards Timelines professionally).

So here’s why I love Timelines . . . world building wise, that is.

You Know Your History

Having a timeline is pretty integral to worldbuilding because stories happen in a place that has a past. Recent events have one impact, past events another. Two people interact because their timelines intersect, two empires come to blows because they are competing for the same space at the same time. Your world was made at a certain time and the gods will return at another.

It’s actually too far out to say that worldbuilding is a way is all about timelines.

The value of timelines therefore is making sure you know what’s going on, why, and when. If you’ve ever read a story where the history was all too “timey-wimey” you know what I mean – imagine as a writer keeping track of that . . .

Provides Realism

Having good timelines also means that your readers/players will find the worlds more believable. Think of what a timeline brings:

  • A sense of cause and effect – and in turn a sense of stakes that cause can have effects in the future.
  • A sense of believability. Good understanding of timelines means a solid, believable world because of the cause and effect. An unrealistic setting can be very realistic when its history makes sense.
  • A sense of empowerment. Especially important for gaming worldbuilding. To see the past in turn is to believe you can influence the future or know why the characters in a game are doing what they do.
  • Proper conversation. Ask how many of our conversations are about the past. Just think of what it means in writing/creating conversation in your settings.

Good timelines means believability.

They Stabilize The World You Build

I strongly recommend reviewing your world (and story, see below) timelines now and then. When you have good timelines and good continuity, a review can also help you polish your world, head off issues, and in general write better.

We’ve all made writing mistakes. But when you have a timeline, regular review can polish, strengthen, and improve your world. That timeline itself is a powerful tool.

Even if you don’t think you need the review . . . well it’s there in case you need it. You always have it there just in case . . .

Timelines Prime Awareness

Building timelines as part of your world-setting also makes you aware. The very act of contemplating interactions and so forth helps you become more intimate with your setting. Even f you don’t enjoy timelines, they are ways to truly know your world.

I find that taking time for timelines means that you develop awareness of so much more. Much as it’s good for readers/players you believe the world, for you it means a sense of what it’s all about.

Helps You Create Tales

The flipside to the centuries, aeons, and more of history that you have created is that when you’re good at doing timelines (say, in worldbuilding), that it makes storytelling easier.

I use timeline based storytelling when I write or run RPGs. I figure out what’s happening, how things interact, and what happens. I actually have even kept timelines of various characters/groups an then looked to see how they intersect. Literally, the story just unfolds as the different “timelines” interact.

This can be great for adding structure to your writing or creating a cause-effect chart for a game:

  • Determine what happens when.
  • Move the “timeline” along and determine how events intersect.
  • Those events that are important to the players/readers/etc. are the ones that become prominent.
  • Write/implement what’s important (and track what may be unseen).

Over time I find this method just becomes habitual. Which is good if you’re doing a complex tale or one of those mega-multi-ending visual novels.

Timelines Jumpstart Your Imagination

Well you may have all sorts of things going and your story is easy to write. Except for those moments where your imagination locks up and you’ve got a world with nothing happening.

This is where your Timeline keeping helps.

Read over the timelines in your world, review unused elements or hanging lines, or events tat had wide repercussions and see what they inspire. It’s playing “what if” or “what may happen’ with your own world, and can quickly result in many ideas.

Provides Good Organizational Skills

Working with timelines also teaches you good organizational skills. I’m not joking here – good worldbuilding needs good organization, and timelines are pretty much all organization.

Making the effort to keep good timelines (as needed), write with them, etc. just makes you better at keeping your ideas organizing and your worldbuilding. It develops good habits because you put a lot of work into this.

It might even help you elsewhere. I know a few cases where my world building record keeping was educational in my career, teaching me about writing and organizing documentation.

Timelines Reveal Flaws

Working with Timelines is also a way to find out where you have, are, and will screw up.

First, having good timelines reveals, when reviewed, where you made mistakes and need to fix continuity.

Secondly, having good timelines lets you double-check what you’re doing and think about current writing or active game development in an appropriate cause-effect manner.

Third, reviewing timelines keeps you primed (as noted) so you’ll be less likely to mess up. When your last review reminded you that the Dwarves are facing ecological catastrophe, you’ll make sure to mention it and eventually have it happen.

Timelines Let You Stay Productive

You don’t want to write, code, or do art. But you want to do something with your world.

Go flesh out some timelines. Go on, figure out what happened in the Boring Century, or work out the exact details of the Rival Band’s early days. It lets you be productive when you’re not up for heavy lifting, its fun, and it provides all of the above advantages.

Timelines Can be Fun

If you’re like me, messing around with Timelines is also just plain entertaining. Sometimes we need a break and want to come up with the history of an obscure wine in our setting because.

Again, though, this IS me.

Closing

I love Timelines, as you can tell. The advantages are really profound.

I also find that no matter what methods of the above appeal (or don’t appeal) to you the very exercises of some making you better at all the others. Writing with timelines makes you a better note-keeper, fleshing out timelines during writer’s block inspires you, etc. Working with Timelines in any extent improves your skills in all.

Plus, of course you have something to stick on a wiki or a blog or in a guide later.

. . . where your fans will catch errors or come up with fanfic that you never expected. But that’s the risk you chose . . .

– Steven Savage

Geek As Citizen: Your Children Are Ugly And Stupid

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Atomic Bomb Test

(Going to expand GAC a bit to go beyond the abstract and the society-spanning here. I think it’ll be quite welcome).

Once among my many readings, someone said that you should treat every response to a blog or a website as a post of its own, part of your own body of writing or personal brand. I wish I could find where I read that, both because I’d like to quote it directly, and because if I somehow hallucinated it that was a pretty profound hallucination and I want to take credit.

That being said, wherever I read this (or whatever state I was in when I deluded myself) it really affected me. I think a few of our regulars here can recall how some of my blog posting and my commenting changed over the year, and that post was a big part of it. I’ve tried, and worked harder over time, to make sure if I say something it’s useful – and of course reflects well on me.

Any writer – professional or amateur, aspiring or arrived, knows that the words we craft are important. Words are part of being human, and they have an effect on others and affect us as we write them. We can become meander and crueler and make others the same, or we can practice wisdom and share it.

As we all communicate, what we write and say and post is important.  We’re all writers and speakers and so forth. The words we make are our children, really.

However a quick review of many of our linguistic offspring will make us realize a lot of our children are an unpleasant and ignorant lot.

Evil Thread: Army of Dumbness

In the last year you probably heard of Popular Science shut down online comments, noting that it could skew perception of stories. I myself felt mixed feelings on this, of course; I love comments and interaction, and dialogue.

Yet, since that incident, I began thinking about this more and more. It’s frankly not hard to find comment threads degenerating into toxic commentary, non-sentences like “Epic Fail,” and so on. It’s almost refreshing to see a good old “Ron Paul 2012” or something and you feel nostalgic in that at least someone isn’t calling someone else an asshat.

I came to realize that for some sites, posts, and so on comments were probably not appropriate for the intention of said site. Certainly I don’t think of science as a place where random comments about how one has had intercourse with another person’s combat-boot wearing mother as appropriate. There are, in short, different forms of dialogue appropriate for different people, temperaments, and sites.

Still, this stuck with me as well. Over time, as I thought about the value of comments I began to see how things could go downhill in supposedly civil conversations on sites I liked. I began wondering just what people thought they were achieving.

Of course they weren’t focused on achieving anything but catharsis.  It was just ranting and yelling into the void all too often.

THE UGLY MINERVAS*

The aforementioned advice about writing comments as actual writing is sort of the antithesis of catharsis-posts. It’s about being thoughtful, about thinking of what you’re doing, about your personal brand. It’s a deeper expression that’s not just rage, or anger, or whatever spawned the last weird post that accuses the President of practicing Witchcraft with the remains of Neil Armstrong.**

After observing posting and comments online, good and bad, for the last few months, I’m reiterating my support for the statement I discussed at the start; we should treat our public internet writing as real writing, that does something, that connects, and that doesn’t make us look like raging loons (or at least we’re well-written and interesting raging loons). We should in short seek to communicate.

Venting has it’s place, but it’s not a very big one.

Really Communicating

In the end, I think in commenting or not on sites, blogs, whatever is a case of good communicating. It’s establishing a way to talk to people, imparting information, building your brand – and setting the stage for actually talking. Yes, you may deal with ignorant comments, bizarre racism, and of course random postings of “Rand Paul 2014″*** But at least you don’t have to descend to that level – and it’s not like you’ll get much done anyway.

It’s also about how we function. As XKCD notes, someone being wrong on the internet is hard to get worked up on, since so many people are often wrong****. It’s not worth getting worked up for, not worth getting upset, unless of course there are practical reasons and we can do practical things about them.

It comes down to what are we trying to achieve by writing. If it’s only (or always) catharsis, then it’s better to take a run, get drunk, have sex, or play video games (preferably not all at once, you only have two hands). If it’s more, well . . . then that’s writing.

Otherwise it’s just shouting through our fingers.

MOVING ON AND UP

Over the last few months I’ve tried a few things to help me.  Some notes and ideas.

  1. One thing I experimented with between myself and Serdar was writing on posts I liked. That was excellent for my writing and communication, and something I really should do more on with friend’s blogs. Perhaps you’ll want to try this forming of dialogue.
  2. Read the comments sections of your favorite websites – really read them. How much of it is actually useful?
  3. The next time you see someone post something stupid that you agree with, look at times you’ve seen people post with equal stupidity but disagreeing with you. It’ll really help develop awareness of how fast dialogue can degenerate.
  4. Do treat each post, anonymous or not, as a real piece of writing and part of your personal brand. What do you really want to do, what is useful, and how would you react if people traced it back to you.
  5. Contemplate different ways to have dialogue. There’s internet comments, twitter, blog exchanges, podcast debates, etc. Which ways fit your goals best? I think at times we’ve become too obsessed with internet comments . . . says the guy who did a post on them.

Now I should note I’m not against short comments or anything. Sometimes they’re socially useful, saying thanks or acknowledging someone – in their words, polite and a part of communication. It’s just when you get going . . .

. . . make sure it’s worth it.

Less Ugly Minervas.

– Steven Savage

 

* This would be a good band name.
** I assume this is not an actual rumor. I wish I could be 100% confident that it wasn’t.
*** You know it’s coming.
**** Including your humble author at times. At times.

Geek As Citizen: More On Writing And Reposting

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Paper And Stars

As I’ve hinted at before, once I finish rewriting Way With Worlds over at Seventh Sanctum (and republished here) I plan to wrap it up into a book. Admittedly this could be quite a ways away since it is not just a rewrite but adding everything I learned in the last ten-fifteen years, so my guess is I may be doing this for up to a year longer. However, at some point I want to take it, re-edit it, maybe add a bit more, and do it as a book.

(Also possibly to take a break as this is pretty intense).

Anyway the reason I plan to turn this into a book:

  1. I think it’d be pretty useful.
  2. People who read the column in the past had commented on the value they got from it, and one had even printed it out.
  3. It helps preserve knowledge, which I wrote about previously.

I was discussing this with Serdar, and mentioning some of his past reviews and writings, and future plans. He’s quite adept at reviews and writing, and I thought maybe he should consider something similar. He noted he wouldn’t, as some writing is appropriate for a book, some isn’t, some things are good to put in print, for others being on the internet is enough. Plus some things aren’t appropriate to charge for.

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