It was recently brought home to me the importance of creating a timetable for my characters’ and their family’s backstory. The dates when things happened and how they interrelate can be vital to a story’s viability. And especially when writing historical fiction, you need to know not only what happened to your characters and those connected to them (friends, family) as necessary, but what was happening in the real world at that time.
As I was happily plotting the next scene I was going to write, I needed to know when my heroine’s father went on a trip and when he came back. As soon as I began to go through the dates this happened, I suddenly realized that if her father went on his trip when I had planned, the heroine would be older than the hero (it was already established and necessary that the hero be in his late 20’s or 30 and the heroine be 20 or 21 years old).
My dates didn’t work!
I went into panic mode and began figuring out the dates of everything in both protagonist’s backstories as well as what was happening in the real world at that time.
For example, I had thought my hero’s father would have gone to France carrying classified information to give to the French government—I had assumed that this happened during the Napoleonic War. But when I figured out when he had had to do this, it was a year before the French Revolution and about five years before the start of the war. Ooops! Argh!
But I still needed this event to occur. Fade in to a scene of yours truly frantically reading Wikipedia, BritishHistory.org, and any other website I could find to give me a clear picture of what was happening at that moment in history and what the hero’s father could have possibly brought to France that would make him guilty of treason.
I could go into great detail about all I found—actually, really fascinating history—but I will spare you. Suffice it to say, I finally hit upon a solution dealing with the American Revolution and the French Revolution (which was partially sparked by both the American Revolution itself and the war fought against the British, which, without the French, the American colonists would not have won).
Phew! Problem solved.
But for a few minutes I actually thought that the entire premise of my novel, which I am about 30% finished, was impossible. Ergo, here I am warning you to do your timeline research first before you start writing you novel. You truly don’t want to go through the panic and anxiety-driven scramble through history to find what you need for your story.