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Blogs by Michael Charles Messineo
Building your story and checking the dates 2/12/2006 5:00:22 AM
Creating a time line of your story helps build your characters and lines up the plot.
After finishing my latest book, Maddy’s Secret: The Search For Einstein’s Lost Work, I decided to pull all my research together and post it as an article. The funny thing is that Maddy’s Secret only briefly touches on my original research of Nikola Tesla. Two years ago, after pulling together all the facts and dates and creating my own time-line I quickly discovered that for my original plot idea to work I would have to tweak the facts and twist a few things to make it work. But that was something I didn’t want to do.
When I write, one of the first things I do is create a time-line of my story. What year is it, what season, what news events surround the time in my book, how old is each character and when were they born. This helps me create my characters and the influences in their lives. When mentioning real news items of the past, it was important for me to be lined up logistically with dates and ages of the characters. In Maddy’s Secret, there are numerous references to past events and some brief references that were important to the story line that went back 100 years in time.
After creating a spreadsheet with 46 cross referenced dates that I identified in my story, it was now time to triple check each one so they lined up to each reference in the story. As it turned out, my main historical person, Nikola Tesla, died 6 months before my original plot line even happened. I quickly found a way to tie Tesla to Albert Einstein and created a hand-off of the plot that fit in perfectly.
Want to go for a ride? Check out my article, Nikola Tesla Timeline – Legend, Magician Sorcerer. This man has touched everyone’s life in so many ways.
