Backstory Timetable

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!