Timing. Lining that up is a big plot point right? Where plot holes can occur. What techniques do you use to line it up? I will share some examples from my recent revisions, as well as the first draft.
A freelance editor presentation recently mentioned that a technique used by Rowling was to make a chart with each character on the left, then their arc and plot line, so she could have some peak while others were more of a lull.
I am not a plotter, so I don't have a graph like that. As a pantser, here are some techniques I use:
In the first draft, I had to introduce all of the main characters, and keep straight how old they were, and at what point in each other's lives they married the main character. I did draw a chart for that, marking the marriages and ages on each timeline.
In the revisions, in the fourth act, I have a few points of interweaving characters and plot elements. There is a lot of preparation for a war, and a search and rescue mission, simultaneously. I seem to do a lot of things in my novel simultaneously with each other as a theme. One character comes back and connects with other characters, but the events that happen to her were not lining up. My solution was to make a summary. Three things have to happen to her, and the order has to be consistent. For example, she can't appear to have a meeting on the first day if she got sidetracked, and had had a "good night's sleep" in the meeting. Identifying the individual events that happened, and organizing the logic about what order they had to happen helped. Then taking a pass to focus on that helped me catch things in the different scenes which were inconsistent.
The second point I had to move to make sense was the war speech. I had put it at the start of the section because it was one of the first ideas I thought of that needed to happen in these chapters. However, I had to unwind a lot of the different plot elements, like the one above. The timeline between the war speech and the battle turned into weeks of time for the characters, and that kind of lost the impact. Moving it until after those events and before the war, however, changed the plot elements mentioned in the speech. It meant going back to changing the focus of the motivation. The motivation at the time in the sequence when it was earlier also lost effect after certain topics had been discussed by the characters in the interim time. I had to ask on the new day when this is given, what are the questions and motivations of this army about to head to battle? How are they different than they were a few weeks ago for them?
As you can see, different timeline problems have different factors that lead to different solutions, and different techniques to resolve. Hope these examples are helpful, and post any examples you have experienced in the comments!
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