Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Does Anybody Really Know What Day It Is?

One of my readers for SSA remarked that my characters were driving around Chicago at an impossible time of day. I’m a California girl who totally understands rush hour. In the early drafts, my characters behaved sensibly, but somehow in one of the revision shake ups, my characters ended up in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

I fixed it, by having them drive all night. Believe me, it’s a better option. Other changes expanded or contracted the original time frame, and now all references to the day of the week are incorrect.

My next revision step will be to make a calendar for my novel. I’ll block out a page of scratch paper with a box for each day of the story. I’ll note what the characters are doing on that day and where they spent the night. Let’s hope they’ll make it home on time.

2 comments:

Natalie Aguirre said...

When I did my outline, I put the days of the week in each chapter so I could keep track of it all. I agree. It's got to make sense.

Ann Finkelstein said...

My outline had days marked too. Then revision happened.