I'm not a plotter.
I've said this before. I start a book with only the most basic of ideas about where it will be going and some key scenes. I also write out of sequence, typing scenes as they come to me, before stitching everything together in a logical order at the end.
Because of this, I don't start a book with a detailed timeline - how could I? I have no idea what's going to happen, let alone when!
But the keyword here is start I don't start a book with a timeline, but I invariably have several by the time I have finished.
Why are timelines essential for police procedurals?
My books are split into sections with a day and date for each section. This is my personal stylistic choice and it works very well for me. Other writers may not mention the date at all; you have to start reading that next chapter for clues that a new day has dawned. Again, it works absolutely fine. However, even though that author has not explicitly written the date or the time, they probably have a pretty good idea when that chapter takes place. They may even have a detailed timeline.
Timelines serve multiple purposes.
They help you keep track of what different characters are doing.
Is DC Blogs doing three things simultaneously, whilst DC Doe hasn't been seen or heard from for two days - an absence apparently unnoticed by all of the other characters (but most certainly noticed by Amazon reviewers)?
They maintain the story's internal continuity.
One of the most useful things about timelines, is that they help you see at a glance logical inconsistencies. For example, your SIO can't receive detailed forensic results for a crucial piece of evidence before they've found it and submitted it to the lab...
They make timings realistic.
I've written before about the custody clock (TuesdayTips#63) and alluded repeatedly to the time taken for results to come back from the lab. If you want to write an accurate police procedural, you need to keep timings in mind. Custody clocks start ticking the moment someone is arrested and they are inviolable, so make certain that your story takes this limitation into account. You can fudge the time taken for forensic results to come back from the lab to a degree - authorisation to 'fast-track' them as a priority, or a backlog at the lab can help you time your revelations to make the story dramatic, but there are limits. These days, with quick access to a modern crime lab, a simple crime scene and the budget and clout to push them through the system you may get DNA results overnight - a timeline helps you avoid stretching the limits of credibility. On a more basic level, if you need a character to be in Edinburgh in one scene and Cornwall in the next, leave enough time for them to travel there!
They help control pace.
Even the most blood-pounding thriller needs to give the readers (and the characters) time to catch their breath. Similarly, those beautifully written pieces that give vital character information, or fill-in crucial backstory, may be essential to the book, but tiresome to readers if they pick up a so-called crime thriller and the first fifty pages are all about the character's missing pet.
I've heard of thriller writers colour coding scenes in their timeline according to the action and pace. From there, they can easily tell at a glance if they need to adjust things to keep readers hooked.
They help you spot redundancy/missing scenes.
A good timeline will have a descriptive title for each section; it will be almost like a table of contents. This means that you can see quite quickly if there is anything missing, or anything you can get rid of because it's repetitious.
For example, in a serial killer book, things can become a little formulaic if you aren't careful.
Person Killed --> Police Called --> SIO calls Forensics --> SIO attends autopsy --> Forensics find a clue --> etc etc etc.
A timeline can help you identify this and also highlight areas where there is redundancy. An autopsy would be an essential part of any investigation, but if there are five deaths, do you need to drag your reader to the morgue five times? Can later visits by the SIO be summarised or mentioned in passing?
They help you rearrange your book.
See all of the above! It's also a Godsend for those of us who don't plot, and write out of sequence. You can rearrange your timeline before you start cutting and pasting your chapters into a new draft of your document.


What sort of timelines might you use?
I have a number of different timelines for my books. The most common one is a day-by-day listing of the key events. This starts off pretty blank. For convenience, I tend to work out a starting date, so that I can pin events to this. To this timeline I add in some important dates, eg bank holidays, birthdays, clock changes, school holidays etc.
As I write the book, I find that I also build more detailed timelines for individual days. My current work in progress has several, ranging from the night of the murder and how it was planned, to the police's investigation of a suspect's alibi.
I also have a series timeline that places the books chronologically and notes key events. This helps me be consistent - for example I have a significant birthday that can't be ignored during an upcoming book.

Tools for constructing a timeline using common Office programmes.
There are a plethora of programmes and writers aids available these days, many of which are highly recommended. I have yet to bite the bullet and install Scrivener (although I will be doing so in a few months). So instead I am going to make some suggestions based on my own experience using MS Office. Most of these functions are also available in comparable office suites, such as Google Docs.
The simplest way to do it is an Excel Spreadsheet: a column of dates, with a second column containing a description of events.
Excel has a lot of formatting options, so you can easily colour code your timeline. You can even add additional columns, such as which characters are in a scene.
A glaring limitation of Excel is that it won't easily tell you the day of the week for a given date.
If you are confident coding in Excel, this link details how to have it calculate the day for you.
https://exceljet.net/excel-functions/excel-weekday-function
Of course, typing in all that data is a bit of a chore.
I have previously spoken about how useful a descriptive section heading is for navigating your Word document.
These descriptive headings will appear in the Navigation Pane if you have formatted them with one of the heading styles from the Style Gallery. If you go to the end of the document and insert a Table of Contents (found on the Reference Tab), these headers will be listed.
You can then copy and paste the TOC into Excel. Voila! All your section headings are in your spreadsheet, with each section heading on its own row.


Excel is great, but it has its limitations. Most irritating is the fact that reorganising your timeline requires you to cut and paste and insert or delete empty rows, rather than dragging and dropping.
A different method that I heard about recently involves MS PowerPoint. You give each new scene its own slide. If you switch to Slide Sorter View, you can easily rearrange slides into whatever order you want. By using large enough fonts and colours etc, you can encode a lot of information into each slide. You can even write a summary of what happens, which will be a readable size if you double-click the slide to make it full screen.
A limitation is that you can't easily export a table of contents from Word, so that each slide is a new row from the table of contents. However, if you are detailed planner, this might be the method for you.
What information would you include in a timeline?
Do you have any recommendations for simple methods for generating one?
Until next time,
Paul.

On a recent visit to a museum, an information sign proclaimed that the castle that originally stood on that site had been "raised to the ground" in the 16th century. This seemed rather odd; unless it was originally subterranean and had been dragged to the surface. In which case, where was it now?
Of course the correct phrase should have been "razed to the ground".
Before we start, let's just make it clear that this blog post is not going to be poking fun at people for making incorrect word choices, or struggling with misheard common phrases. Indeed it would be very hypocritical.
Like many people, I struggle with homonyms. Homonyms (and homophones) are words with the same spelling but different meanings, or words that sound the same, but are spelt differently and have distinct meanings. The classic example is Their, There and They're.
I am fortunate in that I actually know the differences between most common homonyms and can easily spot them when proof reading my writing or marking students' work. However, when I am writing, I almost always pick the wrong word first time. Over the years, I've learned to immediately go back over sentences and check the usage and correct as necessary and final versions rarely have errors. I liken it to choosing words blindly from a high shelf. I get to the word and pick one of the choices from the shelf at random. When I finish the sentence, I have to go back and double-check I picked the correct one.
The second problem that many people have is related to phrases. This is often because they are so commonly misused in every day life that we just blindly say or write them without thinking. Or the phrase was slightly misheard - "raised to the ground" is a good example.
An especially tricky subset of this problem is knowing when to use the verb form or noun form of a word (and knowing what that even means! I am a product of the Tory government's disastrous decision in the 80s to not explicitly teach grammar, so I really struggle with this).
Examples of this would be when to use "Licence" or "License".
"Practice" or "practise"?
The problem with all these examples, is that a basic spell checker wouldn't pick up these as errors. All these words are correctly spelled. The latest versions of MS Word now have intelligent grammar checkers, that will place a blue squiggly line under these words, and flag a possible "incorrect word choice", but it's far from perfect and doesn't actually correct it for you.
So how can you minimise these errors in your writing?
Fortunately, there are a lot of resources out there that can help.
The simplest thing to do is simply ask Google.
After reading the sign at the museum and thinking it didn't look right, I simply Googled.
'raised to the ground' OR 'razed to the ground'
I received lots of hits and was able to confirm that my instinct was correct.
Similarly, 'Licence' OR 'License' will produce dozens of pages that seek to explain the difference, or even furnish you with helpful mnemonics to remember the correct usage.
A real gem of a website is
https://writingexplained.org/confusing-words
This lists in alphabetical order thousands of commonly confused words.
Public Health Warning:
It's important to remember that US English and UK English can often be different. A great example is
Tyre vs Tire
(https://writingexplained.org/tyre-vs-tire-difference)
As the website helpfully highlights further down the article, tyre is the traditional UK spelling for the rubber surround on a wheel.
Both UK and US writers use tire for fatigue - e.g. I am beginning to tire.
Americans use tire for both meanings.
​
If it's unclear from the website if it is US or UK English, try typing one of the variants into Google - perhaps in a very simple sentence fragment - and seeing if it returns hits from trusted UK websites such as the BBC or The Guardian or even gov.uk. As always, try and find a couple of examples to be certain.


What words do you find especially tricky?
Have you any suggestions for how to choose the correct word or phrase?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until next time,
Paul

Here's a little activity for you. Pick several different books off your bookshelf, written by different authors and published by different publishers. Read the first chapter, paying particular notice to the spelling and grammar. What do you notice?
The chances are, that if you look carefully enough, you will notice some inconsistencies.
The differences are small. For example, look at the use of possessive apostrophes for names ending in the letter S.
Do the they follow the traditional UK English rule of a single apostrophe, for example.
Warren Jones' car.
Or do they use the traditional American English convention of apostrophe S? e.g
Warren Jones's car.

Do they use an S or a Z in words like fantasise or fantasize?

Do verbs end in t or ed?
He leant against the table
He leaned against the table?

The chances are that you were taught some rules of grammar and punctuation at school that you have seen 'broken' by writers in your favourite books.
The most obvious ones can be chalked up to differences between UK English and American English. For example colour or color, but even in two books published in UK English, there maybe differences between books from different publishers.
This isn't down to sloppy editing, rather the publishers have their own style guides. Essentially, these are manuals used by publishing houses to ensure consistency across their titles.
The English language is governed by a lot of small rules, but not all of these rules were written down. The language is a living, breathing construct, and has evolved organically over many decades, and with thousands of new words being coined every year, common usage isn't always common!
When I was at school in the eighties, I was taught to enclose speech with double quotation marks (") and if the person speaking quotes somebody else, to enclose the quotation with single (') quotation marks.
"She told me to 'go away'," said Warren.

I still follow that rule when writing. However, my copy editors change this to
'She told me to "go away",' said Warren.

This is because it is the HarperCollins preferred style.
Similarly, HC prefer 'he leaned against the table'. However, other publishers prefer 'he leant against the table'.     
A few years ago, my original publisher was bought by HarperCollins. My first four books used the traditional UK rule for apostrophes after names ending in S. But when I received the copy edits for my first book written under HC, I was taken aback to realise that all the Instances of Jones' had been changed to Jones's. I queried this and they agreed to keep the original form so that my books are consistent.
These changes may seem small and inconsequential, and the job of the copy editor is to 'correct' these errors, but I am a bit of a pedant, and I like to hand in a manuscript that will require as few changes as possible - it's easier for everyone. So I asked for a copy of the style guide. It has been really useful.
The document runs to several dozen pages and covers everything from preferred spellings (e.g. S or Z), when to use hyphens (-), en dashes (–) or em dashes (--) and ellipses (...), when to spell out numbers or write them as figures and how to write dates and times or units of measurement. There are also guidelines for when to italicise foreign words, titles of publications and place names, as well as how to abbreviate, for example, Professor can be written as Prof. or Prof (no full stop).

If you are writing for a publisher, then I recommend asking your editor for a copy of their style guide.
If you are self-publishing, or haven't yet got a publisher in mind, I suggest searching the internet for a style guide and then sticking with it. It looks more professional. Ultimately, there is no right or wrong style, so pick one that you like, that suits the style of document (technical writing is different to fiction), and be consistent. Also, decide if you want to use UK or American English (or Australian or Canadian etc).
This Wikipedia page has a list of common style guides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_style_guides

English is an evolving language.
The style guide I use is a few years old. Therefore, it doesn't cover everything, particularly more modern words and phrases.
So sometimes it is necessary to do a bit of research.
The Guardian and Observer newspaper have a useful online guide for quick reference.
https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a
Sometimes, finding a publication using the word or phrase you want to use in context can answer a quick query. Wikipedia can be useful, but bear in mind that many of the content editors are American. The BBC is also a good source, but take care - I'm sad to say that like many journalistic sources, they have cut back on their editors to save money, and early drafts of a story sometimes contain typos and other errors. As a basic rule, Google what you are looking for and then check several different sources.

Trademarks and Capitalisation.
My internet search history would baffle anyone who doesn't know that I am a writer. In amongst the searches for technical details about decomposition of dead bodies, there are visits to McVitie's' home page (to look up the correct capitalisation of Jaffa Cakes) and the Wikipedia page for Pritt Stick to do the same. I always double-check names of businesses and trademarks - you'd be surprised just how many that you think you know are actually spelled or punctuated differently. Classic examples are the supermarkets. Tesco (not Tescos, despite most people I know adding the S when they say the word out loud) and Sainsbury's (note the apostrophe). Morrisons, doesn't have an apostrophe.

Next week, I will continue this theme by looking at how to select the correct homonym, how to choose the correct wording for commonly misused phrases and list some resources for choosing when to use different spellings eg licence and license or practice and practise.

Do you have a preferred style guide?
Feel free to comment below.
Until next time, take care,
Paul