My Mistake
There I was innocently starting to write my novel, when before my eyes my nemesis loomed…Maths! Where the heck had that come from? I didn’t set out for this!
White flag waving frantically in surrender but it wouldn’t leave, I had to meet it head on. And so will you.
The mistake I made was not thinking about any of it before I started, then getting all in a pickle as I went along and having to stop mid flow to work it out.
Save yourself the headache, take some time before you start and work it out.
Why you should bother
It’s all important to the physicality and plausibility of your story structure. It will affect your characters, settings and plot. If your story isn’t plausible, if your reader gets confused or distracted, it will stop them in their tracks and pull them off the page.
Characters age (and what you can do about it)
Here I’m going to give you a worked example.
You set your crime novel in current day – 2020. You decide your protagonist is a detective, he’s going to solve the crime, you want him to be 35 years old in current day.
You had an idea for his back story, he had been deeply effected by the miners strikes of the 80s and the crime is an assignation of a political member, calling into question his own personal feelings towards politics.
OK, sounds a fair and plausible plot. Except the maths don’t work.
If he is 35 in 2020, then he was born in 1985, which is when the strikes happened. So he wouldn’t have been personally deeply affected by them, he had only just been born.
Curse this darn maths!
There are various ways to fix this, but it will mean changing your details.
1. Change his age
You can make him 15 in 1985, still affected through his family by the strikes but makes him 50 in 2020.
You can make him 25 in 1985, deeply affected by strikes as a young man, but this makes him 60 in 2020. Not the young detective you wanted. But being 60 doesn’t have to make him old and inactive. I know 60 year olds competing in triathlons. Make this part of his developing back story, he took to running to clear his head and kept it up. So what, he’s 60, but he is lean and physically fit.
2. Change the back story
There has always been political turmoil globally. Pick a new political issue as his backstory.
If he is 35 in 2020, then he would have been 20 in 2005. Research what happened in the UK in 2005 and choose something. There were the terrible terrorist attacks in London, that’s certainly compelling and still works with your other elements.
3. Change the current setting
You’re not budging, you want him to be 35 and effected by the miners strikes. Fine.
Then you have to move your current setting for the novel.
If he was 20 in 1985, then he would be 35 in 2000. So your novel is set in 2000. This will effect technology used, police and criminal practises, fashion and trends etc.
Either way, you can make it work but before you put the effort into details of your story, do your maths.
Timelines – The Past
If your story involves the past, you’re going to need to work it all out and the more complicated the past, the more important this is, especially if your setting is not of this world.
You may need to create or include the rulers of the past, their lineage, historical events and even your main characters family trees. Then you will know who was where, when it was and how old they were.
My own novel is a fantasy, and although time works the same, my protag is a magical being born as a child, not a baby. They then rule the kingdom, but there are time rules with this too. They don’t live long either. Working out their entire life cycle, along with cycles of the past magical rulers, along with the matching humans around them got very complicated. With patience I got there and I have a little leeway so I should be able to fix any holes in editing. Or I need to find a maths genius to sit with me.
Unfortunatly I don’t have a magic process to calculate it all, I simply wrote down my working outs with a note book and pencil first, then entered them onto an excel sheet, which can also be amended easily.
Again, my advice is, do these calculations at the start of your process, especially if you have a similar complicated timeline.
Timelines – The Present
Now we get to the actual story you are writing. Whether it’s set over a week or over a decade, the maths is going to come back to get you.
1. Travel
My protag goes off on a quest, travelling through a new land, with a time constraint on them. I had to calculate how far my protag could travel each day, depending on which form of transport they took, to work out how big my new land was in distance, where they could get to and by when.
Bloody maths!
For my new land, I started with a very simple map so I could mark where the places were.
Then I researched. How far can the average person walk in a day, travel by horse, by hot air balloon, by steam train…anything you think you want to use.
Once calculated and decided, I then noted the miles between each place on the map and slowly my world formed and still with plausibility.
You should still use your imagination to make it work for you. A normal horse may only travel 40 miles a day, so sure, give them the super steed that no one else dare ride to get them there quicker. Or give them a normal horse, that they ride until it collapses from exhaustion. Knowing the realistic basics, will give you something realistic to work with.
Depending on your genre, will depend on what your calculations are.
A modern day by car is faster than a 1920s car. For Sci-fi – you could make them all teleport in seconds.
2. Scenes
Now that I knew how long travel would take, I could then note what time of day each scene would be able to take place. There is no point writing the most beautiful sun set arrival if they couldn’t have arrived any earlier than midnight.
This however, was the easiest part of all the maths and again, I found you can create leeway if you need a scene to be set in at certain time of day.
I noted the details on my scene log, for quick reference while writing the novel. I keep my scene log on excel and then its super easy to change or move scenes, rather than a hand written note book.
I’ll post a blog about my scene log and other organisation ideas shortly – you can discover my other posts in the blog section.
I hope you’re found this post useful rather than confusing, or even worse, daunting. Don’t be put off by the maths involved, just be aware it’s there.
