Timeline Proposal

It appears we agree that we should flesh out the Chronology. I’ve tried to clean up that group to make it easier for us to do just that, and I’ve used some `PmWiki magic (pagelist) to try to make things fit well. This results in ten time period pages that are dynamically summarized on a master page. I recommend we use a concept I learned from “Snowflake Plotting” to develop the master timeline, as the timeline is essentially a master plot. I believe this approach will help us make the Chronology narratively strong and unified. If we agree to this approach, then I’m suggesting we each dib a time period and apply the snowflake approach similar in spirit to how we wrote the lexicon.

We seem to agree that the Timeline needs work. We have the Imperium well in hand, but we need to circle back and take what we’ve learned in the lexicon and apply it to other periods; at least for the period summary. To that end, I have been re-organizing the Chronology/Chronology page to make it easier for us to do just that.

I’ve tried to ease our re-writing of the timeline by breaking its content into component pages. Visiting Chronology.Chronology, you’ll see the pages listed simply, then a new section which shows the various periods of our timeline using Pagelists. As a reminder, pagelists are PmWiki’s way of dynamically listing pages within a wiki page. With pagelists, it is possible to include some content from those pages being listed. So, what I did was take the short summaries from Chronology.Timeline, and put those summaries in the top of each time period page. The pagelist on Chronology.Chronology lists the title and the first paragraph of each period page. This ties the master timeline to the individual time period pages. With the exception of the prehistorical entry, the present Chronology.Timeline should be represented with the pagelist in Chronology.Chronology. For pages that already had some content, I moved the content down and labeled it.
I recently picked up a rather interesting method for plotting called ““Snowflake Plotting.” Essentially, the author writes a sentence which summarizies the entire novel. Then, he develops the sentence into a summary paragraph. Each sentence of that paragraph is then developed into its own paragraph. This is sort of like writing a narrative outline. We could apply this approach to each time period by taking the material we have for a given time period to write a summary paragraph that we then expand ala Snowflake Plotting.

This approach will help us make the Chronology narratively strong. The benefits for us are the same for plotting as the master timeline is a master plot. We fill all holes in the timeline. This approach also helps expose ideas that really don’t fit in with the entire plot (e.g. Mecha; based on how we developed the Imperium). Additionally, a visitor would read Chronology.Chronology and get an executive summary of the entire timeline. Clicking through to a time period would present the teasing summary paragraph from the main timeline (showing unity between the master and period pages) and then be greeted with a couple pages that make the time period come alive. Additionally, we could use another pagelist to have a single page (by replacing Chronology.Timeline) display the entire content of all ten periods; which would result in roughly 20 printed pages of detailed history.

How do to this? Why don’t we each start by dibbing a time period? There are ten, and we’ve already handled the Imperium (albeit not via this method, suggesting a re-write is in order), leaving nine. There are three of us. We could either dib three periods at once, or dib one period at a time. Once a period is dibbed, then the author takes what information is available for that period (on the period’s page), and applies the snowflake approach to flesh the information into a strong narrative essay. Along this line, we could set a one-week deadline for each round, which would result in us finishing the timeline re-write in three weeks. What would be a good deadline day-of-the-week? Then, we may have a better idea of where we want to start the lexicon next.

We’ve worked together for over a year on a lexicon, and I think we generally agree on where we’d like to take this. So, we should apply the same genial approach we used on the Lexicon; author’s dibbed entry is considered authoritative for that period unless there is obvious need for reining in the entry. I think the others’ suggestions should be considered by an author, but probably only enough to ensure overall uniformity.