Maps, Family Trees and Timelines, by Elizabeth Kay

 Ever been writing something, and suddenly realised you have no idea how to get from A to B? In fact, you have very little idea of what A and B actually look like apart from a few important details such as the pub, the flooded quarry and the cave in which the escaped tiger is hiding. Which direction you would choose? What you would have to pass through/over/under? How long would it take? What method of transport would you use?

Or do you suddenly realise that C couldn’t possibly be related to D without some very unlikely incest, or that E and F would never speak the same language or be old enough to have met Stalin? We tend to think we understand the worlds we create so well that we don’t need any help to remember the details, but you can get it so wrong.

Even a well-respected author such as C.S.Lewis can create anachronisms, especially when you have two worlds where time moves differently. What really upset me as a child was the time discrepancy between The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair. At the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Caspian meets the daughter of Ramandu, who is a similar age to himself – probably late teens – and says he will return. At the start of The Silver Chair seventy years have passed, and Caspian is an old, old man, who had, as predicted, married Ramandu’s daughter. Their only child, Rilian, has gone missing. When  Eustace and Polly find him, having been called up from our world to do precisely that, Rilian is described as a young man. This means Caspian must have been at least sixty when Rilian was born, and his wife would have been of a similar age. As the child of elderly parents myself this bothered me enormously. I was very well aware that sixty was too old to conceive, although it never occurred to me that fertility might be different in a magical world. And what happened in the intervening years? Did Ramandu’s daughter have ovulation issues, or a series of miscarriages? If C.S.Lewis had kept a proper record of the time differences between Earth and Narnia it might have been a different story – literally. 

Vera Rich

The late great translator Vera Rich, who seemed to know everybody who was anybody back in the sixties, said that Tolkien once asked Lewis how come everyone in Narnia spoke English? It took a whole book, The Magician’s Nephew, to put the matter right. We all make mistakes. Sometimes they can be rectified retrospectively, but it’s better to check, check, and check again.

So now I draw maps, create timelines, make up family trees. I do remember that the family tree in I, Claudius was absolutely essential, and something I referred to over and over again. It can be fun making one up, as well, because you may discover all sorts of things about your character of which you were previously unaware. Did you suddenly decide that your main character could have had a Mongolian grandfather? Was he, therefore, distantly descended from Genghis Khan?

A DNA study done in 2003 revealed that 16 million men alive in the world today are related to him. He got about, did Genghis. It could explain a lot of your character’s psychopathic tendencies. Occasionally you need a diagram of a room, so that you can work out whether it would be possible for the seriously wounded policeman to crawl to the window and call for help. How low is the window? Can he reach it? Does he need to draw the heavy velvet curtains first, or undo a tricky little catch? And who happens to be within earshot?

Having a map/family tree/timeline stuck on the wall next to your computer can save a lot of time. Photographs help, too. Street view on Google maps can be very useful indeed, as it can give you an idea of the locality as well as the building itself.

Timelines can stop it snowing in July (unless you’re in the Southern hemisphere). I have had azaleas flowering in October, apples ripening in March, toadstools springing up in February and blue tits nesting in December. Fortunately, all of these were caught before they made it into print. But remember, one glaring error can stop a reader believing anything you write once they’ve caught you out…