Chronologically Intelligent to Emotionally Intelligent in One Swell Foop

April 2025

When I initially began writing Tears Remember, my paranormal novel, I had a brilliant understanding of the organization of the story. The book takes place over the course of seven days, so I thought it would make perfect sense to organize all the scenes chronologically. After all, it is the most natural way to tell such a story; moment by moment, one day at a time.

You start with day one, establish your location and your characters. Then, steadily build the tension each day until you get to the climax in the middle of the timeline. Then wrap things up and end your story within the time you've allotted for it to be over. So... start the story on day one; introduce the climax around day five or six; and reveal the big finale on day seven, and wrap it all up. That seems fairly straight forward, right?

Enter the editor. With her amazing wisdom and expertise, not to mention a healthy distance from the madness of creating the characters and throwing them all together into very odd, surprising, and unexpected situations, she discovers a small faux pas in the chronological logic. For the story to be more believable, and give the characters time to interact and get to know one another, the story needed to be stretched from seven to ten days. Otherwise, they're moving at a pace that even their fellow characters can't keep up with, let alone readers, given all the wacky stuff Drake and I threw at them. Fine. Ten days, that makes perfect sense.

I was trying to cram too much storytelling into too short a window of time, not allowing for the natural evolultion of those moments of tension, discovery, and growth. We didn't have time to explore the ghost side of things, either... given that time for ghosts is completely different than time for regular, non-dead people. Okay. We've got a ten day chronology now. I can work with that. Easy peasy.

The writing sessions and plotline rearranging was going fairly well for a couple of weeks. Then... Drake found a problem.

Last night, while at my writing desk, putting the last of the scenes on the timeline in their newly ferreted-out spots, Drake had a sinking feeling I was organizing it incorrectly... again. Sinking feelings are a mainstay of the paranormal genre, so although I wasn't too alarmed, I felt obligated to take a closer look at what I was doing. Drake was right. I looked at the new chapter breaks, one for each of the ten days. I compared that outline to the notes from my editor. After several moments of contemplative silence, Drake pointed out that even though we were keeping to the established timeline of the story (and doing a bang-up job of it, I might add), the story was lopsided. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you...

Too many things were happening in the first third of the story, with not a great balance in the last third of the story... and the climax, which to my credit DID happen at around "day six..." the fallout, recovery, and resolution of it was rushed, to the point that it felt tremendously anticlimactic. Translation? If all the stuff that I put in the beginning of the book actually happened the way I organized it, NOT ONE of my characters would sleep for THREE DAYS! So unrealistic.

It was clear Drake and I needed to take a deeper dive into our plot outline. We thought we were organzing the story chronologically, and that made sense. But the breaks between chapters weren't natural. So, we kept the refined timeline, but moved things around a bit... we added more scenes and chapters to "stretch" the days into reasonable breaks so the flow of the story was more effective, and engaged the reader in a way that tracked when comparing it to how humans behave in the real world.

Yup, last night, our outline went from "chronologically intelligent" to "emotionally intelligent" in one swell foop; and the book is better for the change.

I know what you're all thinking... "Diana Kathryn, you've betrayed your tribe of Passionte Plotters! You've traipsed into the shadows of the Pantsers and just started moving things around all willy-nilly." But I assure you, that is NOT what I did! I very methodically looked at the logic of my story and moved what needed to be moved, and then I altered or rewrote the transitions to resolve the issues of whether something happened in the morning, afternoon, or evening. The scenes and events of the story stayed exactly as I initially wrote them, they were now just in a slightly altered order. The time on the clock may have changed, but the order of events didn't. I PLOTTED every moment to make sure things happened according to Hoyle, and I filled in the holes so that nothing was left to chance; even though nothing is ever written in stone.

So, of course Passionate Plotters can't be flexible! When Drake and I realized a major confluence in our storytelling wasn't following a natural course, we picked up those scenes, dragged them around on the timeline, plopped them into their proper places, and fixed all the transitions to repair the flow. Our plan is intact, the expectation of what our characters are doing, facing, and overcoming is still all the same. We just gave them a little more time to do it. 😉