Keeping Track of Time 2

One of my earliest posts was about creating a calendar of sorts (even if it's just for your eyes only) to keep track of your story. Now, in lieu of another post about researching for your story to keep it accurate, I will sort of combine the two ideas.

If your story is set in the real world or at least in a semi-realistic form of our world (I'm thinking stories like "Harry Potter" or "Twilight"), you must be aware of when events take place. This will be important in determining seasons and, if your character is in school (whether high school or college) or has a five-day a week work schedule, what your character is up to. So if you say "on May 5th, 2002 Character #1 went to school to take a calculus final," this would be inaccurate because July 5th on that day was a Sunday. So unless your character has an extremely good excuse for being at the school on Sunday, you've made a massive mistake.

This kind of calendar also comes in handy when figuring out what was going in culturally at that time. I discovered this recently when I had a character complaining about the fact that she just had her head shaved. I was going to have her make a reference to Britney Spears. Then I did a quick wikipedia search and realized that the Britney Spears incident actually occurs a year later than the scene and so wouldn't be accurate, so I had to change the comment. Quick wikipedia searches are also handy when discovering exactly when movies, CDs, books, etc... come out so that a character doesn't accidentally get a CD for his birthday that isn't supposed to be released for five more months.

Again, this is not in-depth, and it's certainly not required for a first draft. I generally write a first draft of a story, not caring about the dates, and then in the second draft start making sure everything is accurate and make a calendar (which only I look at, but it comes in great handy). Wikipedia is good for finding release dates, and timeanddate dot com is very helpful in figuring out days of the week and also the moon phases for certain months.

I highly recommend being careful about such dates in your story because keeping them accurate keeps your story accurate.