WRITING A SHORT STORY WITH DUAL TIMELINES - CASE STUDY “THE SHIP MAKER”

Hello, friends!

Welcome to the simulation, where I speak to you through a series of characters and images through some kind of rectangular screen (to anyone with a circular monitor, you must be Satan).

Today I’d like to walk you through how I wrote my short story, The Ship Maker, which is now out on Kindle and Kobo! Super excited about that! 

I hope that this case study might help someone out there in the void to know how I went about writing it. So here goes:

1. Idea storming:

Some call it brainstorming, but I just love the word idea-storming. I picture a cotton candy hurricane on some days and a dark swirling nebula on others.

There are many ways to come up with ideas like listing potential book titles, coming up with characters/names, things people have said, notable people you’ve seen in real life/fiction, other stories you like, and so much more.

When idea-storming in raw form, I will either make a huge list on a Google doc, or I’ll take an actual piece of paper and write words/names/nouns/anything that stands out to me. Then I’ll bubble it and make connections to related ideas.

Example: 

With that, I have an idea for a dystopian world with no more land masses and have successfully ripped off the story of Waterworld. But you get the idea. There’s a lot more I want to say about idea-storming later, but for now we will continue to the next step.

2. Free Flow Writing:

Ok, already I can hear the differing opinions on this. Some love pantsing and get their best ideas from it, while some others think it’s some kind of creative vomit. For me, it’s a bit of both (picture a gold nugget floating in half chewed chunks of jambalaya).

I like to feel out my ideas and free flow writing is like playing. Sometimes from playing I can get a real solid take on what I want to do and sometimes playing is just that, having fun, while vomiting. 

During this step I wrote parts of my story, pantsing all the way. However, in some areas I did not know what would happen. Or a couple of scenes I wasn’t sure how they would tie in together; that is just one of the cons of pantsing, since you are flying by the seat of your pants... sometimes your pants lead you into a back alley where it’s dark and nobody can hear you scream.

At that phase I put in bullet points of what I wanted to happen in the middle or what would need to happen in order to get from one scene to another. This half writing and half bullet pointing can be messy, but because this was a short story it was manageable for me to keep track of all the parts. 

3. Made a separate heading for my theme:

What is the truth of this story? 

That sounds like a heavy question and in some ways it might be, but it’s just you asking yourself, why do I want to write this?

When it’s dark and cold, all you need sometimes is a flicker of a flame. Even a tiny spark to keep you going. Theme is what that spark or flame is to me. When you’re writing and you get lost, if you know what the heart of your story is, you’ll always find your way back home. A story can go off the rails, but I think if you keep the theme and heart of the story in mind, you can turn the focus back onto what needs to happen. It’s your guiding light amidst all the dark alleys pantsing takes you to. If you’re outlining, it’s the basis and foundation to build your story structure on.

For The Ship Maker, I wanted to write a tale about someone dealing with grief and how they overcome it - or not. Grief shows itself differently in every person, and Eleir had her own take on it. 

4. Outlining:

But wait! Didn’t you just admit you’re a pantser in that weird vomit/nugget part?

Yeah, but I do what I want ok ’cause I’m a Certified-Badass©. 

I started outlining because that was when I decided to write this in a dual timeline perspective. Ever since I read Stephen King’s “IT” and N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth Trilogy” I fell in love with multi-timeline storytelling. That they did it in a full-length novel and series is... AMAZING! I was mindblown a story could be told so well in that way. So I wanted to try it on a smaller scale. 

I listed the sequence of events for the “girl” perspective and all the scenes for the “woman” perspective in a Google sheets doc so I could see them side by side and outline them simultaneously. 

I have yet to write a multi timeline novel (one day mark my words), but my first approach would be to have one outline per timeline and view them side by side so we can see what would happen concurrently.

Here’s a screen cap of a section of The Ship Maker in this planning:

5. Research:

I know nothing about sailing or boats and since this story heavily relies on flying ships, I took some time to research sailing terms and get to know my way around a gaff rigged ketch

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

Be wary not to go too crazy on this step lest you find yourself neck deep in documentaries containing way too much detail that you don’t need for your story. Unless you’re writing non-fiction or some kind of hard fantasy/sci-fi, keep the world building to only what serves the story and characters. (Or don’t as it is entirely up to you!)

After this point, I had all the tools I needed to finish the story. 

Be warned the next few steps may be particular just to this case study.

6. Took a 2-3 month hiatus doing O T H E R  S H I T (i.e. releasing a debut single and album).

7. Remembered I had a short story to finish. Panicked. Had a cry about how I’m not good enough to be a writer. 

8. TOOK A BREATH. 

9. Edited it to the best of my ability (thanks for taking the reins on this one, Microsoft).

10. I sent my story to a few of my favourite readers to read it and provide their feedback. Once they sent me their comments, I read through them and reworked the points I agreed with. 

11. Hired a freelance editor to edit it (Her name is Tanis, and she’s great: https://www.revisionediting.ca) - This step is definitely optional but if you don’t have awesome editing friends and have the financial means to do so it was very helpful.

12. Then I submitted it to a few magazines over the last year and got several rejections. Though I received comments, which was a win for me! A lot of them being that it was not the right fit but a lovely story, so that was both encouraging enough that I knew I wanted my story to be out there, but where?!

13. Repeated steps 6-8.

14. Self-published and we are now in the present day, *waves*.

There you go. This was my journey in writing The Ship Maker. Hope this case study was helpful - if not mildly entertaining for you! Let me know your thoughts, have you written anything with multiple timelines or time jumps? What were your methods? 

And if you haven’t, please check out my story, The Ship Maker, so all that nonsense you just read makes some sense... might still not make any sense at all but hey  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Happy reading, happy writing!

Love, 

FP