: Re: How to continually and organically let my readers know what time it is in my story? My novel takes place in a big world, with MANY POVs. Although I know when things are happening, I am afraid

@Kevin153

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It is very important to give your audience tracking data where keeping track of the order of events is a matter of serious difficulty and/or necessity. I can think of several series of novels, of which S.M. Stirling's Nantucket/Emberverse series is probably the best example, which use a chapter header with the date(s) of the action in that chapter, it works well, when the reader knows it's important and takes note accordingly. It works less well in eBook format than physical and I wouldn't want to use such a technique with an audiobook at all since going back for the information is so much harder.

The only real alternatives are to have a character who is obsessed with either:

A. the order of events if the characters are telling the tale to each other after the fact. That character will check in with "when was that?" questions regularly, possibly they're keeping a history or writing an epic and they want to know exactly what order things happened in so they know where to put them in order and where drama will be better served by some changes.

and/or

B. the current time/date if the narrative is told in realtime. I keep thinking of Simon Baker's Character in Margin Call who, under tremendous stress, keeps asking a subordinate "what time is it?". When people are under pressure sometimes small details like a minute or two, that normally wouldn't matter, become desperately important.

or

Have the characters each individually keeping time compared to an important event, this can work well to build tension as well as keeping the reader up-to-date with when everyone is acting in their personal timeline. Lets say all the characters want to attend this cycle's Mass Crossing, they have to get to the venue, they have travel time and things to do before they're ready to leave, time is important to them. They need to keep track for a reason, the reader will keep track with them.

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