Character Development 3: Timeline

[Prof. Sky Alton]

Your characters past is important. It shapes the person they are at the start of the novel just as surely as the action of the novel will shape who they are at the end. How much of your characters past you reveal in the story will depend on what type of story it is you’re telling and how important it is to the present situation. However, understanding your characters past in at least some detail will give you a clue about how they might react to the stuff you hurl at them during your plot. Like with the mood board, it might also help you keep things consistent.

For this task, I’d like you to draw up a timeline of your characters past. It could be their entire life or just a small, crucial fragment of it. You should include events that effected them directly but also more mundane things that you might want to mention in the story (and remember that you did for future reference), like when they graduated or met a certain person for the first time.
Your work needs to be original: taking something off the internet and claiming it as your own is plagiarism. Remember to keep everything HOL appropriate, adhering to all HOL rules, and please keep your submissions 600x600 pixels or smaller. Please also include a short description of your image.

You'll earn 20 beans for completing this prompt as well as it counting towards the chance to snag our shiny Ink Splatters Award.

There is no deadline as such for these prompts but if you’d like it to count towards your chance of earning the award for a specific year, we’ll need it by the end of that school year. If you’re comfortable sharing, then post below. If not, email your image and description to us via hol.bookclub @ gmail.com (without the spaces).

[Isa Vestal]

This image shows a timeline of Kian Faye’s life. In summary, Kian was born in Venturia and, at the age of two, was shipped off to the island nation of Calamite to live with her older siblings. She was found to be developmentally slower than her older siblings. At age four, she started school, which consisted of difficult work and training. At first, she made plenty of friends but, when she was 5 years old, began to lose many due to a drop in grades. Throughout her life, Kian had been indoctrinated by the Calamite way of thinking but, when she was 10, felt so isolated that she didn’t find the religion’s hard-pressed perfectionism worth following any longer and began to lose interest. Four years after this, it was revealed to her school that she had not been keeping up with the sacred rituals and was thrown out of school only a year later due to both this and her poor grades. Being taken out of school also meant that Kian would be excommunicated from the village to live in another located on Calamite’s mainland.