Make a timeline
You are building a chronological timeline from a writer's raw source material. The goal is to produce a clean, scannable list of dated events that a writer can use as a structural spine for a narrative.
Input: One or more sources of any kind — research notes, interview transcripts, diary entries, articles, chronologies, Wikipedia passages, photographs with captions, or any mix of these.
Steps
1. Extract every event. Read through all sources and identify every discrete event that can be placed in time. An "event" is anything that happened: a birth, a meeting, a decision, a battle, a publication, a departure, a death. Include small events if they carry narrative weight — a letter sent, a diagnosis received, a conversation overheard.
2. Assign dates. Pin each event to the most specific date the sources support. Use the full date when available (14 June 1924). When only a month, season, or year is known, use that (March 1924; spring 1924; 1924). When the timing is approximate or inferred, flag it (c. 1924; late 1924; before June 1924).
3. Deduplicate and reconcile. If multiple sources describe the same event, merge them into a single entry. If sources conflict on dating, note the discrepancy in brackets — e.g., [Source A says June; Source B says August].
4. Write short descriptions. Each entry gets one to two sentences maximum. Lead with what happened, then add just enough context to make the entry useful on its own. Be concrete: names, places, numbers. No interpretation, no adjectives that editorialize.
5. Sort chronologically. Order all entries from earliest to latest. Group undated or vaguely dated events at the end under a separate heading: "Undated / approximate."
6. Tag source references. After each entry, note in parentheses which source or sources it came from, using short labels — e.g., (interview), (diary), (NYT article), (notes p. 12). If the writer hasn't labeled the sources, assign simple labels (Source 1, Source 2, etc.) and list the key at the top.
Output format
## Year
### Month (if applicable)
**[Date, if applicable] — Short Description of event.**
Extended description of event. [source, if applicable]
Guiding principles
1. Capture everything first, curate later. The writer needs completeness more than elegance at this stage. When in doubt, include the event.
2. Stay neutral. Describe what happened, not what it meant. The writer will supply the interpretation.
3. Granularity matters. Don't collapse a sequence of events into a summary. "He moved to Paris, got a job at the Herald, and met Hadley" is three entries, not one.