Danger! Author at work.
I found it a little difficult to keep track of Charles Wells’ activities, as so much happened between his arrival in Britain from France in about 1883, and the period just after his epic bank-breaking adventures. Just over a year ago, when I was making the transition from the research phase to actually writing the book, I made the wall chart (pictured). It drew a number of threads together, and made it much easier to see at a glance what was happening to Charles Wells, and the other important people in his story.
In addition I compiled an overall timeline covering his whole life. It started off as an A4 sheet of paper with a few lines on it, and ended up as a file with over 200 pages and around 700 separate entries. From this the first draft of the biography of Charles Wells was put together.