Least favorite alt-history story?

[Talwar]

I wouldn't say they're mutually exclusive, the narrative can still form part of the scrapbook although it is easy for the focus to shift. Like @Warthog I've found myself starting a scrapbook TL only for it to become almost entirely prose because I've started feeling more confident in and enjoying writing the latter. Granted you do sometimes need the occasional return to the scrapbook style for big offscreen events because "Hey Ben, how about that [SPORTS TEAM]? Also did you hear the news the Jiangxi Soviet has collapsed?" is hard to write naturally.

Picturing a scene where two Hockey Dads spend a third of the time cheering on their kids, a third of the time heckling the officials and other kids, and a third of the time talking about news that neither of them fully understand.

 

[The Red]

I've learned as a writer that sometimes conference room scenes are A: sometimes necessary no matter what, and B: Can be done well.

Proof Through the Night springs to mind.

 

[Warthog]

I've learned as a writer that sometimes conference room scenes are A: sometimes necessary no matter what, and B: Can be done well.

Agreed. In a political type story, cabinet meetings allow the information to be supplied to the reader, while also fleshing out the character of the cabinet members, their relationship with each other etc

 

[Lemon flavoured]

Picturing a scene where two Hockey Dads spend a third of the time cheering on their kids, a third of the time heckling the officials and other kids, and a third of the time talking about news that neither of them fully understand.

Done well that could be amazing.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

What are the things that make a scrapbook-style timeline good, or bad?
I am asking because I have been trying to do a timeline in scrapbook style for a long time (which everyone here probably heard of at this point because of posts that I frequently mention it), and I am still extremely unsure of it, despite many people saying it was good.

A key thing is that a good scrapbook timeline requires an eye for different styles of writing.

For example, I often see timelines that try and mimic newspaper articles but don't realise that different papers in different periods had different voices.

If you're writing a timeline in the 1860s, for example, and The Times uses contractions, short sentences, and writes in favour of (say) protectionism, I'm immediately taken out of it.

A lot of writers neither know how to be concise enough to convincingly come across as journalists, nor prolix enough to be academic, nor humane enough for different 'first hand' accounts to sound like different people.

This is all a way of saying that the great trap of scrapbook timelines is that they look easy, because they seem to minimise narrative and character and allow you to get straight to world-building. The thing is though, the style of the excerpts is the narrative and character. If the excerpts aren't convincing, the timeline isn't interesting.