![]() I used colour coding for the different arcs involved.Īs well as events, you can add entities to your story – arcs, places or characters, within the fiction template. This provides an overview of the spread of your events. This view shows the story events separated into different arcs.Īt the bottom of the window is a timeline graphic, with a sliding bar representing the part that’s visible, and the coloured blobs representing the events. Because my novel is set during a school year, it was important to work out term dates and to know what day of the year events took place on. You can see the buttons along the top, then the timeline itself, and then events at the corresponding mark on the timeline. This is a partial view of my completed timeline. I made extensive use of it this year to plan my novel, so here is a basic guide on how I used it. But what use is Aeon Timeline to a novel writer? Fact and event checking.One of the rewards for nanowrimo this year is a discount off Aeon Timeline. I work with a lot of Biographies where the participants and their history are not well known to me, and for that purpose I find timelines valuable. I find it more useful to use timeline software on a separate screen when I am working with a complex timeline (one involving many players and events). Has that changed? I found it inconvenient to change the way I use Scrivener simply in order to make Aeon more functional. I tested Aeon with Scrivener (I use Scrivener for all writing and for developmental editing) and found it limiting in that it only linked to a single document, one which might involve several characters and time-shifts - it doesn't add any form of integral timeline for Scrivener. If I am developing the story I am am placing the characters in time and so see no need. I use a timeline when writing about historical events - for years it was just an Excel spreadsheet or later the y-Ed graphing software - but never for anything contemporary. They are creating the timeline for their characters they don't need to place them in real history. But you get a free trial for 20 days or so to see if you like it.Ĭlick to expand.I can see the value for you in any form of "prequel" development, though I have never understood why anyone would need timeline software in developing a "current" novel. I actually don't consider the second to be a downside, because as business software expenses go for something you potentially could be using every day, that's an excellent investment. The first is that it's currently only available for Mac. ![]() If I update, change, or add bits in Scrivener, I can alsy synch those back to Timeline. And with the general outline done in Timeline, I just synched it with my Scrivener project, and all the text files for those scenes are now in Scrivener. Not only that, but it's really helped me steer around some potential sinkholes in the plot. But for my latest project, which is a sci-fi/fantasy series where I'm jumping back into time from the story told by the already-published books, I needed to keep track of the "historical" events that I'm now writing about so I don't have major continuity errors.Īeon Timeline makes doing that a snap. And let me say up front that I've always been a pantser, and I've never gotten along well with traditional outlining techniques. But after watching the tutorials, my opinion changed. I had tried it a while back, but didn't bother doing that and got frustrated with it. Like Scrivener itself, you'll need to spend a little time going over the tutorials to get the most out of it. I say companion app because you can synchronize your Timeline projects with your Scrivener projects. But a lot of folks probably don't know about another app called Aeon Timeline from Scribblecode, which can be used as a standalone or as a companion app to Scrivener. A lot of you know about Scrivener, which I happen to LOVE as my primary writing tool.
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