I’m struggling a bit with the metadata side of things and was hoping someone could help, please. I’ve watched some videos on custom metadata, which i (sort of) get, and have tried to find the answer in these forums, but haven’t found what I need yet.
Basically I’d like to see how old characters are at any given time but I can’t figure out how to do it. I did have Aeon timeline at one point which did the job but I couldn’t get it running on Linux. Is there a way to effectively change a date using metadata and see the characters age change accordingly?
You mean like a calculation? You’d give your character a date of birth and you could know his/her age automatically at some point of the story?
If so, no, not really. You’d have to do the math yourself.
You could design a calc sheet in some other app that would answer that for all of your characters by a simple copy/paste or type-in of the “current date” in the appropriate cell.
[LibreOffice has a good one and it is free.]
Agree with Vincent again. (Just for argument’s sake should disagree once on principle)
Here is a thought. Create a custom metadata text entry . Call it Age POV (ie character name) and either add date as a metadata value or put the date in the synopsis where visible in Outliner view. Have outliner show this column.
So for POV Rachel, assuming assign Rachel keywords to scenes she is in, Do a project search for Rachel files. Now add in Age variable (would have to actually calculate) and could see column in view with dates of birth. arranged bases for the event in the story.
To keep things minimalistic yet functional all inside Scrivener, after thinking about it, I would make a basic list of characters with their age when the story begins. In the metadata you can create a list type custom metadata that allows you to see them all on demand. That list will be available in the inspector no matter the document.
And then in another custom metadata field, the scene in +x years (or -x years for flashbacks etc). How long after the beginning of the story a scene takes place.
A text custom metadata field allows to have different content per document.
Hi GoalieDad, apologies, very new to this. So the process would be:
Create custom metadata text entry: Age POV / whatever
Add age variable - what would this look like please? I can see there are compile variables, but would this look different given I’m not compiling? is this placed within “Age POV”? guessing it’d be calculated based on the scene start/end date?
This is the main reason I keep to the v2 version of Aeon Timeline – for some reason, they removed this functionality in v3. For a story with multiple narrative arcs – that inevitably intersect – and numerous characters, this data is crucial; even more so when writing the sequel.
Yes! This was my experience of it. I think I had difficulty getting set up on Linux, or some other complication which meant I could no longer use it, but this was certainly useful. Daft that they removed that feature as like you said, I have some pretty complex things going on and I need to think about the series timeline et al.
with text based custom metadata which can be pulled into Aeon, you type whatever you want. If you set the category to be Age Rachel (or abbreviate Rachel-A) all you type in for a event at a specific date is the age. You can sort in the Outliner by value, so could have Rachel’s Age be arranged in a series of events from youngest to oldest (or reverse). Ie a timeline of her story. Would have to calculate her age, but doable.
Metadata is info tagged to any document (event) you create in Scrivener. You can add or not add if not apply. So not forced to use Rachel’s Age for an event she is not in. Leave field blank.
Apologies for the late reply, I got my wires crossed but this makes total sense. I’m sure another program would allow the exercise to be less manual, but I feel like it’s a good exercise as it’s making me think more about the characters and situations as I go (also, it was always going to be tough populating all of the data the first time!). I’m pleased I have it all within Scrivener as well, so I’m not dependant on some other software. I’m now creating my timeline using this.
