I’m wanting to do a timeline, but when I search for software, everything is project management oriented.
For example, if I want to write a historical piece, it would be helpful to be able to have a timeline of events, people, places, etc.
Thoughts?
To be honest… consider Aeon Timeline for that. It’s made for this purpose and syncs with Scrivener.
You could use Scapple, but IMHO it won’t be much more helpful in this regard than drawing your timeline on a wall (although it’s more portable).
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You can have a time in the Outliner, by adding Date as a custom metadata entry and the column can be oriented in chronologic order. But a lot of people swear by Aeon Timeline. I had dates in my metadata and put the date in the synopsis field so it could appear on the corkboard.
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I use Aeon Timeline myself. It’s excellent.
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I use Scapple for timelines, relatively simple ones. For more complicated ones, I use Apple Freeform.
I tried Aeon Timeline, but found it too complicated (but that is probably an issue with me. I downloaded the free trial and made a go of it but gave up.)
Apple Freeform? You interest me strangely. Can you expound?
I tried Aeon Timeline and also found it too complicated for my purposes. For timelines I either use OmniOutliner (for simple timelines) or TimeStory depending on the complexity of the events I’m working with - the latter specifically if I need to be able to visualize (and re-contextualize) the events in a traditional timeline view.
While you could use Scapple for this, it feels like you’d spend a lot of time moving and sorting the various events around manually.
In case it’s helpful for anyone, here is a video I made for another writing community. I show how I use Aeon Timeline and Scrivener together. It’s unrehearsed and unpolished, but I hope it adds something to the discussion.
Just to be clear, I’m not advocating for or against anyone using Aeon Timeline–it’s not for everybody. For me, though, it’s been a game changer. Using it, I can track story beats (in my case, the Save the Cat! beats), characters, objects, locations, magic system, B story, character arc, and much more.
Oddly, I do not think of Aeon Timeline so much as a timeline system (though it is that). Indeed, I rarely look at the Timeline view. Rather, I spend most of my time in the Narrative/Outline views for scene discovery and tracking, and the Subway and Relationship views for looking at my story from any conceivable perspective. I think of it as a master-level story discovery and tracking system that lets me look at my story from every important aspect.
Is there a learning curve? Well, sure. For me, it was well worth the time spent understanding what it can do for my novel writing.
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A little. Apple Freeform is basically a digital whiteboard. Imagine a dry erase whiteboard hanging on a wall in your cabin in the woods (or wherever you fantasize writing.) Using dry erase markers, you’d scribble your timeline accordingly: dates across the top (in Freeform, dates in textboxes,) then down the left side, things or characters (in Freeform, names within geometric shapes,) with long lines stretching across from left to right. Along those line, using textboxes in Freeform, and in any place underneath the appropriate time, whatever happened.
The great thing about Freeform is that I can draw all sorts of lines from here to there and anywhere, import pictures and whatnot.
Attached is a bad example I whipped up, but it should give you an idea.
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Hmmmm. I can see the possibilities. I piddled around with Freeform a bit yesterday, less from a time-lining perspective (I keep a boring analog list of significant events in Scrivener) than from a plotting perspective, The same sort of thing I used to do in the last century papering the wall with index cards and multicolored post-it notes and frowning at them creatively.
This system had its flaws–the impermanence of glue, the machinations of cats, the finite nature of post-it-notable walls–and was replaced by Scrivener’s index cards and digital post-its way back in Keith’s first beta days.
But I do conceptualize better with a pen in my hand.–even a digital pen. Typing is so Official. So Authorial. Even when (maybe especially when) you write (and live) in a cabin in the woods. As I have done since, hmmmmm, the Nixon administration, to hit one point on a timeline. Or Dark Side of the Moon, to hit another.
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FWIW, just because digital tools exist, that doesn’t mean you have to use them. If paper works better for a particular task, use it.
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Paper has its limits. A digital pen offers efficiencies. I’m only just discovering its possibilities.
I love Scapple, but found a mindmap software called Simplemind Pro which like scapple is single fee one time. You can connect notes like Scapple but hide text till you want to look at it and add images or icons to each note and add a date function for a timeline. Here is an image of a timeline for Act I (I chose 8 timeline events but could add more to any act allowing each act to expand or contract based on time line events. Below each date you can add as many notes as you want that can be hidden by clicking a caret.
Below is a sample of the Act I timeline
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