Multiple storyline management?

Whoa I just read the whole thread. So much refusal by the author!

“Likewise, adding a timeline “just for fiction writers” makes no sense”

Hmm, fiction writing is the only purpose why I would need Scrivener. Not sure about others but I can imagine the same goes for most other users.

I don’t see what the problem is with the story lines mode. All other modes in Scrivener are linear. So the story lines mode would indeed but just a different corkboard mode.

@Avalon - Based on Jennifer’s description of the workaround using the free arranging corkboard from version 2.0, do you think that’s enough for our needs (it seems we have identical needs based on your original thread)? If so, then I think once the Windows version catches up with the Mac version, we’ll get exactly what we need. It’ll take a little bit more prep work to set it up like Writ’ers Cafe’s Storylines, but it should be similar enough–or I hope.

@Lunatique I think I have to see it in action before I can say whether it works for me. Right now I’m not sure how the chronological order of the whole story would be retained with the workaround since the corkboard mode (as it is now) wrap the cards around to the next line. But if we’d get something to be able to create infinite lanes and it works consistent then that might be an OK solution.

I’ve used Celtix for a while and later bought their Plot View add-on which is something like a storyline view for Celtix and when I tried to use it for the first time I vomited slightly in my mouth because the execution of it is so awful. I hope this could be done better with Scrivener.

@Lunatique well, to answer your question … I just checked out the Mac version on our Macbook and the freeform corkboard isn’t really what I had hoped for. It’s simply too cumbersome to work with trying to create story lanes out of it and maintain them. The main problem is that cards don’t snap to a card-sized grid and inserting cards somewhere between becomes a chore.

Seeing this freeform corkboard now for the first time however it puzzles me why the author(s) are refusing a story lanes mode so much. It should be almost child’s play to add such functionality on top of this (speaking from being a programmer myself).

Did you read all of Keith’s explanation? I thought he explained very clearly why it was not possible due to the underlying structure of the software. It’s not a matter of him “refusing” to do it - it is incompatible with the way he has designed the software. Keith explained he had thought about it a lot, so it is not some random response but a careful and considered decision. He has also always been very open in saying that Scrivener is not for everyone, and maintains a very good list of alternatives. If a cork board storyline mode is crucial to your workflow, then Scrivener may not be for you.

Thank you, nom, my thoughts exactly. I’ve taken a lot of time to explain this, and have put a lot of careful thought into it; it’s always a shame when someone starts accusing me of being somehow obstinate or block-headed just because I won’t kowtow to their particular wish, after I have gone to the lengths of considering the wish in great detail and explaining the situation at length. I always consider all suggestions - but I cannot implement them all. That way madness (and bad software) lies. It’s very easy for someone to say, “This would just be a different mode, I’m sure it would be easy,” but quite something else to sit down and work out the specifics and all of the problems involved - which I have done. I have whole sketches and diagrams and annotations and pages of notes on this very subject, a sort of “Label-line/timeline” editor I started planning for 2.0, and yet again in its working-out I found that it just wasn’t compatible with Scrivener’s structure, that for it to work it would have to be so divorced from Scrivener’s other modes that it may as well be entirely separate - just as I had always found when working it out in the past. (It’s worth noting that Story Lines is pretty much separate from the rest of Writer’s Cafe.)
All the best,
Keith

@Keith well, I don’t know the application’s structure so I can’t see how difficult it would be. All I see is the surface and from that PoV it looks as if it wouldn’t be too much of a hassle. If the feature hasn’t been planned in from the beginning though it might indeed be more difficult.

Don’t wanted to sound offensive, it’s just when you find such an otherwise well designed writing software it hurts to see that a story lane mode is missing and will never make it in. I guess I would have to write my own application for this instead.

@Lunatique on a second thought, if you’re willing to sacrifice usability for it then you might be OK with the freeform corkboard used as story lanes. i mean after all there are still authors out there who write their stories on real index cards and pin them to a real corkboard and they have the same tedious re-arranging to do. It would be the same with the freeform corkboard, just with mouse and keyboard.

Beyond rolling your own, there are some pretty good timeline alternatives. On the Mac they include Aeon (with its own sub-forum on L&L) and this: http://www.beedocs.com/, which I know writers also use. And I remember plenty from my Windows days.

BTW, good to see our old friends Syuzhet and Fabula raising their heads in unaccustomed form.

I’m not sure why the term “timeline” keeps getting brought up. In fact, in my very first post, I specifically said I was not looking for any kind of a timeline feature.

All I want is a very simple and straightforward way to arrange plot points on multiple lanes–that has NOTHING to do with what people think of as a “timeline” feature (which tracks dates and duration of events and so on).

Don’t be so sure. Fiction writers are a fairly small fraction of all the people who write, and most people who’'ve used Scrivener for any length of time seem to want to use it for anything more complicated than a grocery list.

Katherine

kewms is right - you may wish to take a look at our testimonials page, where you will soon see that we have many, many users who are not novelists. We have scriptwriters, lawyers, academics, students, technical writers, journalists, biographers, and other non-fiction writers of all stripes using Scrivener.

It’s not “missing” any more than Photoshop is “missing” the ability to edit spreadsheets or MS Word is “missing” a corkboard or the sofa I am sitting on is “missing” a built-in drinks panel. It’s not “missing” because Scrivener was not designed to have such a feature and it is antithetical to the rest of the design, as I have been patiently trying to explain in this thread and elsewhere. But yes, you could definitely go and write your own application - that’s what I did after all.

Lunatique - the terminology doesn’t affect the feasibility, I’m afraid. :slight_smile: Everyone well understands your meaning, don’t worry.

Regards,
Keith

Seems to me if there was one additional attribute per index card, that attribute being the story line to which the card belongs (which lane in the timeline), then:

Make the corkboard so that instead of wrapping at 3 columns (or whatever it’s set to), that it scrolls right/left “infinitely”, and displays chapters in their regular order, but which lane (line) they display on is determined by our story line attribute, then:

Problem solved.

My two cents.

Right, and what happens to the hierarchy in the binder when you drag between lanes? Your suggestion might work for viewing a flat list of subdocuments with a single folder (which is what the corkboard does), but it would not allow you to see the entire story on one corkboard (which I am guessing would be what people would want). So unless this is all you wanted - a way of viewing the tracks for only a single folder - then the problem is not, after all, solved.

Given that I feel like I’m going around in circles a tiny bit here ( :slight_smile: ), I’d be very grateful if anyone who wishes to continue this discussion would first sit down and sketch out exactly how their suggestion would work with the rest of Scrivener, taking into consideration Scrivener’s binder structure, the way the corkboard and outliner are windows onto individual folders, not on the entire project, and the fact that any structure at all in the binder should be accounted for. If you’re not sure how the binder works, how much flexibility is allowed there, or how the different views - scrivenings, corkboard mode, the outliner and single document mode - all interact with one another and with the binder, then be sure to familiarise yourself with all of this before sketching things out and posting.

I’m not trying to be awkward, but I have gone through all of this, sketched it out, chewed it over, and really, I am not being obstinate, this sort of system just isn’t compatible with Scrivener. It would be like trying to superimpose a freeform concept map onto a list - there’s no way of going from one to the other without losing information. I am intimately familiar with how Scrivener works and know what I’m talking about. :slight_smile:

So, I’m going to duck out of this thread now, but I’ll keep an eye on it - I’ll certainly respond if anyone really does go to the effort of working through exactly how any proposed system would integrate with the rest of Scrivener, taking into consideration the freeform hierarchies of the binder, and sees something that I have not.

All the best,
Keith

Maybe a hint of the False Consensus Effect here?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
spring.org.uk/2007/11/why-we … uitive.php

I wonder how many writers of various categories there are using Scrivener. Time for a survey, perhaps. I’m non-fiction, academic.

Best, Martin.

Keith,

You’re right; my idea only works within the context of a single folder. I’ll keep pondering…

I’m new to Scrivener, but love it so far. Thanks for the great product.

Mr.Bill

Scrivener has the Scrivenings and Outline views which show all sections of all chapters as a list vertically connected, regardless of the Binder structure. Let’s take the Outliner, instead with index cards and lay it out horizontally and on multiple lanes that are designated by the additional index card attribute mentioned above but the other view modes ignore this attribute.

There is still the problem with the empty spacings between cards on a lane so as far as I can understand it the problem drills down to how to be able to ignore the empty spacings in the other views (and in the binder)?

The lane view would be a grid into that the cards snap and every grid cell has an ID (or index). How about adding another card attribute that determines the x,y position of the card on the grid which is, yet again, ignored by the other view modes?

I suppose every lane could be a linked list and an empty cell is represented in the list as some sort of lightweight dummy card that has no contents and which is ignored by the display implementation.

Well, just some thoughts of course! I don’t know how complex the app code is and therefore how difficult it would make this.

Thanks, Mr.Bill, much appreciated!

Avalon Sutra - you’re still not taking into account the hierarchical structure of the binder. You would have to flatten everything out to place it into lanes. You could do it if the binder was a flat list, but it’s not.

All the best,
Keith

Keith, yes the story lanes would need to be flattened to fit them into the binder scheme (and outline and scrivenings scheme). And where exactly is the problem with the ‘flattening’?

Right now there is the corkboard mode which is essentially a story lanes mode with only one lane and the difference that it doesn’t allow to have empty cells between cards and that it wraps around, but both of these issues are display-related and shouldn’t affect the underlying data structure.

Forget my idea with the linked list, that wouldn’t be very suitable for this. What is needed here is some sort of resizable 2D array to represent the card grid used for story lanes.

If there are now several lanes with cards in arbitrary x/y cells in the grid they need to be flattened into a single lane. If we don’t allow more than one card on the same column that would be easy but optimally it’s desirable to place more than one card in the same column (Writer’s Cafe allows this).

This could be solved by looping through the cards on the grid, first in y-direction to see what card comes next in the chronological order. If there are two or more cards on the same x position (i.e. in the same column) I would say they simply need to be placed one after the other. Let’s look at an example to make this clear:

X-X--XX----XXX-----XX------------------------------ XX--X---XXX---XX--X-------------------------------- ---X---X--------XX---------------------------------

Here are three story lanes with cards on them. Looping through them by first going into y-direction and then into x-direction we first collect the card on x0, y0 then we hit the card on x0, y1 and collect it next. On x0, y2 is nothing yet so back to the top at the next column. On x0, y1 there’s no card so next go one down and collect the card at x1,y1 and so on. I think you get the idea.

With this we’d get a flattened and chronologically ordered output which I think could also be represented like that in the binder hierarchy.

Because that would also flatten any structure in the binder! Users who had set up subdocuments of subdocuments would destroy all of their binder structure without realising it as soon as they started moving things around in the plot-line view.

No, but the other difference is that the corkboard only shows you the top-level subdocuments of the selected folder. It is not capable of showing you the entire manuscript. Did you even read my reply to Mr Bill? It would be entirely possible to create something like this that only showed the contents of a single folder, but I doubt anyone would want that - are you suggesting that you only want to show the plot line for one chapter at a time, and not the whole thing together?

Talking of Writers’ Café, try moving things around in its little outline view, and see how messed up the arrangement of cards soon gets. Even Writers’ Café, a program dedicated to this sort of view, cannot translate a very simple outline to a plot-line arrangement without unexpected behaviour, because the two modes are incompatible - just imagine what would happen with a complicated binder structure in Scrivener!

Sorry, but it seems to me that you just aren’t grasping the real issues here - the issue isn’t how such a view would work in itself, but what would happen to the corresponding document in the binder when you moved something in this view and vice versa. And it’s not enough to think about only a simple binder structure - you need to consider a very complicated structure, because otherwise it solves nothing.

To make it easier for those interested to see the issues, here, consider this binder structure in the Draft folder:

As you can see, there are text documents within text documents, folders within text documents and so on, and some of the documents have been assigned a label (which we will say is PoV here), others haven’t.

Let’s look at the labels (PoV tracks):

If you would like to continue this discussion, please try working with this structure and these PoV labels in mind as a starting point. First, try mapping the structure onto a Story Lines-esque plot line view. You would end up with five tracks:

Bob
Jason
Sally
Margaret
Ideas

But wait, there’s also the “No Label” track - anything not assigned a PoV would also need to go into this plot-line, because if it exists in the binder it has to exist here, too, otherwise how can moving things around here have any effect? If not all documents are shown on the plot-line view, when you move things around, scrivener would have no idea where they go.

But hang on - do we really want all those “Notes” and “Ideas” documents in the plot-line view? Won’t that be really annoying if you’re just trying to work out the plot-line? All of those documents will get in the way, but there’s no way around it because if they’re not there you’re only showing partial data, and you can’t map partial data back onto full data, at least not without what will seem unexpected results to the user. And it’s no good saying that you shouldn’t have all these notes documents in the binder if you want to work like this, because any putative plot-line view would have to work for all use cases, not just the use cases of those users proposing the thing.

Also, remember that the folders all have to be included in the plot-line, too, because they are part of the structure and, besides, in Scrivener there is no difference between a folder and a text document other than its icon.

But, anyway, try mapping all of this out on a plot-line view. Then, imagine moving things in the plot-line view, and try to work out where the movement would now place the scene in the binder.

Then, go the other way. Imagine moving one of the scenes or documents in the binder - where does that place things in the plot-line view?

Make sure you try it out with moving all sorts of scenes in both views - chapters, scenes, beats, notes and so on. Also, be sure to think about what would happen if you add a new document in either view. And a new folder. And also consider what would happen if you moved, some documents inside another document - e.g. moving “Beat B” inside “Beat A” in the binder. And also, what would happen if you group some documents - say you select several scenes and used Documents > Group. And also what happens if you Ungroup some scenes (say selecting Chapter 1 and going to Documents > Ungroup). What happens i the plot-line then? And be sure to think about all of this stuff going the other way, too - do all of these things on your plot-line view and think about what happens in the binder, and how things get arranged on the plot-line too. (You will need to draw out your plot-line and have a pencil and eraser handy. :slight_smile: )

And, of course, try out deleting documents from both views.

Also, move documents from lane to lane in the plot-line view (which would presumably change the label, but may also move the document).

Now, once you’ve done all of this, throw this into the mix: what if I’m starting in medias res? My Chapter 1 actually occurs halfway through the story. Or what if, like in Spin or Holes, my chapters alternate between chapters set in the past and chapters in the present? To make that possible, my plot-line would have to be divorced entirely from the binder, with movements inside it having no effect on my binder, because presumably I’d want my plot-line chronological but my binder non-chronological. Hmm, but this would only be useful for some writers - it wouldn’t be so good for others writing chronologically. Argh, which way to go? Whichever you choose, some users won’t be happy. If the plot-line is supposed to affect the binder, you run into all the issues above - it can’t really be mapped onto the binder anyway; and if it doesn’t affect the binder, how useful is it, really?

So, as I say, if you really want to spend some time thinking about this, start with the image of the binder structure above, draw it out on a plot-line view, and then move something in one and work out where it would go in the other. Test out what would happen when you move documents inside other documents and out again, add new documents, delete documents, group documents and so on. You’ll soon find you run into some serious problems - but also bear in mind that you might be able to decide where such-and-such should go because you are human (I hope!) and so can make some choices based on information not available to a computer. The computer has no idea what is a chapter and what is not, what is a scene and what is not - it just sees text documents, folders and labels. So you need to think like the computer thinks in all of this, making decisions only on the information available and not on knowledge you bring yourself.

Have fun! :slight_smile:

All the best,
Keith