This Scrivener project is used solely to build the timeline of events that make up the overarching universe in which the various stories take place. To make this work, I used a similar technique in a slightly different way.įirst, I created a new project while I called my “Story Background Bible”. Building a story “bible”Īs I said, this story is the first in a series, and there is a background of events that will be important to later stories. In other words, it documents my story timeline. It also allows me an easy way to reference when things happen in relation to one another. Then I can remove the sort, or move the scenes around in any order I like for narrative purposes, but always be able to get back to that chronological sort. This technique worked well for me because it allows me to temporarily re-sort the scenes to see what order things actually happen in. To remove all of the applies sorts, I can click the Title and Synopsis field header three times. Plus, if I add a scene in Outline Mode while sorted by Timeline Date, that scene will fall into its proper chronological order once I add the date to the newly added scene. Now, this doesn’t give me the ability to calculate the time between two events, but it is good enough for my purposes. You can see that illustrated below: Click to enlarge So if I click on my Timeline Date header, it will sort by the date as opposed to the scene. However, I can click on any of the field headers to sort by them, and click them again to reverse the sort. By default, the outline mode will sort the scenes in the order that I want them to appear (no fields are sorted in this mode). That is because the story is told with flashbacks intermingled with the narrative.
The scenes are listed in the order that I want them to appear in the story, but note that the dates are not in order. You can see this illustrated in the screen capture above. So for sorting to work out the way I wanted it, I used dates in the following format: YYYY-MM-DD. Scrivener’s custom meta-data fields are essentially character fields. For things to sort correctly the format of the date is important.
I reviewed my list of scenes in Outline Mode, and by right-clicking on the column header, I was able to add my Timeline Date field to the list of fields displayed in the outline so that things looked as follows: Click to enlargeįor each scene, I gave a date during which the scene takes place. Once I had the new meta-data field added to my project I was set. Second step: building a timeline out of scenes I clicked the Custom Meta-Data tab and then clicked the + button at the bottom of the panel to add a new field. To do this, I went to the Project Menu -> Meta-Data Settings… Click to enlarge I added a new custom meta-data field and called it “Timeline Date”. I decided to make use of this feature in my timeline solution. These are arbitrary fields that can be added to a project for unspecified purposes. Scrivener 2.0 introduced custom meta-data fields for a project. It is not the most sophisticated timeline manager in the world, but it suits my needs. With a little thought, I might be able to make it work for this, too.
And why not? It works well for just about all other aspects of my fiction-writing.
Aeon timeline for windows software#
I know that there are probably software packages out there I could find that would help me with this, but it occurred to me that Scrivener might be able to help me with this task. With this in mind, I found myself needing to build a timeline to keep track of the actual order of things. Finally, as this is the first of several stories to take place in this universe, some of the timing of the background events are key to the later stories. It spans a period of about 60 days and there are flashbacks included, but the sequence of events is also told slightly out of order. The story is told from multiple viewpoints and in some cases the some of the character have no idea what the others are doing.
Aeon timeline for windows series#
It is the first of what I will hope to be a series of interconnected stories. My current story project is a complex one.
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