Your Story’s Calendar of Events
Your characters remember their birthdays and when they faced all those conflicts you created. Your readers also remember and will spot any error or inconsistency in your story’s calendar of events.
How to Remember Your Story Timeline.
Aeon Timeline ($40 for Mac from Scribble Code) helps you plan and keep track of everything. A version for Windows and iOS is also available.
Aeon Timeline handles anything from the tight plotting of a single evening in the mystery mansion to the vastness of a fantasy world over a millennia. If a science fiction world requires a calendar quite different from one of Earth’s, Aeon Timeline lets you invent your own time system. Its display is scalable. You can see the broad sweep of history and the fine detail of hours and minutes.
Keith Blount created the application when he started using the Scrivener authoring software and found that it had no timeline function. His timeline creation tool is useable in science, education and business, but he made it for writers.
Multiple Characters and Events
Each event or scene can be dropped onto the timeline. Then it links to details and research files on your computer or to the web sites you searched. The area below your actual timeline contains a list of your important characters. Every event can be linked to multiple characters, allowing you to visually track each player’s arc.
Aeon Timeline is another reason to consider Scrivener because all events, details, and character arcs in the timeline automatically integrate into Scrivener. In recent projects, having used the timeline myself, I have found it works seamlessly with Scrivener. My future stories will definitely be built using Aeon Timeline.
Don Cram and his wife, Carol, live in a suburb of Albuquerque, New Mexico near their four adult children and grandchildren. Don and Carol teach in neighborhood schools where they are known as educational innovators. Carol with iPad use in the classroom and Don with multimedia iBooks for his students to use. Don has written articles for education journals and has been a popular speaker. He is currently writing a series of fiction books based on the adventures of three sisters: the oldest in Romantic Adventures, the middle sister in Paranormal Romance, and the youngest in Young Adult Speculative Fiction. Don has degrees in science, theology, and education.
This article first appeared in 09/11/2013 on the Book-in-a-Week website.
