Where’s Microsoft Word? I admire anyone who attempts to produce a novel-length work in Microsoft’s jack-of-all-trades word processor. You could dedicate a website to reviewing writing tools, but for this rewrite I’ve decided to focus on the five I know best. The range of tools available to writers has expanded enormously since I wrote the original version of this post for my 5×5 Medium blog. I’ve also discovered what happens without a plan (did I mention the unfinished novel?). I’ve tried a few tools and discovered some of their strengths and weaknesses for my process. On my way through five novels (one unfinished, one about to be self-published, one in beta, two in pre-planning), I’ve had plenty of opportunity to experiment. Wherever you are in the writing process, finding the right tool to produce your outline is more than a thought experiment. Wherever you stand, you’ll need an outline because agents want a synopsis of your whole novel if your 10,000-word taster gets their attention.Īs a taster, my MA in Creative Writing at St Mary’s University demanded a 3,000-word chapter-by-chapter breakdown of our WIPs to show that we could produce a full-length work.
There are pantsers who claim the words flow naturally into a three-act story, planners who painstakingly detail every scene in advance, and plantsers like me in between. But I’m a bear of little brain, and a novel is a thousand times more complex. A simple filter system enables you to see all the events affecting a specific entity, or with a specific tag, arc or label.How do you turn a collection of story ideas into a coherent 100,000-word novel? Novel planning was one of the most daunting tasks I faced as a first-time novelist.Īs a journalist, I’d got used to writing a few hundred words without an outline, or jotting down a few ideas for a thousand-word article or blog post. Events may be dragged along the timeline either singly or in groups. Either way brings up a dialogue box for you to enter and adjust details. To create a new event, you either click on the button to create your arc, entity or event, or double click in the right place on the timeline. The reminder of day of the week and time of year is also useful – having given a season for one event, you can clearly see what point in the year other events happen.
It’s very easy to combine simple view, arc view and entity view in any combination, to see different parts of your project in detail and check the timeline is feasible. You can also create birth and death events for people, and once you have created a birth event, each event that you link with an entity will keep you informed as to their age – a very useful feature that also helps you avoid linking them to events outside their lifespan.Įach entity may be linked as an observer or a participant, enabling you to keep track of whose point of view the section is to be written in. Again, colour coding plays a large part in planning out your timeline.
This enables you to create entities – people or places for example – and link them with the events on the timeline.
Aeon timeline free trial update#
The windows update for this feature is currently in development, and will be made available as a free update when released.Īnother useful feature is entity view.
Aeon timeline free trial mac#
You can also provide a link to an external file – in fact the mac versions of Scrivener and Aeon Timeline will link with each other, so you can generate a scrivener file from your timeline and keep the two synced. Colour coding can be used for different events, and they can be events for a single moment in time or longer events, recorded to within the degree of accuracy you need, whether this is to within the year, the month or even the second.Ĭlicking on any event on the timeline gives access to the details of that event – here you can record which story arc it belongs to, the time and duration of the event and any other details you need. The timeline across the top shows the date, the events are listed in order on the timeline and at the bottom a bar shows how the current view relates to the overall timeline. Aeon Timeline is very simple to use, while providing many tools that are useful for organising your planning.
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