![]() ![]() Fear not! You can also use Timeline to brainstorm your story ideas or piece your plot together in a more organic manner, using the Narrative and Mindmap views, and then work in Scrivener (or Ulysses, or the word processor of your choice) independently. Tip 4: Don’t feel you have to sync with ScrivenerĪlthough syncing is really cool, if you don’t outline your novel scene-by-scene in advance or don’t even know the final order of events, you may be wondering if Timeline is going to be of any use to you. Timeline can handle conflicts, but they can be tricky to sort out if you’ve made a lot of changes. If you’re flipping back and forth between Scrivener and Aeon Timeline and wanting to make changes in both, be sure to sync Timeline both before and after you make changes. These must be text fields, not dates, otherwise the sync won’t work.ĭownload my Scrivener template, below, to have this all set up for you! Tip 3: Sync regularly Tip 2: Add start and end fields in ScrivenerĪ key step in making Timeline and Scrivener work together is adding start and end dates to Scrivener’s metadata. Here’s one I made for an epic fantasy series I’ve been working on. If you’re writing fantasy or science fiction with its own non-terrestrial calendar, or even a novel set in a historical period or non-Western culture, you can go to View -> Show Settings -> Calendar & Date -> Edit Calendar to completely customise days, months and so on. So, when you create a new Timeline file, the first thing to do is to check the calendar and tweak if necessary. Even minor things, like whether the monthly view (where you choose dates) starts the week on a Sunday or Monday, cannot be changed. This is critical - you can’t modify a project’s calendar once you start adding events. There is also a link at the end of this post to a version of the Scrivener template I use for synchronising, which I hope you will find useful! Timeline tips and caveats Tip 1: Set up your calendar first! In this post I’ll give some general tips on how to set up your Timeline and Scrivener projects so that they play nicely together, and next week I’ll go into more detail on my own workflow. Like Scrivener it’s a big, complex application with a steep learning curve, so I strongly recommend you go through the tutorials - and back up your Scrivener projects thoroughly before attempting a sync! The best thing is, it syncs with Scrivener so I don’t need to replicate everything in both programs, just sync them regularly to avoid conflicts. It has a multitude of uses, but I mostly use it to track the events in my novels and avoid inconsistencies. How I use Aeon Timeline with Scrivener, Part 1Īeon Timeline is an awesome piece of software designed for, well, creating and visualising timelines of events. ![]()
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