Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
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I actually used SmartDraw for quite a long time (v2..v6 or so I think), for its diagramming capability. It was very good (and quite cheap early on), but became too bloated (and expensive) for my simple requirements and I gave up.
As for my requirements: Through the books characters split up and do their own things so that there are sometimes multiple threads. Often what happens in one thread impacts on the other, and in any case the characters all meet up again later so I want to make sure they manage to get to the same place at the same time (without needing seven-league boots, or having to stand there twiddling their thumbs to fill in time
).
But threads overlap and things cannot always be told in strict chronological order without breaking scenes in unnatural places. An extreme example of this would Lord of the Rings where, in the second and third books, you get all of one thread for a portion of the book, then all of another thread and so on, but you still get to see how the threads mesh with each for the wraith flying over and similar details.
So an outline of the book, chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene in print order may not reflect the actual story time-line. In order to check that the timing of my story is consistent and logical I keep a strictly chronological time-line of the events cross referenced with a scene description. One of the things that makes this more difficult is that in some cases the problem is long-periods of time, where characters are apart for months, while in other cases I am trying to synchronise things down to minutes. This time-line helps me to easily keep track what everyone is doing at the same time within the story, and if I need to alter the timing of one thread I can see how it impacts what I've done (or planned) for another.
At the moment I have an OpenOffice Text document with a simple table, one column for a the date/time and one a brief scene description (basically all the information you can put on the various "cards" in the software we have been discussing - except that on the time-line itself scenes may get split). One possible solution for me may be to move this simple table into a spreadsheet and add additional columns - allowing me to sort by date/time or by chapter/scene. This is still not going to be ideal since the ordering still needs to be kept in sync with what I've actually done - but it may be simpler than trying to move everything to something totally new.
ETA: My time-line document also carries details not explicitly covered by written scenes. Background information or events referred to indirectly. Making such details tie into any view except the time-line can be difficult.