Any advice on timeline management?

[cjbrooking-kr]

I wrote a draft, just putting in events as I envisaged them happening. My plan would be to add times in the first general review. Unfortunately, as I have multiple threads, this is proving very difficult. For example One thread has a series of quick actions, important so they wouldn't want to hang around - and in my story when they are finishing the last stage they are helped by someone who returns form a journey that has taken him over a week!

I think the main lesson here is to think about the timings at the beginning instead of leaving it to review. Maybe not though, I get a flow of inspiration when I'm "just writing" and it might break that.

[vkbo]

I haven't really solved that myself. When I started on this app, I was working on a multiple timeline story that would converge at the end, which is why I added the @time reference category in the first place. It's sort of the same as @plot, but intended as a way to track a plot in non-chronological order. In practice, this never really needed a separate category and could have been done with just more plot tags. I have never actually used this feature since I made it, and not really heard from people who do.

I think #854 is flexible enough to be used to visualise such story complexity, so I plan to make the swim lanes assignable to any tag you wish. It's something I want to tackle for the next release.

[vkbo]

By the way, in my plot outline, I always create plot tags for all major plot events and turning points. I use those tags in the key scenes that cover those events, so that I can easily check the pacing of the story just by viewing the plot column in the outline panel.

[cjbrooking-kr]

Thanks,
#854 would be ideal, I could have a slimline per story thread. Plot tags (or the current timeline plots) for are a good idea in the meantime. I think limiting it to key events might be the best way, I was trying to timestamp every scene and ending up with a very busy outline panel!

[vkbo]

Yeah, I too could use a way to track time in my current WIP, which has a different calendar to what we use. This itself makes it difficult to define a usable time format that is always sortable.

I add a time note to all my scenes to track the scene date, something like this:

%Note.Time: Saturday, 15 August 2026

I plan to make it possible to pick these notes, as well as story structure comments, for the new outline view I'm designing for the 26.3 release. Which means you can easily get an overview of them in table form. That would be very useful in my current project.