Tools of the Trade

As we get deeper into the plotting of Son of Science Novel, we’ve been experimenting with some new (to us) software: Aeon Timeline. It’s a very flexible tool for, well, making timelines.

Last week we talked about how we think we have all our new characters’ backstory figured out. In order to test ourselves and make sure there were no holes, inconsistencies, or open questions, we laid out the backstory in our favorite Rainbow formation. Each character gets a column in their own color, and each row represents a story point. It took two work sessions in the auxiliary writing cave to get the whole thing in shape, and to answer the questions we uncovered along the way. And to drink the mulled wine and the raspberry lambic.

When we were happy with the Backstory Rainbow, Jen set about entering all of the data into Aeon Timeline. The result is easy to browse, and doesn’t require immense amounts of floorspace.

Our writing software of choice is Scrivener, which Aeon is supposed to sync with. We say “supposed to” because we haven’t tried it yet. It will be interesting to see just what the two programs do when they talk to each other, and testing it now at the beginning of a project makes a lot more sense than pulling the trigger on a work in progress.

What writing tools do you prefer? Tell us in the comments.