Best practices for tracking transient relationships (creative writing)

Q & A
#1

Hello,

I’m totally new to Aeon Timeline. Loving it.

I see the relationship feature, that allow us to specify simple relationships like sibling, rival, etc. I also see other options like fiancée, for example. But I wonder if there is a way to track transient relationships. Like, for example:

  • Fiancée from 197 to 1999, then married in 1999 until 2015 (sorry for the sad example).
  • Or even colleagues from X to Y, then became best friends from Y to Z, etc.

It did cross my mind to create events, like this:

  • Event: Mary and John get engaged
  • Event: Mary and Jon get married

But that wouldn’t necessarily leverage the relationship functionality that well, would it? Feels a little clunky to me because now it is not that simple to see the historical relationship between two people. Like, if I wanted to see a full chronological order of the relationship between these two characters, what would be the best way?

I’m keen to hear how others use the software

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#2

Unfortunately there isn’t a way to add dates to relationships to show changing relationships over time.

The only thing I can add is to your idea of creating events to mark a changing relationship (eg. marriage event, engaged event). If Mary and John have a generic “Participant” relationship to these events, you would then be able to use the filters to show all the events that both have taken part in, which would show a timeline of their relationship.

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#3

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. To be fair I don’t think that creating an intermediate relationship entity between two characters is wrong. Coming from a database perspective, this makes total sense to me.

However there is room for improvement with visualising or customising these relationships.