Chronological Relationships

Q & A
#1

I am a creative writing student about to write my first novel (yea!). As I am developing my characters, I would like to create timelines for them. Here are the kinds of things I am looking to accomplish:

  1. Create a birthdate for a character.
  2. Create events for a character and automatically know how old the character is at that time.
  3. Create a series of events and know how much time has elapsed since the precipitating event.

If that isn’t clear, let me give examples:

If I have a character, I would like to give him an exact birthday (i.e. April 15, 2003). If he murders someone on a specific date (March 19, 2022), how old is he? [It’s easy to do this in your head for one event, but challenging when you have 25).

I would also like to be able to tell the chronology of a series of events. Keeping with the murder theme… If the Murder takes place on March 19, 2022, is discovered on January 06, 2023, how many days have elapsed?

Does this software do either of those things?

#2

This is one of the standard use cases. You might want to take a look at the “Murder on the Orient Express” sample project and check whether the features meet your needs. How to get the distance between two events on the timeline is described here in the knowledge base.

1 Like
#3

I don’t have the app yet. I wanted to see if it would work for me before purchasing.

#4

Is there no longer the free trial?
Anyway, Aeon Timeline is made for exactly that, and I don’t know of any other desktop program application that can do it.

#5

I’ll look to see. Thanks for your help.