Hi there,
I’m kinda new to AT, and I don’t know if I’m doing this right.
In the arcs menu, I can nest an arc inside another, creating a hierarchy, but it seems it doesn’t affect anything.
Lets say my story has three books, there’s a main arc, covering the entirety of the story, and then each book has their own arc with smaller arcs inside. Is there a way to have a main and secondary arc?
Like I said, maybe I don’t know what I’m doing, but thank you either way.
I’m writing a novel series and am doing it within one instance of AT. I can show you how I track various arcs such as which novel, story beats per novel, B story, magical objects (I’m writing fantasy with strong magic elements), scene locations, music to compose (I’m composing music for my series), main character theme, etc.
The trick is to set up Data Types for each thing I want to track. For example, let’s take story beats. I’m using the Save the Cat! story beat method. When set up, I can click on the filter for any story beat and the chapters/scenes relating to that beat are displayed in, say, Outline view.
To set this up, I go to View > Show Settings
which brings up a box with four options: Calendar & Date, Narrative, Data Types, and Colors. I select Data Types.
I click the Edit button for Item Types. I select the Add button (lower left) and add an item type that I call Story Beat.
I click OK, which returns me to the Data Types screen. I then click the Relationships tab button. I then click the Add button and add a relationship that I call Story Beats. Here is what it looks like (I use two images to show all the selections):
I click OK and OK again to exit the Timeline Settings.
I can now iterate through each scene’s inspector to add whichever story beat it belongs to. Here’s a scene that belongs to the Debate story beat:
I can now, for example, view just those scenes that involve the Debate beat, simply by selecting the filter for that beat:
I hope this helps you.
Steve
That’s amazing. Thank you very much!!! What I don’t understand is how you got a custom icon?
I’m glad this is helpful. To change icons, go to View > Show Settings. Select the Data Types tab. In Item Types, click the Edit button. Select the item type in the left column for which you want to change the icon. In this case, I’ll select, again, Story Beat. Then select the Icon selector to choose your icon. (I chose a cat for Story Beat because I’m using the Save the Cat! Writes a Novel beat structure, haha.)
Hope this helps!
