Some questions regarding Aeon Timeline and a fiction project

Q & A
#1

I write on a project with jumps in time (over a 40-50 year period) and thats not told in chronological order - that means that character arcs and development are important for me to track, both from the charcters view but from a reader standpoint as well.

I get a bit confused about some things, if someone can explain it really basic to me.

Events, characters and relationships.

  1. Events are things that happen from what I understand, scenes, people are born, wars and such. Correct?

  2. Characters and relationships, I understand why you would wanna create characters but why would you for example have someone be a wife of someone , if the book is for a longer period of time and the relationship cant be limited to, for example 10 years? I was told by another person here at the forum that its better to create events for those things - I have done that but I still have difficulty getting why you would wanna limit yourself with relationships between characters at all really. Can someone explain it so it makes sense even if its not the best way for me?

  3. I get confused when there is talk about parent and child within Aeon timeline, as characters too are parents and child - can I get some examples from the world of fiction how I should think about events in the parent child context?

  4. I plan to have all things with an arc, big or small, in story arcs - but I want to create a field for character development, things that just develop the character explained with some notes that can be connected to a custom meta data slot in Scrivener - any ideas how to do that?

  5. I have made a lifelong event for my four main characters where I add scenes and other events that affect the character - is there a way to mark or highlight the most important milestone for the character?

  6. I wonder if thats the way to go, to create lifelong events, for the people closest to the main character as well? All of the sudden I see myself with alot of work ahead of me.

Any other ideas on how to use Aeon Timeline together with Scrivener for best effect is appreciated.

Best regards
Marcus Nordlund

#2

Another question;

  1. I have created characters with birthdate and, in some cases, when they die - I wanna make these dates and preferably the character file, something else than events … more like a character sheet where I can edit the birthdate field to Born and when they die to Death or something along those lines. Right now it seems to use the same field as scenes in the timeline, with a start date and an enddate - also the files created in Scrivener (after I’ve made the character in Aeon timeline) seems to by default be “scene” just like actual scenes - where should I change so that these files are called something like character sheet for both programs?
#3

Hi Marcus,

here are some answers that I hope will help you:

  1. Correct.

  2. There may be several paths that lead to the goal, just find out for yourself what suits you. Just define relationships that matter to your story, in a way that helps you to the necessary overview. If you don’t see a benefit, don’t do it for now.

  3. You can take a parent/child relationship in the literal sense, or in the figurative sense. In the world of software development, this might denote the hierarchical relationship of any elements, or an inheritance relationship, or a part/whole relationship.
    If you break down an event into intermediate steps (e.g., journey - stages of the journey/events on that journey), that would be an example of a parent/children relationship. Other examples could be country/cities, or chapter/scenes.

  4. For events, why not just define an additional multiline text field for this purpose?

  5. I can only draw on my experience with Aeon 2. Here, too, I first defined events as the characters’ lifelines, but this later turned out to be unfavorable in the timeline view. I later deleted these lifelines and used arcs with multiple events instead. Events that belong to an arc can also be assigned the same color to increase the overview.

  6. As I said, these lifelong events didn’t help me, but I’m talking about Aeon 2, where birth and death dates are part of the character properties and cause events with assigned characters to also show their age.

Cheers,
Peter

#4

In answer to your questions:

  1. Yes this is correct.
  2. Aeon Timeline is designed to be customisable, so if you don’t wish to have relationships between characters defined, you don’t have to. Defining relationships between people can be useful to some people, especially if their status does not change over the course of the novel (eg. daughter/mother).
    Relationships between events and characters (or other entities like Story Arc) are more commonly used, in that you can assign characters to which events they participate it, and therefore filter/group the timeline by character or arc.
  3. There are some examples of using parent/child events in our example timeline “Murder on the Orient Express”. For example, one parent event is “Poirot interviews the passengers about the murder”, where all the child events are the different interviews that he conducts.
  4. You can create additional properties for events in Advanced Settings. Got to Settings->Data Types, Edit. Then under the tab Properties you can add a new property (eg. “Character Development”) which can be assigned to events or characters. This can also then be synced with Scrivener.
  5. There isn’t really a way to mark or highlight the most important event for a character. You could add a new relationship between an event and a character (eg. “Milestone”), however this would not really appear on the timeline visually.
  6. Instead of creating life long events for characters where you add scenes and other events, you can instead assign relationships between characters and events. Then if you want to view all the events for that character, you just need to quickly filter by that character to see that character’s timeline. Or you can create a split screen or group your events to see multiple character’s timelines side by side.
  7. If you are using the Fiction template, then the default wording for the start and end dates for characters is Born/Death in the Inspector. Is this what you are referring to? I’m not sure what you are referring to in regards to calling the file “character sheet”. Do you mean the documents created in Scrivener for each character? These should have the title of the name of each character.

If you do wish to adjust your template more, then you can read more about our advanced settings here: Advanced Settings - Aeon Timeline 3 Knowledge Base

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