I’m a historical novelist. My novels are long and complicated, and require a lot of research. I’m about to start my 12th novel in a series for Berkley/Penguin, and it’s a particularly complex story with multiple plots. The overall time span is about 1863 to 1886, with about 1/3 of the novel spanning 1863-1866.
One of the reasons I think the Aeon Timeline approach will be useful is my need to keep the overarching CIvil War timeline in focus. From reading different threads here I understand that there are a few historical timelines I could choose to start with, but there’s nothing close to the Civil War. That leaves me with a few possibilities: I could enter the relevant data into a new template specific to the war; I could (in theory, and if I can find one) import a spreadsheet that contains the necessary information, or I could ask if anyone has developed a Civil War template and might be willing to share it, or sell it.
It seems that there are so many interesting projects people are working on, I wonder if it hasn’t occured to the powers that be that this might be a useful thing to pursue. People might have templates for different wars, for advances in medical science, for religion or for the way steamboats were developed and put into use. I would be pleased to share templates I’m working on at some point, of course. Thank you for whatever thoughts or suggestions you might have to share.
If I understand you correctly, it’s about feeding historical data into your timeline. I can imagine that it is more practical to do this via a data import, i.e. in the case of Aeon Timeline via csv, than via a template. Personally, I would see templates more as a project structure than as a compilation of content.
As a novelist, you may want to have a differently structured timeline project than a historian, for example, who wouldn’t need the narrative. I also expect it to be easier to combine the data of different historical lines by importing the related events and assigning them to corresponding arcs. I don’t know whether you can combine different templates at all.
Anyway, there’s a section in this forum dedicated to sharing templates.
Another thought:
If you have an extensive timeline with a lot of historical data that you have either compiled yourself in the course of your research or received from someone else, you can use this as a reference and copy/paste the the events relevant to your story into your separate novel timeline, where you assign them to a “Historical background” arc.
This will allow you to keep your novel timeline leaner and at the same time base it on a template that suits your novel design.
I did a Google search for downloadable history. One site I found was Americanhistorycalendar.com.
Some of the links there are no longer functioning. It may not be actively maintained.
There are plenty of other sites, too. I couldn’t find a CSV other portable format, though. If you find something like that it would be very useful.
Thank you so much. It’s a place to start.
If you find some good sources, please share - pre-populated timelines would be really cool for history, biographies, or historical fiction.
Hi Rosina, we’re hoping to make it easier in the future for people to share timelines and templates, etc. In the meantime, if you can gather the data you need we can help you format it to get it into the app. Just send it through to support@aeontimeline.com