In preparation for this year’s NaNoWriMo, I stumbled across Aeon Timeline – a handy piece of software that encourages both freedom and detail in your writing.

It’s sometimes difficult to write in a linear timeline (one event following the next) because my thoughts are invariably looking ahead to a scene that I feel might be more exciting.  To keep track of scenes that haven’t yet been written, I’ve historically used a MindMap with bubbles representing ideas and ideas forming inspiration for scenes.  Leaping around the storyline picking up scenes depending on my mood has always proven successful in the past.  However, that way of writing doesn’t encourage attention to detail.  Knowing when things happen and how they relate to other things that have already happened, or are yet to happen, is crucial to keeping the story grounded in reality and backed by a solid structure.  Both of these have been my weak areas in the past.

What I needed was something more structured than a MindMap but not so limiting as a spreadsheet.  What I needed was a timeline that I could populate in a linear sense while also dropping facts, events, and ideas around as they occurred to me.

Aeon Timeline looks like it ticks all the necessary boxes.  With NaNoWriMo less than ten days away, I’ve been populating various timelines in Aeon Timeline with events and facts from my previous stories.  This, I hope, will see me in a good position for writing during November.  No longer will I be looking aimlessly out of the window wondering when something happened, or dismissing a crucial event with the phrase “some time ago”.  Now I’ll be able to see when the scene I’m writing actually fits in relation to all other events.

Will it work?  That remains to be seen, but it all looks promising so far.

One key advantage of Aeon Timeline over a lot of other software I’ve found over the years is that its creator, Matt Tobin, keeps in frequent contact with the users of his software via his forum and email.  He’s quick to take on-board ideas that may improve the software further down the line, and he’s a keen supporter of NaNoWriMo.  The trial version of Aeon Timeline typically runs for 20 days but, during NaNoWriMo, it won’t expire until well into December.  That gives you the whole of NaNoWriMo to try it out and if it proves as useful as it seems to be, the purchase price of $40 is discounted by 20% for Wrimos and 40% by those who “win” NaNo.

It’s rare these days to find a piece of software that has no downsides.  If you are entering NaNoWriMo, or you’re thinking of embarking on storywriting, or if you just have a project that could do with help from a decent timeline, you’d do yourself a big favour by checking out Aeon Timeline.

You can find Aeon Timeline’s NaNoWriMo page here: http://www.scribblecode.com/nanowrimo.html

Matt is currently undertaking a series of Question & Answer sessions with NaNoWriMo participants.  I recently had the pleasure of being involved with one of these sessions and you can read about this here: http://www.scribblecode.com/author_jrudderham.html