

It’s also fairly complex, and doesn’t welcome you with easy-setup wizards. You can use conventional calendars or create your own calendar for the Munchkin kingdom on the planet Zarg.Īeon Timeline’s strength is that it will sync with Scrivener, creating events that you can organise as chapters and scenes. A simple outlining tool like Scrivener’s corkboard or Scapple can make it hard to keep track of your who’s doing what to whom, when and where, particularly if you’re writing something with an epic or historical scale.Īeon Timeline helps you to create a story outline, complete characters, locations and story arcs, on a timeline view that lets you zoom in and out at any scale from seconds to millennia. Students/teachers can get around 50% discount on Xmind 8 and Xmind ZEN.Īeon Timeline is a powerful but unwelcoming planning toolĤ Aeon Timeline.
#Scapple export full#
ZEN is also subscription-based, at US$60/year (£46), which puts me off (although it comes with the full mobile version for iOS/Android). Xmind ZEN has a new engine and is probably better, but if you import to ZEN you can’t return to Xmind 8. Xmind 8 is a standalone package that I’ve used extensively in the free edition. There’s also a mobile version for iOS/Android.
#Scapple export pro#
There are two desktop flavours for MacOS, both available in a highly-functional free edition and a fully-featured Pro version (you get things like exports to Word/Excel and Gannt charts, but not to Scrivener). I’ve also used it for many other projects where I wanted the ability to zoom in and out at different levels of detail, apply a wide range of formatting and create linked mind-maps for complex projects. I’ve been using it for about five years and used it to plan all of Blood River, from the outline/timeline to character relationship diagrams. If you want a powerful mind-mapping package that will let you do everything from free-form thinking to timelines and organisational charts, you’ll need something like Xmind (and there are a lot of mind-mapping packages).
#Scapple export pdf#
While the learning curve can be steep if you’re coming over from Word or Google Docs, I can honestly find very little to say against Scrivener, since it even lets you export to Word, PDF and many other formats including ebooks.ģ Xmind.
#Scapple export trial#
The current price is £47, with a big discount if you take part in Nanowrimo or you’re a student, and there’s a 30-day free trial (a genuine 30 days of non-consecutive use). Scrivener is both ridiculously feature-rich (after three years I’m still finding new ways to use it) and absurdly cheap. When you’re writing, you can see your ideas for the current scene in a synopsis sidebar.įinally, the outliner view shows the same synopsis information along with things like word counts, status indicators, when you wrote them and progress bars if you’ve set yourself targets. The corkboard gives you a set of virtual index cards where you can scribble your ideas for characters, locations, parts, chapters and scenes - in as much or as little detail as you want - and play with their order. The binder sidebar lets you organise the structure of your parts, chapters and scenes, which you can colour-code to show their status (or by narrator or location, if that’s your thing), and drag-and-drop to change their order. When it comes to planning a novel, there are three key features:

Many amateur and professional authors swear by Scrivener, the long-form writing tool from Literature & Latte. Scrivener is an almost-complete author’s toolkitġ Scrivener.
