How to create a story timeline for a novel

I know this isn’t what Infinity is for, and I use Infinity for a lot of other things. Still learning and loving the flexibility! :smiley:

I feel like with some tweaking there should be a way to create a timeline for an outline story/novel project, and if I can manage to pull that off within Infinity, I would be very happy :slight_smile:

I’ve been playing around with the Gantt view and start/end dates. Luckily my story is set in present time (2016-2018), so the dates are accessible in Infinity. But there might be other solutions. Basically, what I’m trying to create is the following:

  • A visual overview of plots and subplots – many stories and characters over the time in which the story is set, with defined scenes viewable on a timeline.
  • Character-specific color coding (using tags?) to easily see what scenes on the timeline belong to which character (and consequently, subplot). Bonus if this can be filtered, to easily identify only scenes related to a specific character.
  • Easy drag & drop moving of scenes as the draft develops.

If someone has any ideas, fire away! Maybe I’m stuck in my way of thinking and someone else can think outside the box, even if it’s not a complete solution :slight_smile:

Hey @jozii89, have you tried to use columns view for this and group it by date?

That night work :grinning: I’ll play around with it. I’d like to be able to see lines of events that happen simultaneously in the timeline, as well as many character-specific events over time, and columns might involve a lot of scrolling to do that. But the filter might help, to only see character-specific items.

Thanks for the suggestion :blush:

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Whenever I have trouble envisioning the structure for something I want to do in Infinity, I always search for existing examples for Trello or Airtable (both have been around longer with much wider use) and then adapt and/or import those into Infinity. It saves loads of time! Have a look at these options.

https://trello.com/forwriters



https://prowritingaid.com/art/453/How-to-Use-Trello-to-Storyboard-Your-Novel.aspx


I’ve used a few of these for technical writing in the past. Hopefully, you’ll find something directly useful or at least get some ideas.

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