forum Using Notebook.ai to develop, plan and organize your plot

Started January 26, 2018 by Riley

tune

Hello everyone,

What kind of pipeline or process do you use for developing your story line/plot? The tools available here are useful for fleshing out the world building, individual character bios and such, but building a plot is often much more complicated than simply building a world.

I'm attempting (keyword) to write a novel and I'm curious how others organize their thoughts and ideas for plot points and structure them into a timeline of events. I have an outline document but this feels rudimentary compared to the possibilities presented by a service like Notebook.ai.

This is the wrong section for submitting ideas but I feel like a Timeline page or view or something that could link dates, times, etc. together and show them in chronological order would be useful. Maybe have a way to color coordinate events related to certain characters and/or filter events for specific characters. Being able to add notes to the timeline would be excellent too. One Stop has a story map option that is similar to this. Based on the world building premise of Notebook.ai, this option could get vastly more complicated if it allowed users to delineate their own time systems but that might be a bridge too far (at first at least).

Note: I don't have a premium account, so I don't know if scenes have a similar functionality. I wasn't able to find any preview of what a "scene" looks like either… but based on the similarity in the other page options I'm guessing they don't.

I usually use the scratchpad to scribble down plot ideas, but I think it would be nice to have a category for stories, so that we could keep track of our plots.

I think you can make a new category on the right side to see if you can make it be a plot planner.

This is good.

The "Scenes" category lets you link Characters, Locations, and Items, and I think having a timeline feature would be very convenient for sorting out these scenes.