... Is a relatively new digital tool that describes itself as "a story development and writing app", a "story sequencer" and an "outliner and writing app". Clearly designed for scriptwriters and novelists, its main display combines three panes: a timeline that has some hierarchical functionality, a "story logic" pane that is slightly reminiscent of flowchart apps such as Flying Logic, and a writing pane.

It also has several other features that are likely to be particularly attractive to fiction-writers in the Hollywood tradition - for example a way of associating "set-ups" and "pay-offs". But I mention the application also because I remember that some members of this forum engaged in composing non-fiction have in the past made good use of tools for fiction, and it may be that some can make use of this.

Causality is paid for on a subscription scheme, and it's available for both Windows and macOS. Its developers have big ambitions. I can't vouch for it being bug-free, but so far I've found that the app has been put together in a serious and professional way. It's also worth mentioning that as an app it's noticeably colourful - Technicolor-colourful, some might say!

Details at https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.com/causality.html

Hugh wrote:

... Is a relatively new digital tool that describes itself as "a story
development and writing app", a "story sequencer" and an "outliner and
writing app". Clearly designed for scriptwriters and novelists, its main
display combines three panes: a timeline that has some hierarchical
functionality, a "story logic" pane that is slightly reminiscent of
flowchart apps such as Flying Logic, and a writing pane.

It also has several other features that are likely to be particularly
attractive to fiction-writers in the Hollywood tradition - for example a
way of associating "set-ups" and "pay-offs". But I mention the
application also because I remember that some members of this forum
engaged in composing non-fiction have in the past made good use of tools
for fiction, and it may be that some can make use of this.

Causality is paid for on a subscription scheme, and it's available for
both Windows and macOS. Its developers have big ambitions. I can't vouch
for it being bug-free, but so far I've found that the app has been put
together in a serious and professional way. It's also worth mentioning
that as an app it's noticeably colourful - Technicolor-colourful, some
might say!

Details at https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.com/causality.html

I saw this mentioned on the Scrivener forum a couple of days ago and downloaded the free version to see what was what. I'm working on a large non-fiction text in the history of medicine, and have been using Tinderbox and Aeon timeline to keep all of the factual, conceptual, historical details relatively manageable, but the whole narrative structure has been problematic so I was open to new ideas, and after just a few hours of playing with it, Causality does seem to offer some goodies.

It basically gives an overall graphic outline of synopses, and the main writing will still be done in Scrivener, but the graphical presentation is very flexible and really does help to clarify things. The Sub-Arcs which allow 'unpublished' trajectories and repositories of themes is - none of which appear on the graphical outline until they are added - are a great idea: e.g. brainstorm a few digressive points and then distribute through the main narrative at a later date.

I'd jump immediately for the full version if there was a way of linking from the synopses to e.g. Scrivener document links, but at the moment I'm still exploring.

Of course it can be used as a more simply outliner too: I used it this morning to outline a lecture for next month and and the clear graphics seemed to offer a very effective way of working.

I'll see how it goes over the week-end

Hugh thank you for the tip. Looks interesting and a challenge to learn to use properly.

There's a permanent license available in addition to the subscription:

https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.com/xcart/causality-permanent-license.html

Pricey -- I put it in my maybe-someday bin.

Thanks for the heads up. Interesting approach; the main timeline is reminiscent of professional video editing software--not surprising since the company behind it is clearly targeting movie directors.

Seems similar to yWrite ( http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter6.html ) except a little more sophisticated, but yWrite is free whilst Causality is expensive.

There's a free version of Causality, crippled to the extent that the writing functionality is limited. After the trial, that's probably the version I will use, dipping into the subscription version if I need it.

I used yWriter too, way back. When I used it, I liked it. I think it's rather different from Causality. Both applications attempt to give the user both macro and micro views of a writing project - as do other applications for writing fiction - but the emphasis in Causality on graphic representation distinguishes it from yWriter for me (unless yWriter has recently changed significantly).

In particular, as a dyed-in-the-wool "plotter" (or outliner), I find the attempt in Causality to provide a "flowchart" view interesting, especially in combination with a timeline. When outlining quickly, it's always a challenge to ensure, as someone once put it, that "the villain, the victim and the weapon arrive at the murder scene all at the same time and in the most unexpected ways" (and also that many other "beats" that involve cause and effect are likely to work on the page, including the aforementioned plants/set-ups and payoffs - although of course one doesn't want to be too fussy about these things).

Naturally, traditional outliners and mind-maps do provide solutions of sorts. But they're not really tailored to the needs of fiction (or for that matter, to the needs of some forms of factual film-making).

There have also already been various attempts to provide graphical ways of addressing this specific need. Time-liners, most particularly Aeon Timeline in my experience, come at it from one direction. I think "swim-lanes`' is another possible solution, as used by the long-standing app Writer's Café, and more recently by Scrivener for Mac 3.

A few years ago I and a German novelist independently tried to use the application Flying Logic to address the same need, by flow-charting fiction. I failed. Flying Logic is designed for other purposes; I could bend it, but not far enough for me. I don't know whether the other experimenter made any progress with it. (If it was a solution, it too was potentially rather an expensive one, if I remember correctly.)

I want to see whether in practice Causality can do any better.

Hugh wrote:

A few years ago I and a German novelist independently tried to use the
application Flying Logic to address the same need, by flow-charting
fiction. I failed. Flying Logic is designed for other purposes; I could
bend it, but not far enough for me. I don't know whether the other
experimenter made any progress with it. (If it was a solution, it too
was potentially rather an expensive one, if I remember correctly.)

The German novelist was Andreas Eschbach, a pretty successful author on the German market. I remember him writing about Flying Logic on the Scrivener forum a few years ago but haven't seen him mention FL recently either on his website or somewhere else. It's been a long time that he posted on the Scrivener forum, he uses Papyrus Autor now (he inspired a lot of the language tools in Papyrus).

This is an interesting thread. I have a few writing efforts coming up that required coordinated timelines and events.

Has anyone used Aeon for this? I can see why FlyingLogic would be difficult to coerce into representing beats in flow of events / character.

Franz Grieser wrote:

Hugh wrote:

>A few years ago I and a German novelist independently tried to use the
>application Flying Logic to address the same need, by flow-charting
>fiction. I failed. Flying Logic is designed for other purposes; I could
>bend it, but not far enough for me. I don't know whether the other
>experimenter made any progress with it. (If it was a solution, it too
>was potentially rather an expensive one, if I remember correctly.)

The German novelist was Andreas Eschbach, a pretty successful author on
the German market. I remember him writing about Flying Logic on the
Scrivener forum a few years ago but haven't seen him mention FL recently
either on his website or somewhere else. It's been a long time that he
posted on the Scrivener forum, he uses Papyrus Autor now (he inspired a
lot of the language tools in Papyrus).

Yes, Andreas Eschbach. Thank you, Franz. When I wrote my post, I unsuccessfully trawled my memory for his name. At the time I experimented with Flying Logic, I read his novel The Carpet Makers in English, and enjoyed it. I also remember his connection with Papyrus Autor, and afterwards looked into using it.

Off topic: all this reminds me of the issue of "Who killed the chauffeur?" When Raymond Chandler's thriller "The Big Sleep" was being made into a movie with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the scriptwriters asked Chandler about a murder in his novel which the plot leaves partially unexplained: "Who killed the chauffeur?" Chandler replied with words to the effect that he hadn't the faintest idea. A case when flow-charting fiction would have been useful?

Paul Korm wrote:

This is an interesting thread. I have a few writing efforts coming up
that required coordinated timelines and events.

Has anyone used Aeon for this? I can see why FlyingLogic would be
difficult to coerce into representing beats in flow of events /
character.

Yes, I've used Aeon for precisely this (for fiction-writing). Previously I experimented with one or two other timeline applications, and in my view Aeon is the best for this sort of purpose. This may be because to date, as far as I know, Aeon is the only timeline software to have been developed first for use with fictional projects, and only later for real-world use, rather than the other way about.

For real-world use, Aeon's flexibility should be helpful. It has some templates for this purpose, for example project management, that may be useful for you, though I suspect that they are pretty generic. As I recall, it has a 20-day free-trial period.

Hugh wrote:

This may be because to
date, as far as I know, Aeon is the only timeline software to have been
developed first for use with fictional projects, and only later for
real-world use, rather than the other way about.

The only timeline software for use in writing fiction - apart, of course, from Causality!

Anyone with an idea/explaination if and how this could help non-fiction and textbook writers ?

Lothar Scholz wrote:

Anyone with an idea/explaination if and how this could help non-fiction
and textbook writers ?

I don't think that one can be prescriptive. I can only outline my own experience. Years ago, when writing scripts for factual TV programmes, I and others tried very hard to order and structure what we wrote in ways that obeyed what we believed were the guidelines for audience expectations of fiction: inciting incident, narrative arcs, turning-points, climax etc etc. We tried to tell stories. Generally, the material was amenable to this approach, if lightly done. More importantly, it seemed to help in making quite complex factual subjects more palatable to general audiences.

Later, when giving presentations and making speeches to business and educational audiences, I tried to follow similar guidelines, with acceptable results. Since then, I've noticed that some very successful teachers, presenters, speech-makers and speech-writers use similar approaches. In a general sense, they too try to tell a story.

Recently, the Hollywood guru and author Robert McKee has attempted to widen his audiences from screenwriters and novelists to business people by persuading them that they too can benefit from using story-telling skills. I don't know how successful he has been in this attempt, but I can certainly see the relevance.

In all these cases, I imagine that a tool such as Causality could prove helpful. After all, successful story-telling is an ancient and proven tool of human communication.

Text-book writing is outside my experience. But I suspect that in many cases at that level the material "writes its own rules" of order and structure.

Hugh wrote:

Lothar Scholz wrote:
Anyone with an idea/explaination if and how this could help non-fiction
>and textbook writers ?

I don't think that one can be prescriptive. I can only outline my own
experience. Years ago, when writing scripts for factual TV programmes, I
and others tried very hard to order and structure what we wrote in ways
that obeyed what we believed were the guidelines for audience
expectations of fiction: inciting incident, narrative arcs,
turning-points, climax etc etc. We tried to tell stories. Generally, the
material was amenable to this approach, if lightly done. More
importantly, it seemed to help in making quite complex factual subjects
more palatable to general audiences.

Later, when giving presentations and making speeches to business and
educational audiences, I tried to follow similar guidelines, with
acceptable results. Since then, I've noticed that some very successful
teachers, presenters, speech-makers and speech-writers use similar
approaches. In a general sense, they too try to tell a story.

Recently, the Hollywood guru and author Robert McKee has attempted to
widen his audiences from screenwriters and novelists to business people
by persuading them that they too can benefit from using story-telling
skills. I don't know how successful he has been in this attempt, but I
can certainly see the relevance.

In all these cases, I imagine that a tool such as Causality could prove
helpful. After all, successful story-telling is an ancient and proven
tool of human communication.

Text-book writing is outside my experience. But I suspect that in many
cases at that level the material "writes its own rules" of order and
structure.

Hello Hugh - I wrote my first post to this forum after reading your opening comment, but as it was delayed by the mods (as anew account) it might not have shown up. But in that post I mention my own narrative approach to complex non-fiction and how I hoped Causality might help as a replacement/adjunct to my current Tinderbox/Aeon timeline set up.

After a long week-end of exploring I now think it will be useful to me, but only as an adjunct for specific portions of the work. The graphic representation of the higher level structuring abilities (basically a narrative of synopses) is excellent - very flexible - but need to corral (and control) a mass of detail, some of it recurring, leaves Tinderbox as the obvious tool of choice.

Oddly enough, I've looked at using Tinderbox a little differently this morning after 3 days with Causality ...

Another card-based outlining story builder is Story O. I'm not endorsing it, just pointing it out for those who like to explore all options. Here's the website:

http://www.junglesoftware.com/products/storyo_home.php

Sadly, they do a horrible job of selling this app. Honestly, the iOS version looks more sophisticated than the Mac version.

Steve Z.

Dr Dog wrote:

But in that post I mention my own narrative
approach to complex non-fiction and how I hoped Causality might help as
a replacement/adjunct to my current Tinderbox/Aeon timeline set up.

Welcome and thanks for the info! The kind of work you describe looks very similar to one of my current projects.

Can you elaborate a bit on your combination of Tinderbox and Aeon?

I understand that there is no direct sync between Aeon and Tinderbox as there is with Scrivener and Ulysses https://www.aeontimeline.com/walkthrough/scrivener-ulysses-syncing/

I am on Windows and often envy the MacOS ecosystem for specific tools such as Tinderbox, but wonder whether its application can somehow be reproduced by other means.

After a long week-end of exploring I now think it will be useful to me,
but only as an adjunct for specific portions of the work. The graphic
representation of the higher level structuring abilities (basically a
narrative of synopses) is excellent - very flexible - but need to corral
(and control) a mass of detail, some of it recurring, leaves Tinderbox
as the obvious tool of choice.

The apparently-no-longer-developed Outline 4D, formerly Storyview, is quite powerful in this regard; it's an outliner where the outline can be viewed either horizontally (as a timeline), or vertically (as a classic outline). The other Dr of the forum, Dr Andus, has written several times about it. Not surprisingly, this has also been developed primarily for the scripting world.