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Posted by Hugh
Aug 12, 2018 at 11:34 AM
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.
Posted by Franz Grieser
Aug 13, 2018 at 09:38 AM
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).
Posted by Paul Korm
Aug 13, 2018 at 11:48 AM
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.
Posted by Hugh
Aug 13, 2018 at 01:23 PM
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?
Posted by Hugh
Aug 13, 2018 at 01:52 PM
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.