One of the greatest pitfalls of the dual timeline is the possibility that one of the plots will interest readers more than the other. Essentially, you’re asking readers to read two stories simultaneously, with sometimes very little to connect the two until they reach the final chapters. Make Sure Both Timelines Are Equally Interesting Below are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from my experiments with this difficult but sometimes rewarding technique. Not too long ago, I received an email asking for a post on how to pull off dual timelines. 6 Tips for Managing Dual Timelines in Your Novel But the benefits are also manifold: dual timelines can create the opportunity for a deeper plot, more resonant theme, and greater character development. The pitfalls of this are obvious, since you’re risking reader confusion and frustration by straying from the beaten path of a single chronological storyline. Often, this is the result of an intricate and integral backstory, such as we might find in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood or Ann Brashares’s My Name Is Memory, which switch back and forth from a “present-day” timeline to a timeline further back in the characters’ pasts.
These SaaS (Software as a Service) tools are getting more mature all the time and are able to see some very unique features that the desktop offerings can't match (specifically in the area of multiple-author collaboration and beta-reader reviews).Some stories are so complicated they require not just one, but dual timelines to tell everything. And then, the newest entrant into the category are the online dedicated writing environments for authors like Wordslingr and LitLift and some others. Especially when combined with dropbox (or one of its competitors) to allow synchronization of your work across multiple devices. After that, desktop writing environments that are designed for authors like Scrivener and yWriter are popular.
They are easy and accessible and everyone has them. MS Word and other desktop word processors are still the king. This thread was originally started way back in 2008 (that's some legs!) so I know the answers here have probably changed over the intervening 7 years. Plus, being online, these tools work pretty much across all devices. Being online (ala Google Docs) you are able to get some unique collaboration and review features that desktop applications can't provide. There are several free ones like LitLift out there, as well as my own, Wordslingr. None of these will make you a better writer or your work more successful, but it will allow you to be better organized.Ĭlick to expand.I haven't seen many online writing tools mentioned in this thread. Once fully implemented this may well be a standout feature. An interesting one is oStorybook - an open-source version of Storybook - that is currently being developed by a small group.ĮDIT: I forgot to mention that oStorybook will allow creation and editing of scenes/chapters in LibreOffice. I gave up on Scrivener because I find its (Windows) UI is intractable, although it has a fair degree of power, and is not exclusively for novels. To me, the most impressive for writing a novel are yWriter (free and very good), WriteItNow (expensive, but it's the one I use), WriteWayPro (inexpensive and good), and perhaps Liquid Story Binder (complex, and no longer under development). Personally, I wouldn't consider going back to just using a wordprocessor - there's too many things for me to create, try, keep track of, etc - but some still get by with Word/LO, and good luck to them.
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