I recently looked at an application that lets you create characters, locations, McGuffins, scenes, plotlines, and chapters/book divisions.
It’s great. It will revolutionize how you thread plot lines, but, cuss me, I’m always looking for ways to get general purpose tools to do specific tasks.
Here’s what I came up with.
I have about 200 notes about locations, people, and stuff that goes shockingly wrong, and I would like to turn them into a novel.
Imagine a DT group per plot thread. In each of those groups are scene notes dragged and dropped into the order they appear for that plot thread. There’s the sub-story, and of course I can tag things as needed to build cross references between story lines.
Now it’s time to weave the plot lines, so I make a new tag called Outline. Under that I make groups for the subdivisions of the work. Acts, chapters, beats, whatever.
I set the top level tag, “Outline”, to “View->Sort->Unsorted”, which proliferates down to the child tags in one operation.
In the scene library groups, I tag them by where I want to use them in the Outline/Chapter xx tags.
The Outline tag is a ready-made roadmap to work with, and I can immortalize it by selecting all the groups and documents under Outline and exporting. OPML is best, because that gets the tag titles. Other export options export the documents, but without a reference to the group they were in.
Anyway, fun stuff, and a new way to use Devonthink.
