Has anyone used both? I plot and outline and make notes in Scrivener, but I won a free year of Plottr in a writing contest. If I'm happy with Scrivener, is there any real reason to activate Plottr, or should I give it to someone who needs it?
I use both, and they're very different. Basically Scrivener doesn't have a timeline, and Plottr is a very comprehensive timeline.
I use both. After using the trial version of Plottr, I bought it. It is completely different from Scrivener, it allows the timeline, management of cards, places, more organized writing. It helped me a lot in my writing. If you want to buy it, let me give you some advice, I bought it using a discount, which I found on the NanoWrimo website. https://nanowrimo.org/offers
I should say I use Scrivener specifically for the corkboard function, which is a highy responsive beat sheet aka step outline. That's where I work out ideas and shuffle sections around. Then, once I'm pretty satisfied with the rough ideas stage I move to Plottr to work out a more detailed structure and all the things Angy mentioned. But it's never as simple or smooth as that makes it sound, I move back and forth between them all the time. Plus Plottr now lets you work out a timeline for an entire series as well as individual books. You don't need both (really you don't need either one), but I find each one extremely useful for specific things.
Thanks, y'all. I downloaded the trial last night and tried it out. I started plotting out the beats in this magic battle that has me stuck. I've been trying to figure it out for months. I still didn't get very far, but I think I might be able to skip to the major beats and fill in the blanks, maybe rearrange as needed. I mean, these are individual actions I'm using in place of entire scenes, but I think it might help. I do something similar when outlining. I just don't use the corkboard display. I use the left side panel, so it functions more as a vertical timeline I can rearrange, which is why I was wondering if I really needed Plottr, but I'm going to give it a try.
Oh yeah, you can do it that way. Really it's the same thing as the corkboard, you're just looking at it vertically, smaller, and in less detail. When you re-arrange the vertical line it also re-arranges the individual cards. The only difference is you're not looking at it in corkboard mode. Really the corkboard (or the left side panel, seen vertically) is a sort of timeline. It just functions differently from the one in Plottr. Personally I love both.
In case it may be of interest to you, Aeon Timeline is a great timeline software for writers, and you can sync it to Scrivener (although I haven't used that function yet).
