Keep Track of Point-of-View Characters and Timelines in Scrivener’s Corkboard

If you write a novel with multiple point-of-view characters or multiple timelines, it’s important to be able to keep track of each section of your story as you progress. As you shift from one element to another, you need to make sure that each part of your narrative flows correctly. Scrivener’s Corkboard, together with labels that you can apply to each of your files, give you a bird’s eye view of your plot, and helps you ensure the coherence of complex stories.

Working with multiple point-of-view characters

Multiple point-of-view characters allow authors to tell a story from different perspectives. Multiple point-of-view characters are often used in romance novels, fantasy, and thrillers. In many cases, there are two or three point-of-view characters, but there can be more.

Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, for example, has two narrators: one is an omniscient third-person narrator, and the other narrative is in first person told by the protagonist Esther Summerson. Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is told by three first-person narrators, showing the difference between a family and its domestic worker, with a third character, a friend of the protagonist, offering an outsider’s perspective.

One extreme example of multiple point-of-view characters is George R.R. Martin’s novel, A Game of Thrones. The novel has eight point-of-view characters, with each chapter shifting from one character to another. These changes in point-of-view characters do not occur in a specific order, and, for an author writing this sort of novel, it’s important to keep track of when each character is speaking and how events in their chapters fit into the narrative.

Use labels to mark scenes or chapters

If you work with multiple point-of-view characters, it’s a good idea to mark their scenes or chapters with labels. I’ve made a sample Scrivener project with all the chapters of A Game of Thrones, named as they are in the novel: the point-of-view character’s name followed by the Roman numeral of their appearance in the story. I’ve set up labels for each character, and chosen to display them in the Binder and as Binder icons. These labels immediately show the complexity of this approach.

(5 Tips for Using Labels in Scrivener looks at using labels, and discusses how to apply them. )

While these labels are useful in the Binder to highlight which character is the focus of each chapter, they become much more powerful when you switch to the Corkboard. By default, the Corkboard looks like this. (I’ve made the cards very small to fit as many as possible in the window.)

If you click the Arrange by Label button (in the red circle in the screenshot above), the Corkboard changes to position each file on a line according to its label.

Each label line shows the chapters for a single point-of-view character, and the overall timeline, from left to right, shows the linear progression through the novel. As you scroll sideways, you can see when and how often the various point-of-view characters appear in the story. When writing a novel like this, you can use this view to make sure that each character appears often enough, and that their chapters aren’t too close together.

Work with multiple timelines

Multiple timelines are also used frequently in fiction. Some examples are The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier, where two characters 400 years apart are contrasted; All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, where there are two timelines and two point-of-view characters; and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, which hops back and forth between the present and many pasts.

One of the most common ways multiple timelines are used is to intersperse chapters set in the present time with flashbacks. A character may interact with others in the present, and then reflect on events in the past to show how past events affect the character. In this approach, each timeline generally progresses chronologically, but doesn’t have to.

Managing multiple timelines is similar to working with multiple point-of-view characters. You can apply labels for, say, present and past, and view them in the Corkboard as above. If you have multiple past periods that you want to tag, you can create more labels. For example, you may have a character whose past is shown in childhood, adolescence, and as an adult, and you can tag each of these periods. Or the timelines could correspond to locations where characters were through their lives, with different labels used to tag different locations.

Another way to manage multiple timelines is to use status. By default, Scrivener provides status set up to mark the state of your chapters: First Draft, In Progress, Final Draft, etc. But just as with labels, you can create your own statuses. (We explain how to do this in Three Ways to Mark the Status of Items in Your Scrivener Project).

To display Status Stamps on the cards in the Corkboard, choose View > Corkboard Options > Show Status Stamps. These status stamps can help you get an overview of a novel with a single point-of-view character, letting you see how often you switch timelines. And if you use this with multiple point-of-view characters, marked by labels, this feature becomes even more powerful.

Working with multiple point-of-view characters or timelines can be demanding, but this approach can enrich a narrative by keeping readers on their toes. These approaches allow authors to tell stories in unconventional ways, and Scrivener can help you organize this type of project when outlining and a s you write.