I bought an app called Plottr. It's compelling. The premise is you define plot lines on one axis of a grid and chapters or story beats on another. At the intersections of plot lines and chapters, you can put scenes. That lets you document each of several plot lines as a series of events. Those events can be distributed in relation to the events in other plot lines. It's cool. The effect is like index cards in swim lanes, one lane per chapter/beat/act/whatever. Locations and characters can be associated with each scene, and best of all, it's not tied to a proprietary cloud server. It's similar to Scrivener's swimlanes for synopses. Plottr has room for improvement, but I haven't found any fatal flaws. It's pretty cool. I wish there was a way to remove a scene from a timeline, for example, without discarding the scene. My workaround is to put my scenes in Devonthink and link to them from Plottr. A scene in Plottr can then be a brief description with a hyperlink to the document (or group of documents, or a tagged group, or a smart search, or anything) in Devonthink, where I would do the actual note-taking about the scene. Since that arrangement gives me more flexibility than a scene library in Plottr would, the lack of a scene library in Plottr doesn't really bother me. Once you have your timeline (swim lanes) worked out, you can export to Scrivener or Word. I found the docx export to be OK with some programs but not others, but I also found an easy work around for that. The free document conversion utility pandoc can be used to "convert" from docx to a new docx. That preserved heading styles and produced what appears to be a universally acceptable docx file. Anyway, I thought I would toss this out. You can do a lot of what Plottr does with Scrivener's swim lanes or with a spreadsheet, but not quite with the convenience. If nothing else, it has given me a fresh view of multiple plots in a story, and that's already made it worth the price. I am not affiliated with the company. For more info, https://getplottr.com .
