I am new to Tinderbox, plus I am a decidedly non-geeky type, so please bear with my very basic question. I am using Tinderbox to organize notes for a novel, and I'm very pleased with how flexible it is. I can just type notes on the fly when I'm brainstorming, and worry about organizing them later. My problem now is that I'm at the point where I have a LOT of notes, and it's becoming unwieldy. I created adornments (boxes) in Map view for scenes, motivations, conflicts, Acts (I, II, and III), but one problem I'm having is I have so many notes in each box that I can't see them individually. Is there a way to just get an Outline view of an individual box? I would like to see all the notes for, say, Act I, in a list so that I can change them around according to what scenes will be in that Act. The adornments don't show up in Outline view, only the whole file, and it's difficult to sort out which notes belong with which Act.

Thank you in advance for your answers. By the way, since I'm so new to Tinderbox as a novel-writing tool, I would appreciate any suggestions from other writers on how they organize their writing with Tinderbox.

John

How many notes do you have?  Just wondering!

Early on, you might well want adornments to represent Act I, Act II, and Act III; you won't know whether the sinister Mrs. Higgins appears in Act I or not until in Act II, so it's nice to be able to move things back and forth quickly and fluidly.

Later, these decisions will seem more fixed.  If course Mrs. Higgins must be established late in Act I!  Once the acts are fairly fixed, and you seldom find yourself wanting to move notes between acts, it makes sense to drag all the notes from the Act I adornment into an Act I container.  There, you have a fresh map to explore the structure of the act in detail.  Perhaps now you do the same thing with scenes.  

Note that it's not hard to move things between containers -- it's just not as easy.  And there's not a simple way to express things like, "I suppose this is Act II, but maybe it's Act I"; something can be between, or near, or astride an adornment, but you're either in a container or you're not.

You can certainly export everything even if it is all just organised in map view, but one of the key things with Tinderbox is that the map view does not impact outline order. In your case, this is going to be a frustration most likely, but generally it is considered a feature. Moving a note spatially above another note (or from left to right) does nothing to actually re-order the note in the outline. It would be too difficult for Tinderbox to try and guess what you mean by the movement. So if you have never organised anything in the outliner, you might find it is a huge mess.

Depending on how you have things organised, you could maybe sort the map container by Xpos or Ypos---but I'm guessing you probably have clusters of notes where a super-cluster (Act I) might be organised top-down from the next super-cluster, but within the cluster everything is left-right or even in a matrix. In that case, a simple sort will not work.

You could try sorting by Xpos first, and then Ypos second (or the other way around if the case may be) and see if that gets you close enough to save an hour.

Going forward, a good rule of thumb is: If you intend to export in a linear fashion where order is important, then working in Outline and using Map as embellishment is the direction to go. For example, when I was working on a book in Tinderbox, I had things organised primarily by plot thread containers, and then I would drag manually created aliases into chapter containers which were organised in act containers.  So there was one part of the outline that I could export in a linear book-order fashion, and another part that had all of the plot threads in their own order which I could export to check for continuity. I used maps within the book-order container to keep track of non-order related details.

So what I would do is create a structure like this:

Code:

- Book
    - Act I
    - Act II
    - Act III 

Then select everything in the Act I adornment and drag it into the new Act I container. Likewise for the rest. Then as already suggested, use the existing spatial map as a reference to organise everything within those new containers into book-order. If sorting by Xpos+Ypos gets you close, do that before you drag notes. Use colours (if you aren't already) to make sure that everything is grouped together as it should be in the outline. By that I mean, select everything in Act I and make it bright red in the Color menu. In the Outline view, you'll see where all of those notes actually are in the Outliner. Then play with sort until everything is grouped together. You might have some other attribute that is more useful. Say if you have titled everything numerically "1. This is chapter one"---then obviously sorting by name would be useful.

If sort doesn't work out, you'll just have to do it fully manually. With 100 notes, it shouldn't take longer than an hour or so.

Once you get everything organised into the proper book-order, select the "Book" container, create a Nakakoji view, make sure "Book and contents" is selected on the left, and choose an appropriate export template. The default will just give you an indented and numbered outline. Then export and you'll have a file ready for print.

I think it's important to mention here that you can work BOTH in map and in outline view.  

In fact, you can keep a bunch of different windows open on the same document at the same time.  So, even when I'm brainstorming in maps, I can keep an outline of my references handy (and automatically alphabetized, so I can find things).

I have another very basic question about Views. The adornments that I create in Map View, which contain scenes and acts for my novel, are not visible in Outline View, right? Unless I'm missing something, I can't find Act I, II, etc. when I switch to Outline view. Would I need to create a prototype in Outline view to do this? I think the problem I'm having is that I did most of my work in Map view, and now I have a jumble of notes in Outline view with no structure to them.

Hi John,

In Outline View you can set a note to be a Separator. I indicate the end of Acts with Separators, or sections of the narrative that I feel need to marked. I also use a Separator as a "bookmark" to show where I am in the novel as I am revising it.

You make a Separator in Outline View by creating a normal note, call it say End of Act One, then click a tick in the box that is called Separator (just under and to the left of where you pick the colour for the note when you create it.) As with Adornments in Map View, Separators are only visible in Outline View.


Greg

Actually, Tinderbox won't give a warning about separators with duplicate names.  (And separators in charts and treemaps are probably npt useful; they may well be hidden in the future.

Separators are indeed gone from Chart and Treemap views in v4.2.3, just released!