Timeline

What it is

Every novel runs on two clocks. Story order is when things happen in the world of the book. Reading order is when the reader learns about them, chapter by chapter. Narrative theory calls the pair fabula and syuzhet. A prologue set twenty years earlier, a flashback in Chapter 9, or two point-of-view lines running a week apart all pull the two clocks apart on purpose.

The timeline is the story-order clock. It holds when each event happens, how long passes between them, and how old everyone is when they do. Readers rebuild it in their heads as they go, which is why a timeline error is so easy for them to spot. They do the arithmetic you stopped doing three books ago.

Where a timeline breaks

• Two weekdays that cannot both be true. It is Monday, and “the next morning” is Monday again.
• A time of day that cannot hold. The same hour is dawn in one scene and midnight in the next.
• Relative time that does not add up. “Three days later” and “the following week” land on the same morning.
• One character in two places. She is at the harbor and in the capital on the same afternoon, a day’s ride apart.
• An event before the thing it follows. A scene set “the week after the siege” sits before the siege in story order.
• An age that moves. A birth year, or an age stated in one book, that no longer fits the dates in the next.

Why a series makes it harder

Inside one book you can keep the clock on a single sheet of paper. Across a series, the facts are spread over years of drafting. The gap between Book 2 and Book 3, the age a character gives in passing, the season a battle was fought in: each is set once and relied on for the rest of the series. The elapsed-time guide walks through the arithmetic by hand.

In a Full read, StoryHelm’s Timeline pass takes the events already recorded in your canon, adds the time markers found in the text, and puts them in story order, separate from the order of the chapters. Any passage it quotes is checked against your manuscript and dropped if it is not found word for word. Inside a book, the Full read’s Coherence Guardian reads the text for two weekdays that cannot both be true, a time of day that cannot hold, and relative time that does not add up, and flags a character in two places at once. A check on the story-ordered events flags an event placed before the thing it follows. Across books, a paid check you start from your series’ Checks page compares the physical details each book records for a character with the same or nearly the same name, such as a scar or eye color, and names the books that disagree. When both books hold enough of that character’s dialogue, it also flags a noticeable change in how the character speaks. Your Series Bible export can list the events from each book together, and the check flags the same event given a different year, month, season or length in two fully read books, but it does not compare ages or the time between events. It reports what it found and where. You decide which date is true, and you make every edit in your own words.

An example

One book, two chapters, one afternoon that cannot happen.