How to make a story timeline for your novel

A story timeline is a record of when things happen in your story: the day, sometimes the hour, and how long each thing takes. Readers rarely see it. They see the result, which is a book where the journey takes as long as the map says and nobody is fourteen for three years.

Why a story needs a timeline

Prose hides arithmetic. "A few weeks later" costs nothing to type, and forty chapters of such phrases add up to a schedule you never checked. A timeline checks it. These are the sums it does for you:

• Ages. Juliet is thirteen, with her birthday a little over two weeks away. Every later scene has to agree.
• Travel time. If the city is three days' ride away, news from it is three days old when it arrives.
• Who could have been where. An alibi, an ambush and a chance meeting all depend on two people's days lining up.
• Seasons. Six months after a July wedding it is January.
• Pregnancies and healing. A baby takes nine months. A broken leg does not mend by Friday.
• Deadlines. "Married by Thursday" only creates pressure if you know what day it is now.

The order things happen and the order you tell them

A story has two orders. The first is the order events happen in the story world. The second is the order the reader is told them. A flashback or a pair of alternating storylines pulls them apart.

Your outline keeps the telling order. Your timeline keeps the happening order. Keep them as two separate lists. If you only have the first so far, how to outline a novel covers it.

Give every scene one line in the timeline even when the reader meets it out of order. A flashback in chapter 12 to a childhood fire goes at the childhood date, with a note saying where it is told.

Build the timeline in three passes

A spreadsheet works for this. So does a strip of paper.

1. Anchor dates first

Write down the dates the plot cannot move. Think of a birth, a death, a wedding, a battle, a deadline someone states out loud. Give each a real date, even if the book never prints it. "Sunday 14 July" is something you can count from. "Early summer" is not.

2. Then durations

For every scene and every gap between scenes, write how long it takes. A feast is an evening. A ride to the next city is a day. A sleeping draught lasts forty-two hours. Now count forward from the anchors. This is the pass where problems show up, because vague gaps have to become numbers.

3. Then one lane per character or place

Split the timeline into rows: one per major character, or one per location. Read down a column to see what is happening everywhere at one moment. Read along a row to see one person's week.

A worked timeline: the five days of Romeo and Juliet

The play runs from a Sunday morning to the small hours of Friday. Juliet's birthday anchors the season: it falls on the last night of July, a fortnight and some days away, so the story is set in the middle of that month. The play is loose about a few hours, so read this as one consistent version.

Laid out like this, the tragedy is a scheduling problem. The Friar's plan had a day to spare until Capulet moved the wedding from Thursday to Wednesday. Put Balthasar and Friar John in two lanes and you can see it: one leaves Verona on Wednesday, the other never leaves at all.

The mistakes a timeline catches

Once the lanes are filled in, read each one from left to right and look for these.

• Two places at once. A character is at the feast and on the road in the same hour.
• Impossible travel. A messenger covers three days of road overnight.
• Age drift. A character's stated age stops matching their birth date as the years pass.
• A dead character in the room. Someone appears in a scene dated after their death.
• Wrong season. Snow in a scene that the dates put in July.
• A deadline nobody notices. The date passes on the timeline and no scene reacts.
• Knowing too early. A character acts on news that, by the timeline, has not reached them yet.

Each of these is a continuity error a reader can find with a pencil. How to find plot holes and continuity errors goes through the wider set.

A calendar for an invented world

A fantasy world does not have to use our months. If you make a calendar, decide four things and write them at the top of the timeline:

1. The length of a day. Leave it at twenty-four hours unless the story needs otherwise.
2. The months. A name and a number of days for each. Equal months are easier to count than uneven ones.
3. The seasons. Which months are winter. A character who rides out in Frostmonth should be cold.
4. The eras. What event the years are counted from, and whether a new age has started since.

Keep it regular. In your notes, write dates as numbers, year then month then day, so they sort. Use the month names in the prose, where they add flavor.

How to make a story timeline in Plotra

In Plotra a timeline is a note in the binder: choose New…, then Timeline. It needs no module, and a project can have several. You do not copy scenes onto it. It reads two properties from each scene, in the Properties panel of the inspector:

• Story date, written 1596-07-14, or 1596-07-14 21:00 with a time. The month and day can be left off.
• Duration, written as a number and a unit: 2h, 3 days, 42h.

Each dated scene appears as a bar at its date, as long as its duration. Scenes with no date wait in a strip called Undated scenes. Drag one onto the timeline and its story date is written for you. Drag a bar sideways to move it, or drag its right edge to change its length. See story dates and durations.

Events are for things that happen but are not a scene you write: Friar John's quarantine, or a war before chapter one. Click Event in the toolbar, or double-click an empty part of the timeline. An event belongs to the timeline it was added on.

Lanes in the toolbar splits the timeline into rows by Plot threads, POV character or Location. In POV or location lanes, dragging a scene into another lane changes that property on the scene. See lanes.

The two orders are two buttons. Chronological is story time. Narrative lays the dated scenes out in reading order and marks a scene flashback when it happens earlier than the one before it. In Chronological, Show reading order draws a line from each scene to the next one the reader meets, dashed orange where it steps back in time. Events are not shown in Narrative. See chronological and narrative.

Calendars of your own

Choose Calendar, then Manage calendars…, then New calendar. Set Hours per day, name the Months and give each a number of days, and add Eras if you count years from an event. Dates can then be written as 312-04-17 or as "4 Frostmonth 312". A custom calendar has no leap years: every year is the same length. Calendars belong to the project, and each timeline remembers which one it uses. See calendars.

Checks that read the dates

With the World bible module on, the Continuity view runs fixed rules over the same story dates. It reports a character who appears after their death, a character in two overlapping scenes with different locations, and an age that does not match the timeline. It reads properties and links, not your prose, so it can only check what you have recorded. See continuity checks.

Under a spoiler horizon

For a series, the Releases & reveals module lets you choose a book under World as of. The timeline then shows only the scenes readers know by that book. The spoiler horizon filters your own view. It is not a lock: someone you share the project with can still read everything.

Every feature here is on the Free plan. See pricing.

Start with five dates

Open a blank sheet and write down the five dates your plot cannot move. Put a real day on each. Then count the gaps between them and see whether your draft agrees. Fix what does not add up before a reader finds it.