A timeline you can zoom from the year to the minute
Why a story needs both a long view and a short one, how folded gaps and reading order help, and how to use the zoom levels in practice.
A novel has two time scales that rarely look at each other. The long one is the arc: months, seasons, a year. The short one is the scene: a night, an hour, five minutes of an argument. Most writing tools give you only the first.
When the two are not connected you get the errors you would expect. A character leaves the house at nine and arrives at a meeting at nine-ten, forty minutes away. A storm passes in a paragraph and lasts three hours elsewhere.
Five levels#
The timeline in Author zooms across five levels: year, month, day, hour and minute. At the top you see the shape of the book, strand by strand. At the bottom you see the minute-by-minute of the night that matters.
You do not need to enter minutes for everything. A time can be as rough as a year, or ~1923 for approximately, and it is drawn at the precision you gave it. Only the scenes that need detail need it.
Folding the empty parts#
A book rarely fills its time evenly. There may be a gap of four years between chapter six and chapter seven, and a whole book in one night. The timeline folds the empty stretches into break marks, so the long gaps do not push the interesting parts off the screen.
Story time or reading order#
Two axes are available. Story time puts things in the order they happen, which exposes a flashback in the wrong place. Reading order lays chapters out by their words, which shows how the pages are spread. Switching between them is a useful test for structure: a thread that is rich in story time but thin in reading order is rushed.
Strands as rows#
Each strand has its own row, so the timeline is also a map of what carries the book. A mystery that appears in chapters 1, 5, 8 and 11, and nowhere in between, is visible as a gap in its row. The board view shows the same strands against chapters for a coarser look.
The checks lane#
Issues from the continuity checks sit in a lane on the timeline, so you see the seams where they occur in time, not just in a list.
A way to use it#
- Start zoomed out and look at the shape. Is there a strand that disappears?
- Pick the busiest night and zoom to the hour. Do the events fit the hours?
- Zoom to the minute for the scene that matters most, and check the order.
- Look at the checks lane for anything flagged in that stretch.
Fifteen minutes with the timeline will tell you things that three read-throughs did not.