Chapter 31 · The Project
The Timeline
A draft knows what happens. It rarely knows how long any of it takes. The Timeline is a spine of dated rows you drop events onto, so the three days everyone spends travelling are three days on screen instead of a sentence you will contradict in chapter nineteen. Not every project needs one. Historical fiction, anything with a siege or a school term, and every series with a season to keep straight all do.
Opening it
Open a project and look at the row of tools above your documents. Timeline sits between Research and the Lookbook, and the chip under it counts the events on it or reads empty.
Nothing is created or named first. The timeline is made the moment you first open the page, one per project, starting in story mode with 90 days shown a day at a time from Day 1.
Story days or real dates
Two modes, because most drafts know the order and the gaps and nothing more.
| Mode | What the rows say |
|---|---|
| Story (the default) | Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. No calendar at all. A week here is a block of seven days labelled Days 1–7, and a month is a block of thirty. |
| Real dates | March has 31 days and 2024 has a 29th of February. Weeks and months snap to their own boundaries, so a window opening in the middle of March starts with a part-month row labelled March rather than a thirty-day block ending in April. |
To switch, press Use real dates. You are asked what date the story opens on,
in YYYY-MM-DD form, with today filled in. That date becomes day zero, and every event
is measured from it.
Be deliberate about this one. The date is written once, and once the timeline has real dates the button is gone: the interface has no control that turns them back off. If you are not sure your novel happens in a particular year, stay in story mode.
The window and the rows
The controls sit above the spine, in the order a calendar app puts them.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Days · Weeks · Months | How much of the story one row holds. |
| Starts on day (story mode) | The window's first day. A negative number shows the days before Day 1, which is what a prologue is. |
| Starts (real dates) | The same, as a date. |
| Covers (days) | The window's length, from 1 to 3650. |
| Week starts | Sunday or Monday. Real dates only. |
| Track | Narrows the spine to one thread. |
Moving the window never moves an event. Every event stores one number, how many days it sits from day zero, and the window is a separate pair of numbers describing what you happen to be looking at. Widen a timeline to reach an earlier chapter and not one date you typed will have shifted with it.
Each row carries a + that opens the event dialog already set to that day.
Adding an event
+ Event in the toolbar, or the + on any row, opens a dialog titled New event. Clicking a card opens the same dialog titled Edit event.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| What happens | The title. Required, up to 200 characters. Save does nothing without one; it puts your cursor back in this field. |
| On / Day | A date in real-date mode, a day number in story mode. Moving an event is editing this field. |
| Lasts (days) | A siege, a voyage, a hospital stay. It still belongs to the day it starts on, and the card shows the length. |
| Track | A thread or a character, up to 60 characters. The box suggests tracks already in use. |
| Colour | None, Blue, Green, Amber, Red or Violet, tinting the card's left edge. |
| Notes | Up to 4000 characters. |
| Scene | Links the event to a document in this project, giving the card an Open the scene link. Only this project's documents are offered, and only they are accepted. |
Delete sits at the bottom right of the dialog and asks for confirmation by name. There is no undo. Each save, delete and window change is its own request to the server, so if your connection drops you get a plain warning that it did not save rather than a dialog that closes and quietly loses the event.
Tracks and colours
A track is a lane: a subplot, a point of view, one character's movements. There is no list to maintain, because a track exists only because an event says it does. Type a name into an event and it appears in the Track filter. Delete the last event that names it and it is gone.
One consequence: renaming a track means editing every event on it. "Ellis" and "ellis" count as one track, "Ellis" and "Ellis's thread" as two. Choosing a track from the filter draws only that track's events, hides nothing permanently and deletes nothing. Set it back to All tracks for the whole spine.
When an event falls outside the window
The window hides nothing. An event it does not reach is named in a band, with the button that fixes it.
| Band | What happened | The button |
|---|---|---|
| Before the timeline starts | Earlier than the window's first day. | Start earlier moves the window back to reach it. |
| After the timeline ends | Past the window's last day. | Run longer extends the span to reach it. |
| Further on, in the part not drawn | Inside your window. The drawing ran out of rows first. | Show months changes the row size so the span fits. |
The third is the one people misread. Your window is already wide enough, and widening it further changes nothing. Cards in every band open for editing like cards on the spine.
Reaching a long way back can push the far end of the story off the other side, because the window is capped. The status line says so when it happens, and that far end becomes a band with its own button, so the trip back is one click.
The two caps
Two numbers stop a mistyped year from asking for four hundred thousand rows. A window covers at most 3650 days, roughly ten years, and Covers (days) will not accept more. At most 800 rows are drawn, so on Days a window longer than 800 days runs out of rows first. The status line says when that happens, naming the rows drawn, the days left undrawn, and the events sitting in that stretch.
Printing and the Word file
Print sends the spine to your printer with the toolbar, the row + buttons and the status line removed, and empty rows dropped. On screen the empty days are the point, since they are where you click to add something. On paper they are blank lines between two entries.
Word downloads a .docx named for your project, for example
My Novel timeline.docx, holding only the days that have something on them. Each is a
heading, and under it every event gives its title in bold, its track in square brackets, its length
in parentheses when it runs longer than a day, and its notes underneath. The three bands become
headings of their own, so nothing is left out. An empty timeline exports a document saying so
rather than a blank page.
That button matters more than a convenience, because the timeline is not written into your Dropbox or Google Drive folder the way your documents are. Your manuscript lives in your storage, as Chapter 3 describes. The timeline lives in Storskarvia, and the Word file is how you take a copy out. The other export formats are Part VIII.
What the timeline does not do
It is a page you fill in. No AI reads it, writes it or proposes events for it, and the staff in Part VI do not consult it: the continuity editor and the fact-checker read your manuscript, not your timeline. Two dates that contradict each other sit on the spine looking calm until you notice, which is the noticing this page exists to make easy.
Cards cannot be dragged between rows. Moving an event is opening it and changing its day.
A scene link is the only connection between the timeline and the rest of the project. It does not draw on the Story Bible, and it is separate from the beat cards on the Outline board. The outline is what happens, in what order. The timeline is when, and how long it took.
Updated 2026-09-07 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?