How to keep track of a timeline in a novel

List the events of the story in the order they happen in the world, not the order you wrote them. Give each one a date, or at least a marker you can count from: day 1, the third winter, year 312. If your world has its own calendar, use it, but decide how many months a year has before you start, because every age and journey depends on it.

Keep each entry short: what happened, who was there, where. You are building a reference you can scan in a minute, not a second draft.

Next to every entry, note the chapter and scene where it appears on the page. Flashbacks, prologues and letters are where the two orders split, so they deserve the most care. An event the reader only hears about second-hand still gets a chapter number: the one where they hear it.

In Loomworld, a timeline can be shown as a scale axis, a dated line that shows years and durations, or as card flow, a row of event cards that only keeps order. Every event can carry a location in the draft, down to the chapter or scene, and Jump to Script takes you back to that spot. You add the events yourself; the timeline does not generate them from your text.

Record birth dates, or at least birth years, rather than ages, and work the age out when you need it. Do the same for anything that takes time: travel, pregnancies, sentences served, the seasons. Many of the continuity errors readers spot are arithmetic: someone is thirty when the war ends and twenty-eight ten years later.

Loomworld does not calculate ages from dates. If you want a character's age on the card, turn on the Activity toggle beside Age and type the new value at the chapter where it changes; it holds until the next change. Work the number out from your dates first.

Before you rework a chapter, decide which kind of change it is. Moving a scene to another chapter changes when the reader learns something: check what each character, and the reader, already knows at the new spot. Changing when something happens in the story changes the arithmetic: check ages, travel times and anything caused by it.

For a series, keep one running timeline for all the books and add to it, rather than starting fresh each book. If each book is its own Loomworld project, that series record is yours to maintain; timelines are not shared between projects. If you use Loomworld's AI, Quill, you can also ask it to check a chapter or the whole manuscript for contradictions, timing included. The check reports what conflicts and where without editing your manuscript; a fix is applied only if you approve it. Quill needs a sign-in, an active subscription and cloud sync turned on for the project.