States & timeline

A static story bible tells you what a character is. A long story needs more than that: it needs to know what a character was, and when they changed. States record those changes over the course of the book.

What a state is

A state is a note attached to an entry at a point in the story: “believes her brother is dead,” “now captain of the guard,” “the bridge is burned.” Each state is tied to where it happens, so the Atlas holds not just the current truth but the whole history that led to it.

A state can also carry a fact: a short name like age, status, or location, with the state as its value. Keyed facts give an entry a value history (“17 from chapter one, 18 from chapter thirteen”), shown in the entry’s Facts section, and they are what lets a continuity check say exactly which fact your prose contradicts. Leave the fact empty for a plain narrative state; both kinds live on the same timeline.

The timeline

Read an entry’s states in order and you get its timeline: how it entered the story and how it has changed since. This is also what the relationship map reads when you scrub through chapters, and what Ask your story draws on to answer questions about how things stood at a given moment.

Scene-level precision

States are ordered by chapter, and when several share a chapter, by scene order beneath that. So two changes in the same chapter still line up in the sequence they actually happen, which keeps the timeline and the map honest even inside a busy chapter.