In chapter 2, your protagonist’s little brother is eleven. In chapter 9, three weeks later, he’s ten. Nobody did it on purpose. Somewhere between those chapters you changed your mind about his birthday and forgot to go back and check. Readers will notice. Someone always notices.
It’s the most common continuity slip there is, and the cause is simple: a novel runs on two clocks, and they’re hardly ever in sync.
Two clocks
The first is reading order: chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3. That’s the one the reader sees.
The second is story time: what happened before and what happened after, in the characters’ lives. That’s the one the people inside the book live by.
In a straight-line novel they match. The moment you add a memory or a prologue set ten years earlier, they drift apart. And that gap is where impossible ages sneak in, along with Tuesdays that last three days.
Count in days, not dates
The most useful trick is to stop thinking in dates and start thinking in days: day 1, day 2, day 3. Day 1 is whatever you want it to be. Usually it’s the day everything goes sideways.
In Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, day 1 is the Sunday the glass case turns up empty. The night before, the Saturday of the summer dance, is day 0: all of Valdrago is dancing in the square while Mara locks up the library alone. The festival falls on day 7, the following Saturday. Six days to find an egg. With the days numbered, you can see it without counting on your fingers.
Anything earlier gets a negative number. Mara moved to town a year ago: day −365. The egg has been in its case for three hundred years, so if you feel like writing that down, it arrived around day −109,500. Nobody needs that much precision. It’s just nice to know you could.
If your story happens on real dates (a festival in August, the winter of the big snow), give it an anchor date: the real date of day 1. From then on, every day has its date and you never have to open a calendar.
The flashback, or the day 0 you read halfway through
This is where two clocks pay off. Bruno, the baker, hid the egg in his oven on the night of the summer dance, because the oven was warm and that seemed like the sensible thing to do. That happens on day 0. But the reader doesn’t find out until halfway through the book, when Bruno tells Mara.
If you write it as a flashback, that scene sits in the middle in reading order and near the start in story time, on the very night Mara was locking up the library. Both are true at once. Writing down each scene’s day lets you see both.
Two clocks: the book and the story
- 1 Day 0
- 2 Day 1
- 3 Day 2
- 4 Day 4
- 5 Day 0
- 6 Day 7
There’s an order within a single day, too: when Mara stops by the bakery for her loaf, the egg is already in the oven. That’s why something smells burnt, though she doesn’t know it yet.
Ages that do their own math
Back to the kid who gets younger. The fix is not to write an age in every scene, but once: their age on day 1. Bruno is 82. Mara is 31. From there, their age in any scene is arithmetic, and arithmetic can be left to a machine.
One honest caveat: without a date of birth, the math adds a year every 365 full days. The epilogue of Wanted: One Dragon takes place on day 365, and Mara is still 31 there: she’s one day short of a full year. If her birthday matters (say it lands right in the middle of the festival), give her a date of birth and give the novel an anchor date, and her age will be right to the day.
When someone dies (and then comes down for breakfast)
After ages, the most common slip is the dead coming back. Not by magic. By accident. Wanted: One Dragon is a kind book, and nobody dies in it. But picture a sadder version where Remedios, grandmother of the twins who run the bar, dies on day 3. If you put her in a bar scene on day 6, pouring coffee, you’ve got a problem. If people only mention her (“Grandma would’ve sorted this out in two minutes”), you don’t. And if the scene is a memory set before day 3, you don’t either. Flashbacks can visit anyone they like.
Tips
- Give scenes a day, even a rough one. “Day 4, more or less” beats nothing, and it takes a second to change.
- You don’t have to date everything. Scenes without a day don’t get in the way. They wait off to the side until you get to them.
- Only record the events that matter. Births, deaths, the day someone left town. Not the day Alex got a haircut.
For today
Give three scenes a day: the first one, the “All Hell Breaks Loose” one and whichever one you’re least sure about. That’s enough to see whether the weeks add up.
In Sunday Plot, every scene has a “Day” on its card, and the real date of day 1 goes in Settings. Characters keep their age on day 1 and their events (born, dies or other) on their card in the story bible. The Timeline, one click from the Outline, puts it all in the order it happens. Each scene sheet tells you how old everyone is that day and reminds you of things like “Remedios died 3 days ago”. And if a dead character is present in, or narrates, a later scene, Checks will ask you about it. It asks, it doesn’t scold. Maybe it’s a ghost. That’s your call.