Dankstory

Timelines for writers

Timeline for writers

Your plot in the order the reader meets it and in the order it happens, with every flashback flagged. Free, no sign-up.

Start your novel's timeline, or look around an outlined one first.

The whole timeline is fitted to one page, with its name as the title. A long timeline prints small; the SVG keeps every detail.

Your timeline is kept in this browser only. Clearing site data deletes it; save a file to keep it or move it to another device.

Tracks and eras

Tracks

A track is one row of the timeline (a column on a phone): a plot line, a character, a kingdom. Deleting a track deletes its events (Undo brings them back).

Eras, in order

Year 1 of each era follows the last year of the one before it. The last era runs on with no end. Changing an era's length keeps every event at its own era and year number.

Characters

Give each character a birth year, and a death year if they die, in your own eras. Every event's editor then lists who is alive at it and how old they are, and each character gets a lifeline under the tracks. Tick up to four for the ages row under the year labels.

Import from a family tree

Open a tree saved from the Dankstory family tree maker (a .dankstory-tree.json file). Anyone whose born text holds a year number in one of your eras, such as "Year 241 of the Ember Reckoning", becomes a character, with a death year when their died text has one. Nobody is given a guessed year: people with no usable year are listed below so you can add one. The file is read in this browser and not uploaded.

Two orders, one story

A novel with flashbacks has two timelines: the story order, chapter by chapter as the reader meets it, and the world order, year by year as it happens. Give each event a chapter, an optional scene number inside it and a POV character, then switch with the toggle. World order is the full timeline with tracks and your own eras; Story order lists the told scenes by chapter beside every event by year and draws a line between the two places of each one. A book told straight through gives lines that run side by side; a flashback is a line that cuts back across the others.

The example is an invented novel outline, Salt in the Bell Tower: 20 scenes in 15 chapters, set in Years 411 to 414 of the city's own calendar, plus four pieces of backstory with no chapter. Chapter 4 goes back to Year 393, the night the bell cracked, and chapter 12 back to Year 382, when the harbourmaster bought the tower lease. Both are flagged; nothing else is.

How a flashback is found

The page takes the told scenes in reading order and finds the longest run of them that never goes back in time: that run is the book's present. Every scene left out of it is out of order. It is a flashback if it happens earlier than the present scene told just before it, and a flash-forward if it happens later than the present scene told just after it. Because the run is the longest one, the fewest scenes are flagged: one scene set 18 years back in the middle of the book is the only one marked, not every scene after it. Each one is listed under the toolbar with how many years it jumps.

What the reader knows

Drag the Reader knows slider to chapter N and every event told after chapter N is greyed, in both orders. In the example at chapter 11 the reader has not yet learned that Orrin bought the lease (chapter 12), although it happened 29 years before the first scene. Backstory with no chapter is never told, so it is drawn dashed rather than greyed. The POV filter shows one character's scenes alone, to check whose eyes carry each part of the book.

Private by design

No account and no upload: the timeline is saved in this browser on every change, and nothing you type leaves your device. Save file keeps a copy; it is the same dankstory-timeline file as the story timeline maker uses, so a file from there opens here with no chapters yet (both orders still work), and a file from here opens there with its chapters kept. A damaged file, or one from a newer version of this page, is refused with a message and never replaces your work. Characters, ages at each event and PNG, SVG or PDF export work here as they do there.

What it cannot do

It does not write or suggest anything: no AI, no plot advice. Chapters and scenes are whole numbers, so a prologue is chapter 1, not chapter 0. A scene has one chapter and one POV; a scene told twice from two sides is two events. Out-of-order means out of order by year, so two scenes in the same year can be told either way round without a flag. Export draws the world order only; the story-order view is on screen, not in the PNG, SVG or PDF.