Continuity Checks
Five Rooms checks your manuscript against the story times, settings and birth dates you've entered. In Plan, choose Story ▸ Continuity to run the checks. Choose Check Again after you make changes.
| Check | Looks for |
|---|---|
| Two places at once | A character on stage in two scenes whose times overlap but whose settings differ. |
| Travel time | A character who leaves one setting and is on stage in another sooner than they could get there. Both settings need a position on the map. The journey is the straight line plus the usual detour, at the story's fastest way of travelling (see Distances between places). A story set today allows for cars and aeroplanes. |
| Age | "twelve-year-old", "aged 40" and similar phrases in a sentence naming a character, compared with their birth date. |
| Weekday | A day named in the text that doesn't match the scene's date. Phrases like "next Monday", "Mondays" and "Friday's" are ignored. |
| Moon | "Full moon", "moonless", "crescent moon" and similar, compared with the moon's actual phase. |
| Daylight | Sunshine in a scene set after dark. The setting needs a position on the map. |
| Structure | With a beat sheet: beats without scenes, scenes without beats, beats out of order or far from where the structure expects (see Plot and Beat Board). |
Scenes without a story time are skipped for the date, moon and daylight checks.
The checks can be wrong. A character may be misremembering their age, or the moon may be poetic licence. Each finding is a question for you to answer, not an error to fix. Open Scene takes you to the passage.
Work through findings in the margin
Choose Add to Margin on a finding, or Add All to Margin. Each one becomes a margin comment from "Continuity check", attached to the passage in question. Resolve the comment once you've dealt with it. A finding is only added once, however many times you run the checks.
The sun and moon are calculated for the exact place and date: the sun with NOAA's method and the moon with Meeus's. For dates before 1900 in particular, set local mean time on the place (see Story Time and Setting).