Story Time and Setting

Give each scene a time and a place to see your story in chronological order and to check it for continuity errors.

Set a scene's time

  1. Select the scene and open the inspector (or the Scene drawer's All details).
  2. In Story, turn on Story time.
  3. Set When to the date and time the scene starts, and Lasts to how many hours it runs.

Scenes without a time still appear in the story charts. Five Rooms places them between their neighbours and shows them faded.

You can also drag a scene along the Chronology in Plan to change its time. It snaps to the nearest quarter hour.

Suggest story times from the text

Five Rooms can read the opening of each scene without a story time and suggest one. Choose Suggest Story Times… (the wand) on Plan's Timeline or Chronology.

  • A date in the opening ("14 March 1983", "March 14th") is used as it stands.
  • A transition ("the next morning", "three weeks later", "that evening", "On Friday") is counted on from the scene before, so a run of "the next day"s follows through.
  • A time in the same sentence ("at 7.30 pm", "at dawn") sets the time of day. Otherwise days start in the morning.

If no scene has a time yet, turn on The story begins on and give the date, so transitions have somewhere to count from.

Each suggestion shows the sentence it came from. Untick any you don't want, or change a date, then choose Set Story Times. A checkpoint is recorded first, so History can undo it. Scenes with no date or transition are left for you, and the charts place them between their neighbours as before.

Set where a scene happens

Choose a place from Setting. If that place has a position on the map, the inspector shows sunrise, sunset and the moon's phase for the scene's date. Continuity checks use the same figures.

Choose the viewpoint

Choose a character from POV. This makes them the scene's viewpoint character, colours the scene by POV in the charts, and groups the Chronology by viewpoint.

Dates before time zones

Standard time zones date from the 1880s. For earlier settings, open the place in Cast & Places and choose Use local mean time (before time zones). Sun and moon times are then worked out from the place's longitude, as clocks there would have shown them.