What happened when,
and who knew about it.

No, and it would be misleading to imply it. Storyflow does not compute ages from birthdates, does not run a custom calendar system for an invented world, and will not tell you that a character is thirty-one in chapter twelve. Aeon Timeline does all of that and it is the right tool if precise date arithmetic is central to your book. What Storyflow gives you instead is a canvas where the timeline sits beside the map, the character boards, the research, and the narrative structure, with events you drag rather than fields you fill. For most novelists the visual check catches more errors than the arithmetic would, but if you need the arithmetic, you need the arithmetic.

Both, on the same canvas, one above the other. The chronology is what happened; the narrative order is what the reader meets and when. For a strictly linear story the two are identical and one line is enough. For anything with a flashback, a dual timeline, a mystery, or a reveal, the gap between the two lines is where the entire craft lives, and holding it in your head is how writers end up with reveals that land before the setup or twists the reader worked out sixty pages early. Draw connectors between the lines so you can see which chronological event each narrative beat is delivering.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans starting at $9.99 a month, and a Free plan for solo use launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so an editor or continuity reader can review your chronology without paying. If you need free this minute, a spreadsheet will hold a chronology perfectly well and costs nothing, and Notion's free tier can do it with a date field and a sorted view. Neither will show you two orders at once beside your map and character boards, but both are honest free options.

Run three passes and they catch different things. First, durations: go through every event and ask how long it takes, because most continuity errors are duration errors rather than date errors, the wound that heals overnight, the journey that takes a week in one chapter and an afternoon in another. Second, lanes: put each character on their own line and look for the day someone is in two places. Third, knowledge: track when each character learns each fact and check nobody reacts to news they have not been given. That third pass is the one almost nobody does, and it catches the errors readers find most damaging.

Yes, and it is one of the better reasons to use a canvas. Run the world history as a line above the story timeline, zoomed out to decades or centuries, with each book laid out below it on the same axis and the gaps between instalments to scale. Characters then age at the correct rate, which sounds trivial until an author is publicly corrected about it. Pin the map, the family tree, and the invented calendar on the same canvas so the references are a glance away, because consistency is almost entirely a function of how easy the reference is to check.

You describe the story: the premise, the span of time it covers, the main events you already know, and whether there is significant backstory. The AI lays out a chronological spine from that, with event cards and a parallel line for narrative order, so you start by correcting something rather than constructing everything. From there it uses the whole board as context, so you can ask it to lay out a particular character's lane from the events already placed or propose a backstory chronology consistent with what you have written. Re-prompting builds around your existing events without moving anything you have dated.

Yes, and keeping them together is the point. Put the scene cards in one region of the canvas and the timeline in another, with the character boards and research nearby. Structure work and chronology work are constantly interfering with each other, moving a scene changes what a character can know, and a tool that separates them guarantees the two documents drift apart. On one canvas you move a scene and immediately check the lane it affects. Storyflow also lets you open any card into a full document, so a scene can go from a timeline event to a written draft without leaving the board.

Yes. Send a view-only link and they open the whole timeline in a browser with no account, and they can sign in to comment directly on the events they are querying. For a continuity pass this is much more efficient than a document of notes, because a query attaches to the specific event it concerns rather than being a numbered remark someone has to map back onto the manuscript. If a co-writer should genuinely contribute, invite them to the canvas and they join free as a collaborator. Sharing and commenting work on every paid plan.

Detailed enough to answer the questions your story actually raises, and no more. A quiet contemporary novel spanning one summer may need twenty events and no lanes. A thriller with three point of view characters and a conspiracy needs a lane each and probably a knowledge lane too. The test is whether the timeline is being consulted: if you never open it while drafting, it is too detailed to maintain or too vague to be useful. Start with the events that constrain other events, journeys, injuries, seasons, deadlines, and add detail only where you have caught yourself guessing.