Know where everyone is.And who they’ve met.

Why character continuity slips

Nobody forgets their protagonist’s name. What slips is everything around it: the scar on the left hand that moves to the right, the age that doesn’t add up against the war, the minor character called Hollis in chapter two and Hollins in chapter fifteen. Each one is small. Together they tell an attentive reader that the writer has lost track, and they start trusting the book a little less.

The classic fix is a character sheet: a document per character with hair, eyes, age, family, history. It works for the first few chapters. Then the drafting speeds up, new facts get invented mid-scene, and the sheets stop being updated. By revision, the sheet describes a character who no longer quite exists, and you are rereading chapters to check what you actually wrote.

A useful tracker has to be fed by the manuscript itself, and it has to show you the answer at the moment you need it, which is while you are writing the scene, not after.

A character bible that keeps itself

When a chapter is read into the bible, Authrot finds who appears, what they carry and where they go, and adds each reference to the character’s entry: where they are named, where they are referred to (“the captain”, “her father”), where the scene relies on them, and where they shape a scene without being mentioned at all. Those references stay in reading order across every book in the project.

On the entry page you keep what the reader must never see contradicted. Anchor a fact (blue eyes, born in the year of the flood, left-handed) and readings check the chapters against it; a line that breaks one is flagged beside the fact. Facts over time hold what changes: a rank, an allegiance, a wound that heals. Aliases keep a character’s nicknames, titles and false names on one entry, so “the Widow” and “Margery Coyle” are counted as the same woman.

When two entries turn out to be one person (Hollis and Hollins), merge them. Every reference, fact and tie moves to the survivor, and the merge can be undone. Rename everywhere changes a name across the whole text with a preview first, and close-spelling search finds a character whose spelling you can’t quite remember.

• Importance worked out from the text: main, supporting, minor and once, and pinnable when you know better
• The bible browser filters by kind and importance and finds the quiet ones
• Link a name by hand by typing [[ or selecting it, free and with the AI off
• Every change to an entry kept in History, undoable one field at a time

Meetings, reveals and when they happen

The hardest character continuity isn’t physical. It is knowledge. A character can’t react to a secret before they learn it, can’t mention a death they weren’t told about, can’t recognise someone they have never met. Mysteries and thrillers live on this, but every book with more than one point of view has the problem.

Chapter readings record who has met whom, one direction at a time, and the events of each chapter in order, tied to the words that established them. The brief that opens with each chapter shows what is true right now. Keeping track of what each character has been told is still your job, but when you suspect a slip, the chapter where the reveal happened is on the record to look up instead of trusting memory. A line that contradicts an earlier fact is flagged beside it, with a suggested fix you can review.

Flashbacks are handled by story time: a scene set years before the opening sees the characters as they were then, with the facts that held at that point rather than the ones they gain later in the book.

Screen time, absences and balance

Readers feel a cast’s balance even when they can’t name it. A love interest who drops out of the middle third, a mentor who exists only when the plot needs advice, a villain off the page so long that their return has no weight: these are structure problems that look like character problems. They are hard to see from inside a chapter and easy to see from above.

Screen time draws the whole cast across every chapter: presence, point of view and exits. You can see at a glance that one narrator has eleven chapters and the other four, or that a character promised in the prologue doesn’t appear again until chapter nineteen. Characters who have gone quiet longer than the story can bear are flagged as due back, and the flag sits in the chapter brief where you will see it while drafting.

When you decide a character should return, a reminder on an arc marks the spot (“bring her back here”), and the story map keeps it until you do.

Tracking a cast you’ve already written

Most writers come looking for a character tracker halfway through a draft, when the cast has outgrown their memory. You don’t need to start again. Import the chapters you have (Word files, Google Docs, Markdown, RTF, PDF or EPUB), and any character sheets you kept can come in as bible material. Files are read in your browser, and you review where each piece goes before anything lands.

Then read the chapters into the bible, a book at a time or all at once. The cast assembles itself from the text, with importance worked out from how much each character is used, so the main players rise to the top and the walk-on innkeeper sits at the bottom marked as appearing once. Check the duplicates, merge the Hollis and the Hollins, anchor the facts that matter, and the tracker is ready for the chapters still to come.

A tracker that works with or without the AI

Reading chapters into the bible uses the AI, and every reading shows its cost before it runs. You can also read chapters automatically after you stop typing, if you would rather not think about it. For a big imported manuscript, the readings run in the background while you keep writing.

If you would rather keep the AI out of your book entirely, AI blackout turns it off for the project: no model reads a word. Entries, aliases, anchored facts, linking by hand, rename everywhere, merging and the bible browser all still work. You fill the tracker yourself, and it stays inside the same studio as the manuscript instead of in a spreadsheet beside it.