Long-time Scrivener user, first-time poster — and a continuity problem I finally solved

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Hi all, long-time Scrivener user, first-time poster here.

I write epic science fiction — a multi-planet story spanning millions of years of in-universe history — and for years, my biggest editing headache wasn’t prose, it was continuity.

The project started in Microsoft Word with OneNote for reference material. When I discovered Scrivener, I migrated everything over and did a round of revisions, got a few people to look over the writing, though not everyone had the bandwidth to get through it all. Around that same time, I started tracking the timeline in Excel, trying to make sure events lined up across multiple planets.

Eventually, I bought Aeon Timeline and reconstructed the whole thing there — and that’s when the real rabbit hole started. Making sure events lined up across multiple planets, accounting for repeating cycles that involved more math than I’d anticipated, I was up late more than a few nights on that alone. Then I got a little carried away with the worldbuilding more broadly, and several years passed. When I finally came back to the manuscript itself, the story in the timeline didn’t quite line up with what I’d actually written anymore. The bible had grown in one direction while the draft sat waiting in another.

I tried the usual fixes to close the gap — re-reading with a checklist, color-coded comments in Scrivener, and more readers. Nothing scaled. So I used Claude AI (and later Claude Code) to handle the reconciliation work itself — generating scene synopses from the Scrivener documents, importing them into Aeon Timeline as events, and pulling the relevant details from each scene so the timeline could finally sync with the manuscript. I didn’t let it touch the actual prose. Around that same time, I moved all my reference material out of OneNote and into NotebookLM notebooks, one per planet.

That process worked, but it also made the problem obvious: the real issue wasn’t that I hadn’t tried hard enough. It was that there was no tool that compared the manuscript against the bible automatically.

So I built one. The idea is simple: point it at your Scrivener project and your lore folder (including an Aeon Timeline CSV export), and an LLM compares any scene you select against your notes for character consistency, timeline conflicts, world-rule breaks, and plot logic gaps. It’s not a replacement for a human editor — it’s a sanity pass for the kind of small contradictions that are hard to spot when you’re 90,000 words deep in your own head.

I called it StoryCheck. The Scrivener integration was the first thing I built — you open a .scrivx directly and click any document in the binder tree to load it for a check. Read-only; it never touches the project.

I’m posting here partly because L&L users are exactly the people I built this for, and partly because I’d genuinely like to hear how the rest of you handle this. Do you maintain a separate bible, or do you re-read with a checklist? I’m curious whether this is a widespread pain point or whether I’m just uniquely disorganized after twenty-plus years building the same universe.

(If anyone wants to poke at the tool itself, I can drop a link in a follow-up — I don’t want this first post to read like an ad. Happy to answer questions in the thread.)

— Silvercat

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I’m not going to comment on the LLM side of things, as I’m not letting a plagiarism-powered ecosystem destroyer anywhere near anything of mine.

On the general problem, though, I think the first question is, what is “truth” in your world? Is it the manuscript? Is it the worldbuilding bible you’ve so laboriously constructed? Or does it even matter?

While you, as the creator of the world, are all-seeing and all-knowing, your characters are probably not. They can have incomplete or incorrect information. They can lie or exaggerate. They can misinterpret what they see.

Is it a plot hole? A continuity error? Or an unreliable source being unreliable?

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That’s the sharpest version of the question for this kind of work, and honestly, the one I keep running into.

In my own draft, truth lives in the bible — the manuscript is just voices telling pieces of it, sometimes wrongly. I’ve got a POV character working from cultural propaganda who deliberately misinterprets a major historical fact. That’s not a continuity error; it’s the whole point of the chapter. A few other characters across the planets carry incompatible versions of the same events for the same kind of reason.

Which is exactly the problem with this kind of automation. The easy thing is to flag “manuscript says X, bible says Y.” The useful thing is “is that a slip, or is the character supposed to be wrong?” Right now, I just go through the flags one by one and trust myself to know the difference. You’re making me think the output itself should read “this could be a continuity error or an unreliable source — your call” rather than just flagging it as a contradiction—something to think about.

How do you handle this in your own work — do you track per-character knowledge somewhere, or keep all of it in your head?

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My scope is much smaller than yours, which does make it easier. OTOH, since mine is a pre-modern setting, I need to allow for travel time/non-trivial communication time. For any given event, I need to know both whether it has happened and whether the characters in the current scene know about it yet.

I mostly depend on a timeline and a map to keep track of how people and information move around the world. Those have – as far as I know – been sufficient so far.

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