Guides · Revision
How to track what each character knows.
By Daniel Bentes · Published 27 July 2026
The short answer: keep a knowledge ledger — one row per fact per character, recording what they know, when they learned it, and from whom — then audit one character's scenes forward, asking at each whether everything they do is supported by an earlier row. This class of error is uniquely hard to spot by rereading because the mistake is never in what a scene says, only in what it assumes, and you supply the missing information silently as you read.
Definition
Information state is what a character can act on.
A character's information state is the set of things they know at a given point in the manuscript, together with when and from whom they learned each one. It is not what the reader knows, not what is true, and not what you know — three distinctions that sound obvious and collapse constantly in drafting.
This is the hardest continuity class to catch by rereading, for a structural reason: the error is never in what a scene says. It is in what the scene assumes. A character who reacts to news nobody has delivered reads perfectly well, because you know the news and supply it silently as you read.
The method
Build a knowledge ledger.
One row per fact per character. Four columns, and the third is the one everybody skips.
- Who. The character. One row each — shared knowledge is not a thing; two characters knowing the same fact is two rows.
- What. The fact, in the form they hold it. This matters: a character can know a distorted version, and that distortion is the plot.
- When and from whom. Chapter and scene, plus the source. Without a source you cannot answer the only question that matters — could they know this yet?
- Who else learns it, and when. Secrets propagate. Most information errors are propagation errors, not origin errors.
Then audit forward, never backward
Take one character and read only their scenes, in order, asking a single question at each: is everything they do here supported by a row dated earlier? Reading forward is what makes the gap visible. Reading the book normally, you carry the answer with you and cannot see the hole.
Worked example
The error that reads fine.
Chapter eleven · Mira alone
She burned the paymaster's ledger in the grate and watched until the last of it went grey. No one saw her do it.
Chapter fourteen · Tarsil, the quay
"You burned it," he said. It was not a question, and she did not treat it as one.
This scans. It scans so well that it survives most read-throughs — the accusation is dramatic, her non-denial is good, and you know she burned it, so his knowing feels earned. The ledger asks the only question that matters: which row gave Tarsil this fact? If there is none, the scene is broken, and the fix is a choice you now get to make deliberately — he guessed, someone told him, or he saw more than chapter eleven admits.
Pitfalls
Four ways the ledger goes wrong.
- Recording truth instead of belief. The ledger holds what the character thinks is true. A character acting on something false is not an error — it is usually the point.
- Forgetting the reader. Dramatic irony depends on the reader knowing what a character does not. Track them separately or you will "fix" your own suspense.
- Treating groups as one knower. "The crew knows" hides which member was in the room. Propagation errors live in exactly that gap.
- Never recording forgetting. Characters lose things too — memory, documents, certainty. A ledger that only ever adds rows will contradict a book in which someone is told and then doubts it.
Limits
What the ledger cannot decide.
- Whether an inference is fair. A character can reasonably deduce something nobody told them. The ledger flags it; only you can judge whether the leap is earned.
- Whether a lie is in character. It records that a character stated something they do not believe. Whether that is who they are is not a bookkeeping question.
- Off-page time. Between chapters, characters talk. The ledger needs you to decide what happened in the gaps, and it will not do that for you.
- Scale. For a large cast across several volumes, the ledger becomes a real dataset — which is the point at which software that reads it for you stops being a luxury.
Related: the continuity checklist, character consistency, and timeline errors — information and time constrain each other constantly.
Loreon · The Writing Studio
Or let the software read it.
Everything above works with a spreadsheet and patience. Loreon does the same reading against a structured story bible and hands you the findings, with the passages cited.