Character Age Tracker

Record birth dates, not ages

'Age: 34' on a character sheet is right in chapter one and wrong as soon as the story jumps ten years ahead, drops into a flashback or moves on to book two. A birth date never changes, and a character's age at any point in the story follows from it. Many of the age slips readers notice come from that drift: a mother who would have been twelve when her son was born, two siblings born five months apart, a veteran describing a war he lived through as a baby.

How does yazar.io work out ages?

It needs three things: when the character was born, when the event happened and who took part. Enter the birth date in the built-in Date of Birth field on the character's profile, and the death date, if there is one, in Date of Death. In the Event Flow, give the event a calendar date and add the characters who take part to its Participants field. Open that event in the Calendar or the Timeline on Yazar Pro and each participant is listed with their age on that day, for example 'Age 34'. In the Timeline's Parallel view, the age also appears next to the event in that character's lane.

For an event with a start and an end, the age is counted from the day it starts. If a participant's age is missing, either their birth date hasn't been entered or the event falls before their birth or after their death; the second usually points to a wrong date or a participant added by mistake. Timeline Software covers the Calendar section's tabs in more detail.

When you don't know the exact date

You don't have to know every character's birthday. Date of Birth accepts just a year, or a year and a month. yazar.io doesn't guess the missing part; it shows the youngest and oldest the character could be at that moment. A character whose birth date is entered only as 1154 shows up as 'Age 26-27' at an event on April 12, 1181; add the month they were born and the range usually narrows to a single number. Ages are worked out the same way when the event's own date is just a year, or a year and a month. In the Sample Book, open the event 'Kül Savaşı başlar' (the Ash War begins) and you'll see Orun Taşbilen listed as 'Age 26-27'.

If an age has to be right in a particular scene, work the birth date backward from that scene. Say a character must be 17 in an opening chapter set in spring 1206: if their birthday comes before that scene in the year, they were born in 1189; if it comes after, in 1188. Fix the age once, in that scene, and the ages at every other event follow from it.

Where age math goes wrong by hand and in spreadsheets

There is no year zero between BC and AD: 1 BC is followed directly by AD 1. Adding the two year numbers together therefore makes a character a year too old. Someone born on March 10, 5 BC turns 34, not 35, on March 10, AD 30. You can enter BC dates for births and events, and yazar.io does the math without a year zero. In yazar.io, a character born on February 29 turns a year older on February 28 in years that aren't leap years.

If you work ages out in a spreadsheet, watch the date limits. The earliest date Excel allows in calculations is January 1, 1900, so functions such as DATEDIF won't work with anything older. Google Sheets' DATE function adds 1900 to any year from 0 to 1899, so 1453 becomes 3353, and years below zero return an error. For a historical novel, test your formulas on a few characters whose ages you already know before you rely on them. Our spreadsheet comparison covers what spreadsheets do well and where they fall short.

Lifelines and quick checks

The Timeline's Parallel view gives each character a lane of their own and orders the lanes by birth date. With lifelines running from birth to death side by side, you can see at a glance who was alive at which event and which years two generations shared. A character with no death date gets a line that runs to the last dated entry in your story and fades out. If there's no death date but their Status is Deceased, the line ends at the last date known for them, usually the last event they took part in.

If you know the day and month a character was born, their birthday shows up in the Calendar every year they're alive. Open a birthday to see the age they turn that year, or open a death to see how old they were when they died.

To see everyone's age on a particular day, add that day as an event. Mark the day your story opens with an event such as 'The story begins' and add your main characters as participants; open it and everyone's age on that day is in one list. Add a child's birth as an event with the mother and father as participants and you'll see how old the parents were at that moment, which is how the twelve-year-old mother above gets caught.

Worlds with their own calendar

yazar.io uses the familiar Gregorian calendar: twelve months with their usual lengths, and leap years. You can't rename the months or the days of the week, and ages are counted in this calendar's years. The free-text date note in the Event Flow (something like 'the third day of the Harvest Moon') stays exactly as you wrote it, but it's never turned into a date on its own and isn't used for ages.

If your world has its own year count, you can enter its years as calendar years. Enter the 312th year after the Founding as 312 and ages are counted in your years, with the in-world name kept in the date note; years before the Founding can go in as BC. If your months differ a lot from ours in number or length, you'll have to map dates approximately. If you'd rather build your own calendar from scratch, with its own month and day names, a tool such as Aeon Timeline, which lets you create a custom calendar and also works out ages at each event, may suit you better.