We Planted 7 Contradictions in a Chapter. Here Is What the Scan Caught.

Any tool can say it finds contradictions. The fair test is to hide some on purpose, add things that only look like mistakes, and count what comes back. So we did that to our own free Continuity Scan, and this post reports every result, including the one it got wrong.

The setup

We wrote a short Story Bible for a fantasy novel called The Ashen Crown, then two chapters against it.

• Chapter ten has seven contradictions planted in it.
• Chapter nine has none. Instead it has eight traps: details that a careless checker would flag even though the story is consistent.

Some of the canon the chapters are held to:

Mara Veyne is 27. She has gray eyes and black hair worn in a single braid. Mara carries a brass key on a chain around her neck. Prince Edric has been imprisoned in the northern tower for six days. The Ashen Crown permanently burns the palm of anyone without royal blood who touches it. The Ashen Crown cannot be destroyed by ordinary fire. The Ashen Court's fortress is 40 miles east of Veyr.

The seven planted mistakes

Each one is the kind of slip that creeps into a long book: a detail written from memory, a number that moved, a rule forgotten in an exciting scene.

1. Eyes. Canon says gray. The chapter: "her green eyes narrowed against the wind."
2. Hair. Canon says black. The chapter: "Mara Veyne tied back her blonde hair."
3. The key. Canon says brass. The chapter: "the silver key lay against her skin on its chain."
4. The timeline. Canon says six days in the tower. The chapter: "Nine days the prince has been locked in that tower."
5. A world rule. The crown burns anyone without royal blood. The chapter has a fisherman's son lift it bare-handed, and afterward "his palms were smooth and unmarked."
6. Another world rule. Ordinary fire cannot destroy the crown. The chapter: it "melted into a puddle of gold" in a kitchen fire.
7. A direction. Canon puts the fortress east of Veyr. The chapter: "forty miles west of Veyr."

The eight traps

A checker that flags everything is as useless as one that flags nothing. Chapter nine is consistent with the Story Bible, but it is written to tempt a checker into false alarms:

• An old injury mentioned and never revisited (the forearm that aches in the cold).
• An object whose purpose is not explained yet (the brass key, and she "did not know yet what lock it fit").
• A rescue left unfinished at the end of the chapter.
• A character who learns something new: "Only yesterday Mara had learned" that Rusk sold her father. Canon says she does not know, but learning it is the story moving, not a contradiction.
• A sequence of events: her father was betrayed twelve years ago, and he has been "dead ten years now."
• A new detail canon does not have yet (a fresh scar on her chin).
• A character changing her mind about her plan.
• Eyes that only look different in the light: in the torchlight, Rusk's brown eyes "looked almost black."

The results

We ran both chapters through the scan twice, two days apart, with the Story Bible pasted in.

• First run: all seven contradictions found. No false alarms on chapter nine, which scored 100.
• Second run: all seven found again. One false alarm on chapter nine: it reported the betrayal twelve years ago and the death ten years ago as a timeline contradiction.

That second-run miss is a real one, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A betrayal followed two years later by a death is a sequence, not two answers to the same question. The other traps held on both runs: the eyes in torchlight and Mara learning the truth came back as notes to review, not contradictions, and the rest were not reported at all.

Why it mostly holds up

The scan does not take a finding on trust. A finding only counts as a contradiction when it quotes a line from your canon and a line from your chapter, both lines are found word for word in what you pasted, and the two values in them differ. Anything short of that is shown as a note, and notes never lower the score. That rule is why the omission traps disappear: there is no second line to quote.

The score starts at 100 and drops only for confirmed contradictions, more for one that matters to the plot than for a passing detail. It counts contradictions found. It is not a grade of your writing.

Run it on your own chapter

The scan box in this post is the same one we tested. Paste a chapter, add your Story Bible if you have one, and see what it finds. It is free, three times a day, with no signup.

If you write your own chapters and want every one checked against your canon as the book grows, that is what the Continuity Pass does: import your draft into a Story Bible, write, and check each chapter, with every contradiction quoted from both sides.