The TimeFrame Architecture: A Scalable, Constraint-Based Narrative Engine for AI-Assisted Storytelling

January 8, 2026 By Uri Vainberg Independent Researcher in Computational Narratology unifiedgongfu@gmail.com

© 2026 Uri Vainberg. All rights reserved.

Solving the Biggest Problem in AI Writing Tools: Long-Form Narrative Coherence

Today’s AI writing assistants are incredible at generating beautiful prose, clever dialogue, and fresh ideas on demand. But when it comes to long novels, series, shared universes, or any story with multiple characters, timelines, and locations, they fall apart. The AI forgets where a character was last seen, contradicts established lore, or drifts into generic plot lines. Context windows help a little, but they’re not enough for truly complex narratives.

The root issue? Most tools treat story as a flat sequence of text. They lack a real structural scaffold that enforces chronological and spatial consistency at every step.

That’s where the TimeFrame Architecture comes in.

The TimeFrame is a system that treats narrative construction like an engineering problem — specifically, like solving a boundary-value problem in physics or a constrained partial differential equation (PDE). The result is a chronotopic framework that turns sprawling, multi-threaded stories into manageable, consistent systems — and powers AI assistance that actually stays on track.

This architecture is publicly documented (academic paper, BiblioCave manual, and open implementations), establishing it as prior art. I’m now offering licensing opportunities for companies building the next generation of AI writing tools.

The Core: TimeFrame Model — Nodes, Temporal Vectors, and Chronotopes

The core of the TimeFrame Model is the chronotope — the fused time-space point where story events happen. I arrived at this structure intuitively from an engineering perspective. Later research showed it maps directly onto Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary concept of the same name.

·        Nodes are discrete points in the story’s spacetime. Each Node fuses location, event, and character presence into a single unit. Nodes can start empty or nearly empty — ideal for discovery writers — and are placed freely within a rectangular frame that represents the narrative boundary. The bottom edge of this frame serves as the fixed timeline, just like the lower border of a real corkboard.

• Strings (or temporal vectors) connect Nodes. A String is a directed vector with a clear start point, end point, duration, and path. It represents a character’s or group’s movement through time and space between events. Color-coded and dash-styled for clarity, Strings make parallel plot lines, travel phases, and convergence points instantly visible.

• Miniframes act as bounded domains (like one book or arc), allowing clean stacking for multi-volume series.

Think of it like a corkboard with pins (Nodes) and colored strings (temporal vectors). This low-tech analog roots the system in tactile intuition, but digitally it becomes a precise graph of narrative flow.

The Engineering Analogy: Narrative as a Constrained Dynamical System

From my background in physics and materials engineering, I approach stories as systems that must satisfy hard constraints:

• The timeline is the independent variable (like time t in a PDE).

• Nodes are known initial or boundary conditions (fixed chronotopic points).

• Strings are continuity constraints — trajectories that characters must follow without unexplained jumps.

• The climax (Nexus) is the convergence point where multiple vectors meet.

Inconsistencies? They’re violations of boundary conditions or continuity — easy to spot and fix visually.

When the structure is solid, the story “solves” itself within those constraints, just like a well-posed physical system yields a unique solution.

The Game-Changer: Computer Writing Assistant (CWA) — Human-in-the-Loop AI That Respects Constraints

This is where the architecture becomes a true narrative engine.

The CWA module is a staged, agentic AI pipeline built directly on the TimeFrame:

1. It automatically packages the entire current state — all Nodes, temporal vectors (with start/end/duration), lore, entities, relationship trees, and text — into context files.

2. Task-specific prompts (user-editable or pre-built) instruct the AI to treat Strings as strict vectors, Nodes as immutable chronotopes, and the timeline as non-negotiable.

3. AI generates or elaborates - filling gaps, suggesting new Nodes, auditing inconsistencies, expanding scenes, or even proposing structural changes.

4. Outputs are parsed back into the system: new Nodes created, Strings adjusted, entities updated, text inserted.

5. Human reviews and manually adjusts the structure (add/remove/reorder Nodes and Strings) before the next iteration.

This creates a tight human-in-the-loop convergence loop. The AI does heavy lifting - consistency checks across thousands of connections, generating travel phases, seeding sequels - but never runs away with your story.

Because the full TimeFrame graph is injected as context every time, the AI never “forgets” where characters are, what happened when, or how timelines align. Even with complex time travel, parallel dimensions, or branching POVs, the vector nature of Strings keeps everything coherent.

Why Companies Should License This Architecture

• Unmatched long-form consistency - Perfect for series writers, shared universes, game narratives, or franchise bibles.

• Accelerates development - AI becomes a reliable co-engineer instead of a creative roulette wheel.

• Transparent and customizable - Database, prompts, and full architecture are user-accessible. Integrate your preferred models (Claude, GPT, Grok, etc.).

• Proven and protected - Publicly disclosed as prior art, with copyrighted digital implementation, UI flows, and integration details.

• White-label ready - Embed as a backend module, build your own UI on top, or extend for specific genres.

Competitors using stateless or loosely structured AI will struggle to match the reliability this constraint-based system delivers.

Ready to Build the Future of Storytelling?

If you’re developing an AI writing platform (Sudowrite, Novelcrafter, NovelAI, Squibler, or any serious contender), licensing the TimeFrame + CWA architecture gives you an immediate, defensible edge in long-form narrative intelligence.

Contact me at unifiedgongfu@gmail.com to discuss licensing terms, integration support, or a demo of the full system.

Let’s turn narrative chaos into engineered mastery - together.

© 2026 Uri Vainberg Published January 8, 2026