Plans

Outlining, structure and the shape of a story, in whichever of five forms suits how you think.

Five kinds

A plan is a board, and you choose what kind when you make it. They are genuinely different tools rather than skins:

• Scene cards — one card per scene, dragged into order. The closest thing to index cards on a table, and the one most drafting writers reach for.
• Beat sheets — a list of beats to hit, in order, with room to say whether each is done.
• Mind map — a free-form web for a story that has not decided what it is yet.
• Timeline-based — structure laid against the project's own timeline, for when chronology is the thing being planned.
• Flow chart — branches and conditions, for a story that does not run in one line.

Scene cards

The default view is a grid of cards; there is a list view for when the grid is too loose. A card carries a title, a description, and the state it is in, and you reorder by dragging.

Scene cards are where a plan meets the manuscript: a scene planned here is a scene you can go and write, and the dashboard can show how much of a plan is still open.

Plans and chapters

A plan is deliberately not the chapter list. Chapters are the text as it exists; a plan is the text as you intend it, and the two disagree for most of a draft. Keeping them apart means you can restructure a plan without touching a word you have written, and write a chapter that departs from the plan without the plan complaining.

Delete a plan when the draft has overtaken it. Plans are working documents and are meant to be thrown away — the manuscript is the thing that lasts.