Story Outlines

Most of Scriptorium’s visual views are mirrors: mindmaps and timelines show you what your project already contains, so they are worth opening once you have entities to put on them.

An outline points the other way. You pick a structure — three-act, Dan Harmon’s story circle, the Fichtean curve, Save the Cat — and get a labelled skeleton with prompts. Filling it in is what creates everything else. It is the view to open when the project is empty and you don’t know what to do first.

Creating one

Add Plot → New Outline. There is no dialog: the outline opens empty, and an empty outline is the template gallery. Pick a shape and it appears, with its parts, its beats and its prompts.

Changed your mind? One undo takes the whole template back out.

Beats

A beat is one moment in the sequence — “Moriarty climbs the seventeen steps”. Type it and move on; a beat is just text, which is the point. You can type fifteen beats in thirty seconds without creating fifteen entities.

• + between any two beats — on the canvas or in the Outline sidebar — inserts one there.
• Drag or use the arrows to reorder. Nothing on this canvas is positioned by hand: where a beat sits is worked out from its place in the sequence and its part’s tension.
• Deleting a beat removes it from the outline. If that beat was promoted to an entity, the entity itself is untouched — it is still there. Deleting a character is something you do from the character.

Promoting a beat to an entity

When a beat earns it, turn it into a real entity: it then carries relationships, dates, properties, its own entity page and cross-references, and it shows up everywhere entities show up.

Promotion moves the text onto the entity, so the two can never disagree about what the beat says. You can also place an entity you already have onto a beat — “this character’s death goes in Act 3” — and the same entity can appear on more than one beat, in one outline or several.

What a card shows

For a promoted beat, the card shows the property you chose for that entity type. Pick it in the outline’s Entities menu: one property per template, project-wide. A one-line summary usually reads better here than the name.

Parts, and what they own

A part is Act 1, Rising Action, The Ordinary World. A part owns how many beats it covers, not a fixed span of them — so:

• Dragging the boundary between two parts moves beats from one to the other. No beat changes place in the story.
• Adding a part splits an existing one’s beats in two.
• Deleting a part hands its beats to its neighbour. A part never takes beats with it when it goes.
• Reordering a part carries its length. If Act 3 is five beats long and you drag it to the top, it covers the first five beats — it is not resized to fill the slot it landed in.

A part with no beats is normal, and it draws a clickable empty state: that is how a fresh structure invites its first beat.

Tension, and the three shapes

Each part carries a tension profile — where it starts and where it ends, on a 0–5 scale. Rising action is 0 → 3; falling action 3 → 0. What those numbers draw is the outline’s layout:

Layout	What tension means
Line	Nothing. Beats run left to right.
Curve	Height. Cards climb to the climax and fall — three-act, Fichtean.
Wheel	Distance from the centre. Parts become wedges of a circle — the story circle.

You can also name one beat as the climax, which pins the curve’s peak to it rather than to wherever a part boundary happens to fall.

The sidebar

The outline’s right-hand panel has three menus:

• Outline — the beat list, with + between rows and the part boundaries. Everything you need to build an outline is here; the canvas is the picture of it.
• Entities — what has been promoted, and the card-headline property for each entity type.
• Narrative — the parts: add, delete, reorder, and each one’s colour and tension.

What outlines don’t do

• They don’t draw relationship lines. A relationship hairball over a tension curve is unreadable, and the mindmap already does that job.
• They don’t generate your manuscript’s Acts and Chapters. You can link a beat to a section you already have; creating the tree from an outline is deliberately not automatic.
• They keep no version history — an outline is structure, not prose. Within a session, undo is the way back, and every destructive step here is undoable.