Plotting

The plot board is a canvas for planning the shape of your story alongside the prose. You lay out cards — one per beat or scene — arrange them, gather them into plotlines (threads or arcs), and draw causal links to show what leads to what. It sits next to your manuscript rather than replacing it: the board is where you plan, and nothing you do there rewrites your draft.

This guide covers the board day to day. The cards and plotlines carry their own fields (see Custom fields), and the Templates shelf is a list like any other (see Views).

Open the board

From the ≡ menu, open Plot board. It's a workspace pane you can tile, resize, and close like the others. There's one board per project — it's the plan for this book, not one of many.

The ≡ menu also has Plot templates, a separate shelf of reusable beat structures — more on those at the end.

What's on the board

Boxes, with cards flowing inside them, and a few free-floating threads:

• Cards — the plot points. Each holds a title, a synopsis, and a page-status badge: On the page (tied to a written scene), Off the page (happens, but you're not writing it as a scene), or Unwritten (still just a plan).
• Chapter and act boxes — one for every act and chapter, empty ones too. You don't create or name these; they mirror your manuscript structure, so a written card sits in the box of the chapter its scene is in, in manuscript order.
• Decks — dashed boxes you make yourself for cards that aren't in the manuscript yet (see Decks, below).
• Loose cards — a box that appears when some cards belong to no chapter or deck: unwritten cards without a deck, and cards whose scene sits at the top of the manuscript.
• Plotlines — the threads or arcs (the romance, the heist, a character's descent). A card can belong to a plotline, shown by a colour stripe and a named chip. Plotlines aren't lanes — a card carries its plotline's colour wherever it sits.

Cards flow; only boxes are placed by hand. A card has no spot of its own: it takes its place inside its box, after the card before it. Boxes size themselves to what they hold. You drag the outermost boxes (by their title bar) and the plotlines to wherever you like, and everything inside a box moves with it; boxes nested inside another box stay put. Dragging a box never moves your manuscript.

Work with cards

• Add one: the toolbar's New card button makes a fresh card ("New card"), which lands in Loose cards; a deck's own New card makes one in that deck.
• Edit inline: click the title to rename it, click the synopsis to write it.
• Card actions (⋮): the kebab on a card opens a menu — Open card (its full editor, with fields), Set plotline (assign it to a thread, or Unassigned), Mark off-page / Mark unwritten, and Delete card.

Cards and your manuscript

Cards and scenes are linked but independent, and you choose how tightly:

• Seed from manuscript (toolbar) creates one card per scene that isn't carded yet, each attached to its scene. It's safe to run repeatedly — already-carded scenes are skipped — so it's the quick way to get an existing draft onto the board.
• Write as scene (on a card's ⋮ menu) does the reverse: it mints a new scene from an unwritten card, and Write into… lets you drop it under a chosen act or chapter. A card you've planned in a chapter (see below) skips the choice and is written right where it is planned. A card tied to a scene reads On the page.
• Attach scene… (on an unattached card's ⋮ menu) binds the card to a scene that already exists. The picker lists only scenes no other card holds.
• Detach scene breaks the link without touching the scene itself.

A card tied to a scene shows that scene's title and summary, not text of its own: editing the card's name or synopsis on the board edits the scene. Attach and Detach move text between the two. If the scene's summary and the card's synopsis are both filled in and different, you're asked which one to keep; otherwise nothing is lost.

A scene belongs to at most one card. Attaching a scene that another card already has is refused — detach it from that card first. If one scene serves several story threads, keep one card and link it to a beat on each thread.

Rearranging the board is planning, not editing. Dragging a box saves only the board's own layout, and dragging a card into a deck changes only the card's deck and its place in story time — neither reorders your manuscript. The manuscript's reading order is shown on the board (see Layers, below) so you can see plan against draft, but the two only change when you tell them to (Write as scene, dragging a written card's scene to another chapter, or editing the manuscript directly).

Planning a card in a chapter

You can give an unwritten card a place in the manuscript before the scene exists. Drag it by its grip onto a chapter's box and drop it where it belongs among the chapter's cards; a bar shows where it will land. The card now reads Planned, drawn with a dashed edge: it sits in that chapter, after the scene of the written card before it, but it is still only a plan. It isn't in your manuscript and has no scene.

• It stays a plan until you write it. Choose Write as scene on its ⋮ menu and the scene is created in that chapter, right after the scene the card was planned after. The card then reads On the page and shows the scene's title and summary.
• Writing cards one after another keeps their order. If you planned three cards in a row after the same scene, writing the first leaves the other two planned right after the new scene, still in the order you set. Write the next, and so on.
• Move a plan by dragging it again, to another place in the chapter, to another chapter, or back into a deck or Loose cards (which takes the plan away). Undo puts it back where it was planned, or where it came from.
• Undo a Write as scene deletes the new scene (you're asked first if it holds prose) and restores the plan, and the plans that had been moved after it.

A card that's already written can be dragged onto a chapter too. That is a real move: its scene moves in the manuscript, into that chapter, next to the scene of the written card before the drop (or before the first one, at the front). The same works inside a chapter to reorder its scenes. Undo moves the scene back to its old chapter and place.

Decks

A deck is a plot-only box of cards — "Mara's backstory", "Ideas", "Act 3 options". It has a name and a short synopsis, but no scene and no place in the manuscript: it's somewhere to keep cards that aren't part of the book yet.

• Make one: the toolbar's New deck puts a deck in view and opens its name for typing.
• Drag cards in: drag an unwritten card by its grip and drop it between two cards in a deck; a bar shows where it will land. It joins the deck and takes that place in story time. Drop it into Loose cards to take it out of its deck. A card that's written shows by its scene, so it can't be dragged into a deck — detach it first. Dropping a card onto a chapter is a different thing; see Planning a card in a chapter, below.
• Deck menu (⋯): New card, New deck inside, Rename, Realize as Chapter (see below), Open (the deck in its own editor: name, synopsis and its parent deck) and Delete. A deck from an ancestor project can be opened but not changed.
• Nest decks: New deck inside makes a child deck drawn inside its parent. To move an existing deck, Open it and set its Deck field in the rail. A card's own Deck field in its rail moves it between decks too.
• Delete keeps the cards. Deleting a deck removes only the box: its cards drop into Loose cards and its child decks move to the top level. You're asked first when it holds anything, and Undo brings the deck back with everything in it.

Turning a deck into a chapter

When a deck is ready to become part of the book, choose Realize as Chapter in its menu (the name is your project's level at that spot: a top-level deck becomes a top-level container, a deck inside a realized deck becomes the next level down). The manuscript gets a new chapter with the deck's name, and the deck's synopsis becomes the chapter's summary.

• Its cards become planned there. Every unwritten card in the deck is planned in the new chapter, in story-time order. None of them is written: no scene is created until you choose Write as scene on a card.
• The deck now shows as that chapter's box. The deck's own box goes away; the chapter's box stands for it and carries the deck's menu (New card, New deck inside, Rename, Open deck, Detach from deck, Delete deck). Renaming it renames the chapter, and its title and synopsis are the chapter's. Decks nested in the deck are drawn inside the chapter's box.
• Detach keeps the chapter. Detach from deck unlinks the deck; the chapter and its planned cards stay in the manuscript. If the deck's synopsis and the chapter's summary differ, you choose which the deck keeps. Deleting the deck keeps the chapter too.
• Undo takes it all back: the cards return to the deck, the deck is detached and the chapter the realize made is deleted (you're asked first if you've put scenes in it since).

Plotlines

A plotline is a named thread you can follow across the book. Assign a card to one from its ⋮ Set plotline menu; the card takes the plotline's colour. Click a plotline's focus (eye) to light up that thread and dim everything else — handy for reading one arc through a busy board.

You create plotlines from the Templates rail (toolbar Templates): pick Empty plotline to start a bare thread, or a saved template to start one pre-filled with its beats (see below).

Causal links — what leads to what

Draw a causal link by dragging from one card's out handle to another card's in handle: "this beat causes that one." To remove a link, click the × at its midpoint (or select it and press Delete).

Causal links carry a check for you: if a link's cause happens after its effect in story time (below) — the order things happen, not the order the reader meets them — the link shows an amber ⚠ whose tooltip explains the problem, and the effect card wears a Cause is later pill naming the cause. Telling a cause late is ordinary craft and never flags; a cause that happens after its effect is almost always a slip. It's a quiet nudge to reorder, not an error.

Causal links live on their own layer — turn them on with Layers (below).

Story time

Every card has a place in story time: the order things happen, which is separate from the order the reader is told them. A flashback can sit late in the manuscript and still happen first in story time.

The toolbar's Board | Story time switch shows every card in one wrapping sequence, earliest to latest. (The board remembers which view you last used.)

• Drag a card between two others; a bar shows where it will land. The left half of a card places the dragged card before it, the right half after it. Dragging changes only story time. It never moves a scene in the manuscript.
• Earlier in story time and Later in story time in a card's menu swap it with its neighbour, so dragging is never the only way. They hide at either end.
• Place after… opens a short list of your other cards (type to filter) and puts the card right after the one you pick.

Cards that come from an ancestor project read after your own cards and can't be moved from here, or used as a place to drop. Moves can be undone with the board's Undo.

Layers

The Layers control toggles which relationships the board draws between cards:

• Manuscript order — the reading order of the draft.
• Causal — the "leads to" links you draw by hand.

Show one at a time to read the story a particular way, or combine them. To see which cards share a beat, read the beat badges on the cards, or the count beside each beat on its plotline.

Plot templates

A plot template is a reusable set of beats — a story structure you can drop onto any project's board instead of typing the same skeleton each time. Think of the shapes writers reach for again and again: the classic three-act structure, or a romance beat sheet like Romancing the Beat — a named run of beats (an inciting incident, a midpoint, a dark night of the soul, and so on) that many stories share. A template captures one of those sequences once, so a new plotline starts already scaffolded instead of blank.

Manage templates from the ≡ menu → Plot templates shelf:

• Templates marked Library ship with the app and are read-only. Clone one (the ⧉ button) to get an editable copy of your own.
• Your own templates open in an editor, where you can shape their beats.

To use one, open the board's Templates rail and click the template — it drops a new plotline onto the board seeded with that template's beats, ready to attach to cards and reshape. The template itself is untouched; the plotline is your copy.

Diagnostics and AI review

The toolbar's Diagnostics surfaces the board's own checks (like the Cause comes later warning, gathered up). If you've enabled AI and the plot-review prompt is present, an AI review button offers a model's read of the plot — optional, and only there when AI is on.

Where to go next

• Custom fields — give cards and plotlines the fields your process needs.
• Views — the Templates shelf and every other list is a view you can shape.
• Getting started — the wider tour, if you skipped ahead.