The Outline Board

The outline board is where you plan the story before you commit to pages. Open it from the view menu at the top of the editor and choose Outline View.

The board is a graph. Cards hold the story, arrows hold the order, and one flow runs from Start to End.

The ladder: acts, sequences, scenes

The board is built on three rungs, and each rung is defined by what it does dramatically, not by how much room it takes.

• Act. A run of sequences ending in a major reversal. Act headers sit along the top.
• Sequence. A header over two to six scenes driven by one objective, ending in a turn bigger than any scene's. Roughly ten to fifteen pages. A sequence is bound by its objective, not by a location, so it can move across a city and still be one sequence. Sequence headers sit on the middle rung.
• Scene. One continuous dramatic event in unified time and place that turns a value. This is the planning card, and it is the unit generation writes from. A card plays about three pages, which on the page can be one heading or a chain of several, because a heading is a cut rather than a new scene.
• Beat. The smallest unit of dramatic exchange inside a scene: an action and the reaction that shifts the scene's value one notch. Beats live inside a scene card, two to six of them, in playing order. A pause is not a beat.

Because a card plays about three pages, a script holds roughly as many cards as its page target divided by three. Forty cards is a feature.

Working with scenes, sequences and acts

What a card holds

Every card on the board carries the same four things:

• Kind. The dropdown on the card switches it between Act, Sequence and Scene.
• Title. A short name you can read at a glance.
• Description. What happens here, and what it turns. On a sequence header, this is the objective that drives its scenes and the turn it builds to.
• Status. Idea, Outline, Draft or Final, shown as a colored dot you can change from the card.

Scene cards carry one thing more: their beats. Select the card and the beats list opens inside it. Deselect it and the card shows a small count instead, so a full board stays readable.

Headers count what hangs under them. A sequence header shows how many scenes follow it, and an act header shows its sequences and its scenes. A header with nothing under it says so, so an empty stretch is visible before you generate anything.

Working on the board

• Add a card with the Act, Sequence and Scene buttons in the toolbar. Start and End are single cards: once one is on the board, its button takes you to it instead of adding a second.
• Wire two cards by dragging from one card's handle to another. Dragging a wire onto empty canvas asks which kind to create, then makes the card and wires it in one move.
• Membership follows the flow. A scene belongs to the nearest sequence header before it, and that header belongs to the act before it. There is nothing to assign: rewire the flow and the grouping follows.
• Move and select. Drag a card to move it. Hold Shift and drag to box-select several, then move or delete them together with Delete or Backspace. Scroll to zoom, and drag on empty canvas to pan.
• Arrange tidies the whole board back into narrative order: acts over their sequences, sequences over their scenes, Start first and End last.
• Repair wiring appears when the flow has broken. It keeps every card and re-draws the connections into one Start-to-End chain, so any wiring you drew yourself is replaced.

The stats line

The panel at the bottom left is the board's honest read on itself:

• scenes, the cards the script gets written from.
• sequences, when the board has headers.
• unwired, in amber. A card with no wires is not in the flow, so generation skips it. This is the number to get to zero before you generate.
• ≈ pages, with your project's target beside it. The estimate comes from what outlines like yours have actually produced, and hovering shows the range. When your target sits well above the estimate, the figure turns amber: the outline is carrying less story than the length you are aiming for.

Templates

The Templates menu holds ten proven structures, grouped by Feature, Television and Short, each with a line telling you what it builds. Picking one replaces the board. If the board already has cards, it asks first and saves the current outline to Version History, so you can bring it back.

Browse the story templates

Bring an outline in

You do not have to start from an empty board.

Import builds a board from writing you already have. It reads either a file (.docx, .rtf or .txt) or your ScratchPad, the notes view saved with the document. The whole text is read, not just the opening pages, so the outline covers the story end to end. When your document declares its own structure, with act headings or labels like "inciting incident" and "midpoint", the import keeps that structure instead of inventing a different one. A stretch of several pages driven by one objective comes back as a sequence header with its scenes under it.

If the board already has cards, the import asks before replacing them. Your script pages are never touched. Long documents are analyzed in the background, so you can keep writing or close the tab, and you get a notification when the outline is ready.

Import Scenes works the other way, and its button appears once your script has scene headings. It reads those headings and drops a card for each one in its own row below the board, wired in order. Nothing already on the board moves, so click Arrange afterwards to tidy.

An older outline

Boards built before the ladder used a single row of Beat cards. Those boards still open, still read and still generate exactly as they always did. Nothing is rewritten behind your back.

When you open one, a banner offers the upgrade. Accept it and your Beat cards become Scene cards, and any sequence markers become Sequence headers with their scenes under them. Nothing is deleted, and the outline is saved to Version History first, so a restore brings the old board back. Choose "Not now" and the banner stays out of your way for the rest of the session.

Until an older board is upgraded, its cards read as Scenes with a small amber dot, and the beats list inside a card is not available yet.

Outline and script, side by side

The Outline is your planning space and the Write view holds the actual pages. You can move between them freely. When the board says what you mean, it drives generation at any scale: one scene from a card, every scene under a sequence header, a whole act, or the full script.

Generate from your outline

Why outline first

Some writers draft straight into the page and it works for them. Most professionals lay the structure out first, because it lets you:

• See the whole story before you commit to pages
• Spot a structural problem while it is still cheap to fix
• Try a different scene order without rewriting a line of dialogue
• Hand generation a blueprint that says what you actually mean
• Show a collaborator the shape before the draft exists