Strands, timeline and outlines
Strands for plot, arcs and weather; the board and the timeline that zoom from year to minute; story time versus reading order; and the six outline templates.
Strands#
A strand is a thread through the book. Kinds: plot, subplot, character arc, relationship, theme, setting, weather, mystery, structure and custom. A strand can follow a character (an arc), be a place (a setting) or be the weather. You can give a strand a colour and a group, hide it, lock it and reorder strands.
Story views#
Open Story. It opens on the view you chose, and you can switch:
- Timeline: clips per strand over time, with a lane for the checks.
- Board: strands against chapters. A thread that goes quiet for many chapters stands out.
- Outline: the structure strand and its beats.
- Events: a list, written as sentences ("Ilse is now at Terschelling") or as a table.
The timeline#
The timeline has five zoom levels: year, month, day, hour and minute. Empty stretches of story time are folded into break marks, and tiny clips merge into counted clusters when you zoom out. The axis is story time or reading order (by words). Dragging an event moves it in story time; a ripple option moves the later events of its strand too.
Outline templates#
Apply a template and Author adds a structure strand with one beat event per beat, each with a target position in the book. Six templates: three-act structure, the hero's journey, Save the Cat, seven-point structure, Freytag's pyramid and kishōtenketsu. Assign a beat to a scene and the check beat off its mark tells you when it is far from its target. That check is information, not an error.
Tips#
- Start with the main plot and one arc. Add strands when you need them.
- Use the board before a rewrite: it shows imbalance faster than the timeline.