Chapter Planner

The Chapter Planner lays a book out chapter by chapter. You give each chapter a title and a line about what happens, and you can see the whole book at a glance. It’s a Pro fiction tool. You build the plan; nothing is generated for you.

You can open it two ways:

• On its own page, from Tools then Fiction.
• Inside the editor, from the tools panel, where it shows the plan for the piece you’re writing.

A plan can stand on its own or link to a piece. Linking is what connects the plan in the editor panel to the draft in front of you.

Starting a plan

Click New plan, name it, and pick how to start:

• Blank plan gives you an empty plan to build your own way.
• Chapter list drops in a few numbered chapters to fill in.
• Three-act structure marks off Act I, Act II, and Act III with chapters between them.
• Scene and sequel starts the scene-and-sequel craft pattern: a scene, then a sequel.

A starter is a set of cards to fill in, each with its name and a short hint about what it’s for. Rename or rework anything once it’s there.

Named frameworks

Want a named method like the hero’s journey, the seven-point structure, or Save the Cat? Those are the work of specific writers, so rather than copy their beats into the planner, the Frameworks & inspiration panel credits each one and links you to the source. Learn the method firsthand, then lay out your own cards your way. Inkbreaker keeps the canvas open and the structure yours.

Cards, the simple unit

The basic unit is a card: a chapter (or a scene) with a title and a summary. Write what happens in a line or two and move on. That’s enough to outline a whole book and see its shape.

Each card can also carry a few optional details when you want them:

• POV, the point-of-view character for that chapter.
• Status: Idea, Drafting, Revising, or Done, so you can see how far along each chapter is.
• Word target, a word count you’re aiming for in that chapter. The planner uses it for the length projection up top.

The overview line above your cards counts your chapters, your percent complete, and a rough word-count projection. The projection comes from your word targets where you set them and a typical chapter length everywhere else. Treat it as a sense of scale, not a goal.

Adding scene structure

When you want to go deeper on a chapter, open it and choose Add scene or sequel structure. This is the scene-and-sequel model Dwight Swain describes in Techniques of the Selling Writer.

A scene is a unit of action: a character wants something (the goal), runs into resistance (the conflict), and ends up worse off (the disaster). A sequel is the breather that follows: the character reacts, faces a dilemma, and makes a decision that becomes the next scene’s goal. Alternating the two keeps a story both moving and motivated.

For a scene’s disaster you can mark how it lands: Yes, but (a partial win with a new complication), No, and (a failure that makes things worse), or No (a flat failure). Mixing these across a draft keeps your turning points from all hitting the same note.

Structure is always optional. A plain summary card and a fully built-out scene live side by side, so you can outline most of the book in a sentence each and dig into only the chapters that need it. Remove structure turns a scene or sequel back into a plain card without losing what you wrote.

Two views

A toggle in the toolbar switches how you see the plan:

• Board is a corkboard of cards, one per chapter, with the title and summary on each. It’s the fastest way to take in the whole book and rearrange it.
• List is a tight outline you can expand and collapse, good for a long plan or for editing a chapter’s details in place.

Chapters and acts show up as dividers in both views, so you can group cards into chapters or break a plan into acts.

What the planner watches for

If you build out the scene-and-sequel structure, the planner reads it and flags soft spots, never blocking you:

• A scene missing its goal, conflict, or disaster.
• A sequel missing its reaction, dilemma, or decision.
• Two scenes in a row with no sequel between them, which often means a story running on action with no room to breathe.

These are notes, not errors, and they only show once you’ve started adding structure. A plain summary card is never flagged for missing craft fields. A run of back-to-back scenes is a real technique; the planner just makes sure it’s a choice.

Arranging the plan

Reorder cards by dragging them with the grip handle, or with the up and down arrows; either way the numbering keeps itself in order. Each card’s options menu (the three dots) does the rest: add a chapter below it, add or remove scene structure, switch a beat between scene and sequel, or duplicate it. Deleting a card that already has writing in it asks first. Rename the plan by clicking its title.

Add chapter breaks, act breaks, and notes from the row of buttons below the cards. A chapter break with chapters under it gives you a chapter overview, showing each chapter and how many cards it holds.

Your work saves as you edit, shown by the Saved marker in the toolbar. Every change snapshots the plan, so the version history (the clock icon) lets you look back and restore an earlier shape of the outline. A deleted plan goes to trash and can be recovered, the same window described in Saving and recovering your work.

In the editor

Open the tools panel while writing a piece and pick the Chapter Planner. If the piece already has a linked plan, the panel shows its counts, its completion, and the card list, so you can keep the shape in view as you draft. If it doesn’t, one button starts a plan already linked to the piece.

You do the full work here, without leaving your draft. Edit in planner opens the whole planner as a panel that slides in over the editor: add cards, reorder, add structure, fill in the fields, and switch between plans, the same as the standalone page.

Because you’re inside the manuscript, two extra things work here. Put your cursor where a chapter begins and choose Start here on that chapter break to anchor it to the draft; the planner then shows the page each chapter starts on. Once a chapter is anchored, Jump to chapter scrolls the draft straight to it, and the chapter you’re writing in is marked You are here.

Close the panel and the glance in the tools panel updates to match. The planner’s own page is still there as a wider, full-screen view of the same plans, under Tools then Fiction, or from the Open as full page link.