Chapter Structure Planner

The Chapter Structure Planner lays a story out as a chain of beats, following the scene-and-sequel model Dwight Swain describes in Techniques of the Selling Writer. 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.

When you make a new plan you can start blank or pick a starter: a single scene-and-sequel pair, or a three-act skeleton with the acts already marked off as chapters. A starter is just beats to fill in, so rename or rework anything once it's there.

Scenes and sequels

Swain split fiction into two alternating units. 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.

The planner gives each beat the right fields:

• A scene beat has Goal, Conflict, and Disaster.
• A sequel beat has Reaction, Dilemma, and Decision.

For a scene's disaster you can also 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.

You can also drop in two other beats: a chapter break to mark where one chapter ends, and a note for a question or idea that doesn't belong to a single scene. Any scene or sequel can carry its own note too, from the Add notes line inside the beat.

What the planner watches for

As you build a plan it reads the structure 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. A run of back-to-back scenes is a real technique; the planner just makes sure it's a choice. The summary at the top counts your scenes and sequels, your percent complete, and how your disasters break down across the three types.

Arranging the plan

Reorder beats by dragging them with the grip handle, or with the up and down arrows; either way the numbering keeps itself in order. Each beat's options menu (the three dots) does the rest: insert a fresh scene or sequel right below it, switch a beat between scene and sequel if you mislabeled it, or duplicate it when two beats start from the same shape. Deleting a beat that already has writing in it asks first. Collapse a beat to its title with the chevron when the outline gets long, and rename the plan itself by clicking its title.

When a plan has chapter breaks, a chapter overview above the beats shows each chapter and how many scenes and sequels it holds, so you can see the balance at a glance. The summary line also shows a rough word-count projection, drawn from your scene and sequel counts. Treat it as a sense of scale, not a target.

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 if you take it somewhere you don't like. 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 Structure Planner. If the piece already has a linked plan, the panel shows its scene and sequel counts, its completion, and the beat 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 and opens it ready to fill in.

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, reorder, convert, and delete beats, fill in the scene and sequel fields, rename the plan, and switch between plans, the same as the standalone page. Close it 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.