What goes on a board

A board holds sticky notes, shapes, sections, tables, images, links, and live cards for your characters, chapters, scenes, beats, locations, and notes.

Everything you can add to a board lives on the tool rail along its edge. Some of it is freeform (sticky notes, shapes, images), and some of it is your story itself, as live cards.

Write on sticky notes

A sticky note is the board’s basic unit of thinking: a small rich-text note that lives only on this board. If a note turns out to be a real part of the story, promote it. Choose Promote to scene, character, beat, location, or note, and it becomes that entity, with the note’s text carried along.

Promote to note is the one that leaves the board. The sticky becomes a real note in your Notes section, which you can open and keep writing from anywhere in the project, and the card turns into a live window onto it.

Put your story on the board

The rail’s Characters, Chapters, Scenes, Beats, Locations, and Notes drawers put real story pieces on the board as cards. A card is a window, not a copy: it shows the entity’s current state and opens through to its page. You can also create a new character, scene, beat, location, or note from the same drawer, born directly onto the board.

A new scene asks which chapter it belongs in. The list runs in reading order and names each chapter’s act, and it starts on the last chapter, where you’re most likely writing.

The Beats drawer lists the same beats the Plot Board shows. A beat you create here appears there too, in the first act of the book you’re working in (or on the book itself, if it has no acts), and a beat added on the Plot Board is in this drawer the next time you open it.

The Notes drawer holds the notes from your Notes section, not the sticky notes above. A sticky lives only on this board. A note card points at a real note, shows its title and opening line, and opens that note when you click through.

Connect two cards

Drag from one card to another to draw a connector, and label it if the line alone doesn’t say enough. When a connector joins two story cards, the board offers to make it real: link two characters as a relationship, a character to a scene as an appearance, a beat to the scene that realizes it, or a scene to the location where it takes place. The drawing becomes actual project data.

Linking a beat to a scene attaches it, the same as dragging it onto that scene on the Plot Board. A beat is attached to one thing at a time, so the link moves it there, and unlinking sends it back out to its act. If the beat is later attached somewhere else, from the Plot Board or a scene’s Beats tab, the line goes back to being a plain connector.

Group with sections and tables

A section is a named region that carries its cards when you move it. Drop a card inside to add it, drag it out to remove it — placing a section over cards doesn’t capture them. A table is a grid whose cells cards snap into, for when the arrangement is really two axes: acts across, storylines down.

Rectangles and ellipses (double-click one to label it), images from your asset library, and web links that unfurl into preview cards.

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