Chapter 4

Outline

The Outline is the plan of your story: its beats, turns and ideas, nested as deeply as you like, each with notes of its own and links to the scenes that tell it.

Tree, Grid and Timeline

The Outline has three views, chosen with the Tree | Grid | Timeline switch at the top of its sidebar:

The sidebar shows the outline’s items in every view. The Outline’s title, its + button and the switch stay at the top of the sidebar while the items scroll beneath them. Opening an item, whether from the sidebar, a scene’s header or a card in the grid, switches back to Tree.

Outline items

An outline is a tree of items. What an item stands for is up to you: an act, a thread, a beat, a turn, a question to answer. Items can hold other items, as deeply as you need.

Each row in the sidebar shows the item’s title and, after it, either unwritten or how many scenes tell it (see What’s still to write). An item in a plotline has a dot in the plotline’s colour before its title. Hover over a row to see the start of its notes.

An item with items inside it has a triangle: click the triangle to fold its items away, or open them again. As you scroll a long outline, the rows of the items you’re scrolling through stay at the top of the sidebar, each level a row lower, so you can always see where you are.

Adding items

• To add an item at the end of the outline, click + beside “Outline” and choose New Item. In an empty outline, Add the First Item does the same.
• To add one after an item, right-click it (or click its ⋯) and choose New Item After.
• To add one inside an item, choose New Child Item. It goes after the item’s other children.
• To add a whole story structure, with its beats, click + and choose From a Template. See Starting from a story structure.

A box appears where the item will go. Type its title and press ↩; Esc leaves it out. The new item opens beside the sidebar, ready for its notes.

Renaming

To rename an item, right-click it and choose Rename…, then type the new title in place and press ↩. Or open the item and change the title at the top of its page: ↩ keeps it, and Esc puts the old title back. A title can’t be empty; extra spaces are tidied away.

Moving and nesting

Drag an item to move it. Where you drop it on another item decides where it goes:

A line or highlight shows where it will land. An item takes everything inside it along, and can’t be dropped onto itself or into one of its own children.

Deleting

To delete an item, right-click it and choose Delete…. Everything inside it goes too, with its notes and its links to scenes; the scenes themselves stay in the book. If the item has anything worth keeping (items inside it, notes, or linked scenes), Septangular asks first. Until you save, you can get a deleted item back by closing the book without saving; after that, an earlier version in Versions still has it (Chapter 8).

Starting from a story structure

If you’d like a shape to start from, the Outline can add one of six well-known story structures. Click + beside “Outline”, choose From a Template, then a structure. In an empty outline, Start from a Template…, beside Add the First Item, offers the same list.

The structure is added at the end of the outline as one item, named after it, with its beats inside it in order. The item’s notes say where the structure comes from and what it’s good for. Each beat’s notes say what happens there and about where in the book it falls: “About 10% of the way in. Something upsets that world and can’t be ignored.” The new item is chosen in the sidebar, opened out to show its beats.

From then on, they’re ordinary outline items. Rename, move and delete beats, add your own, write in their notes, and link scenes to them. Without plotlines, the structure is a thread of its own in the plotline grid, with a card for each beat. Use a template as the outline itself, or keep it beside your own as a checklist.

Notes on an item

Click an item to open its page. Under its title and plotline is a box for its notes: what happens, why it matters, what it has to set up. Write as much as you need. The notes are plain text, kept exactly as you type them, and don’t go into the finished book.

The top of the page sums the item up:

Linking items to scenes

An item’s page lists, under Scenes, the scenes that tell it. Each shows its status, its name and its words. Click a scene’s name to open it in the Manuscript.

• Link a Scene… shows the book’s chapters, each with its scenes, and the Stash’s scenes at the end if it has any. Choose a scene to link it. Scenes already linked to this item are greyed out.
• Create Scene from This Item… asks which chapter, then adds a new scene at the end of it, named after the item, with the status Draft, and links it. The status bar says where it went. Like any new scene, it’s unsaved until you save.
• To unlink a scene, click the × at the end of its row. The scene stays in the book.

An item can link to any number of scenes, and a scene can tell any number of items.

From a scene to the outline

The link works both ways. When you open a scene in the Manuscript, its header shows a button for each outline item it tells, after its name, status and synopsis. Click one to go straight to that item in the Outline.

When scenes move

Links follow their scenes. Moving a scene to another chapter, or renaming it, keeps its links. A scene in the Stash stays linked, and the item’s page marks it in the Stash; bring it back and it’s told in the book again. When a deleted scene goes for good (at the next save), its links go too. A linked scene whose file can’t be found is marked missing.

What’s still to write

An item that no scene in the book tells is marked unwritten in the sidebar, so the gaps in a draft are easy to see. Otherwise the sidebar shows how many scenes tell it, counting the scenes of the items inside it, and counting each scene once however many of them it tells.

Only scenes in the book count. An item whose only scenes are in the Stash, or missing, is still unwritten.

The plotline grid

Click Grid at the top of the Outline sidebar to see the whole story at once. Each row is a thread of the story; each column is one of the book’s chapters, in order, under its part if the book has parts. After the chapters comes Not yet written, and Stash if any beat is told only by scenes in the Stash.

The row names stay on the left and the chapter headings at the top as the grid scrolls. Each row shows how many chapters its thread reaches.

Rows

Until you make plotlines, the rows are the outline’s top-level items, each in a colour of its own, with every item inside them as part of their thread. That suits an outline arranged by thread. If your outline is arranged by act or by chapter, give it plotlines instead: then the rows are the plotlines, in order, followed by No plotline.

Cards

Each beat is a card, in its row’s colour, in the column of each chapter whose scenes tell it, with those scenes named on the card. A beat told in two chapters has a card in both. A beat linked to no scene in the book waits in Not yet written.

A beat is any item that’s linked to scenes, or one with nothing inside it. An item that only groups others, with no scenes of its own, doesn’t have a card.

• Click a card to open its outline item.
• Click a scene’s name on a card to open the scene.
• Without plotlines, click a row’s name to open its top-level item.

The grid keeps nothing of its own: it’s worked out afresh from the outline’s links and the book every time you look. Move a scene to another chapter, and its beats move with it.

Dragging cards

Drag a card to change what tells the beat:

Dropping in another row and another chapter does both. The status bar says what changed. A card can’t be dropped in the Stash column, or where it already is, and a top-level item can’t be dragged into another thread.

Right-click a card for Open Item, Plotline (once there are plotlines) and, for a card in a chapter, Unlink from Chapter and the chapter’s number, which unlinks the beat from that chapter’s scenes and leaves its other links as they are.

Plotlines

Plotlines let you choose the grid’s rows yourself: name your story’s threads (“Elizabeth & Darcy”, “Jane & Bingley”, “Lydia”), give each a colour, and put each beat in one.

Making plotlines

• New Plotline, above the grid, asks for a name. The new plotline takes the first colour no other plotline has.
• Make Plotlines from Threads, above the grid, gives each top-level item a plotline of its own, named after it. The grid looks the same as before, but its rows are now plotlines. The button is there only until you have plotlines.
• Right-click a row and choose Make a Plotline from This Thread to do the same for one top-level item.
• On an item’s page, choose New Plotline… from its Plotline menu to make one and put the item in it at once.

Putting items in plotlines

Give an item its plotline in any of these ways:

• On the item’s page, choose from its Plotline menu, or None.
• Right-click the item in the tree and choose Plotline, then a plotline or No Plotline.
• In the grid, right-click its card and choose Plotline, or drag the card to another row.

Items inside an item follow its plotline, unless you give them one of their own. In the tree, a filled dot shows a plotline the item has itself, and a hollow dot one it follows from an item it’s inside. On an item’s page, a followed plotline is shown with the name of the item it comes from.

Changing plotlines

Right-click a plotline’s row in the grid:

The No plotline row has no menu. Delete every plotline, and the grid goes back to a row for each top-level item.

The timeline

Click Timeline at the top of the Outline sidebar to see the story in the order it happens, beside the order it’s told. Each scene you give a time is a card in a column for its moment, and things that happen off the page can go in among them as events. It shows where the story jumps, how long it covers, and which scenes are flashbacks.

Giving a scene a time

There are two ways:

• On the timeline, the book’s scenes without a time are listed under Not on the timeline yet, in reading order. Click one, and type its time in When, below the timeline.
• In the Manuscript, a scene’s header has a + When chip, after its synopsis. Click it to go to the timeline with that scene chosen. Once the scene has a time, the chip shows it instead, such as “🕑 14 Oct 1923, 6:40 am”; click it to change it.

Press ↩ or click away to keep what you’ve typed; Esc puts back what was there. If Septangular can’t read a time, the status bar says how to write one. To take a scene off the timeline, click Clear Time, or empty its When box.

Only scenes in the book’s chapters are on the timeline. A scene in the Stash has no When chip and isn’t shown, but it keeps any time it had, and is back on the timeline when you bring it back.

Dates or numbered days

A book counts story time in one of two ways:

The first time you give decides which the book uses. Start with “Day 1”, and every time after it is a numbered day; start with a date, and every time is a date. A time written the other way is refused, with a reminder of how this book counts. If you clear every scene’s time and delete every event, the book can choose again.

Numbered days can go below 1. Day 0 and earlier are before the story starts, so in a story that starts on Day 1, Day −7300 is about twenty years before it. Write the minus as a hyphen or a minus sign. In a book that counts in days, a bare number will do: “12, noon” is Day 12, noon.

Here are some of the ways to write a time, and how the timeline shows them:

A month can be written in full or cut short to three letters or more, before or after the day. A year runs from 1 to 9999. A date with slashes, such as 14/10/1923, isn’t read: write the month as a word, or the date as year-month-day. A day that doesn’t exist, such as 31 Feb 1923, is refused.

Times of day

After the day, you can add a time of day, with a comma, a space or “at” between them. It can be a clock time, such as 6:40 am, 6.40pm, 6pm or 18:40 (a number on its own, such as 6, isn’t one), or a part of the day:

A part of the day is shown as you wrote it, and sorts among clock times at a typical hour for it, so a scene in the morning comes after one at 6:00 am. A day with no time of day sorts at its very start.

How long a scene lasts

Once a scene has a time, Lasts says how long it takes: “45 minutes”, “3 hours”, “1h 30m”, “2 hours and 30 minutes”, “2 days” or “a week”. It’s shown on the scene’s card, after its chapter. It’s there for you to see: a card stays in the column of the moment it starts, however long it lasts. Empty the box to remove it. “Half an hour” isn’t read; write “30 minutes”.

Moments and gaps

Each column is a moment of the story: a time that a scene or event has been given. Scenes and events at the same time share a column. The columns run in story order, left to right, each headed with its time and the gap since the one before:

A gap is a label, not a distance, so twenty years between two columns takes no more room than a day, and long gaps don’t stretch the page. As the timeline scrolls, the row names stay on the left and the times at the top.

The order they’re told

Each scene’s card starts with a number: its place in the book, in reading order, counting every scene in the book’s chapters. Then come its name and its chapter, and how long it lasts, if you’ve said.

A scene told out of story order, a flashback or a flash-forward, is marked ↺. To decide which those are, Septangular finds the longest run of scenes told in the same order they happen (they needn’t be next to each other in the book) and marks the scenes with a time that aren’t in it. Say scene 3 is set twenty years before the rest: 1, 2, 4 and 5 are told in story order, so scene 3 is marked. If scenes 4 and 5 happen before 1, 2 and 3, the longer run, 1, 2 and 3, is the one kept, and 4 and 5 are marked. Scenes at the same moment never count as out of order with each other.

Events

Some things happen off the page: a birth, a wreck, a war, an elopement before the story starts. To put one on the timeline, click New Event at the top, give it a title and a time, and click Add Event or press ↩. It needs both. The event is a card in its moment’s column, marked “Event”, with its length if it has one.

Click an event’s card to change its Title, When or Lasts, or to write Notes on it. Delete Event deletes it, after asking.

Rows

Choose the timeline’s rows with the switch at its top:

For Characters, the characters are the entries in the Story Bible’s categories named like characters or people, such as Characters, People, Cast or Persons; with no category like that, any Story Bible entry can have a row. A scene is in a character’s row if it mentions them by their name or one of their other names, recognised as the Story Bible recognises them (see Chapter 5), in the scene as last saved, so save to bring the rows up to date. An event is in the row of each character named in its title or notes. While Septangular reads the scenes, the corner of the timeline says “Reading…”.

A scene can be in several rows at once. Each row’s name says how many cards it holds.

Clicking cards

• Click a scene’s card to choose it. Below the timeline are its name, its chapter and its place in the book, its When and Lasts to change, Clear Time and Open Scene. A scene told out of order says so there too.
• Double-click a scene’s card to open the scene in the Manuscript.
• Click an event’s card to change it (see Events).

When scenes move

A scene’s time is kept by its file, like its links to the outline, so moving it to another chapter, or renaming it, keeps its time; its card just takes its new number. When a deleted scene goes for good (at the next save), its time goes too.

Where the outline and timeline are kept

The outline is kept in its own file, outline.xml, in the book’s folder beside book.xml, with its plotlines. The timeline is kept beside it, in timeline.xml: each scene’s time and length, by the scene’s file, and the events with their notes. Septangular writes the whole of each file every time; they aren’t meant to be edited by hand. A book that’s never had an outline or a timeline has no file for it until you save one. In a series, each book has an outline and a timeline of its own.

Every change to the outline or the timeline, from a new item or a dragged card to a scene’s time or a new event, is an unsaved change, like a change to a scene: the status bar says “Unsaved changes” until you save with File → Save ⌘S (or auto-save does), and the save writes outline.xml and timeline.xml as part of that version of the book. Notes are kept as you type. If you close the book without saving, the outline and the timeline go back to how they were at the last save. Appendix C describes the files with the rest of the book’s folder.