Items, notes and scenes

An outline in Septangular is a tree of items: acts, threads, beats, turns, whatever your story is made of. Each can have notes, and each knows which scenes tell it.

Building the outline

The + beside “Outline” adds an item at the end. Right-click an item for New Item After, New Child Item, Rename… and Delete…; names are typed in place. Drag an item onto the top or bottom of another to put it before or after, or onto its middle to put it inside. Nest as deeply as you like.

Notes

Each item has a page of its own, with its title and as many notes as you need: what happens, why, what it has to set up.

Linking scenes

Link a Scene… picks the scenes that tell an item, chapter by chapter (or from the Stash). Or start from the outline: Create Scene from This Item… makes a new scene named after the item, at the end of the chapter you choose, already linked. Click a linked scene to open it.

The link works both ways: a scene’s header in the Manuscript shows the outline items it tells, and a click takes you to them. Links follow scenes when they move, and when a scene goes to the Stash, the outline says so.

What’s still to write

An item that no scene tells yet is marked unwritten, so the gaps in a draft are easy to see. Otherwise it shows how many scenes tell it, counting the items inside it.

The outline is kept in its own file, outline.xml, beside the book, and saved with everything else.