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Story Plotter


Words hard.
Story not easy.

We’re all suffering for our art. Let Story24’s plotting tool ease the burden.

or

To plot or not to plot? That has been the question for a long time. For me, the answer is easy: if you want to be productive as a writer, if you want to finish what you start and publish as often as possible — and if you want what you write to be consistently good — then you have no choice. You need to outline.

I know, I know. Outlining is hard. Outlining is no fun. We all want to get down to the exciting business of just writing. But if you think of your writing as a business — and if you’re trying to make a living as a writer, then your writing is a business — you need to treat it as such. You need discipline and you need a plan. You need to stop wasting time on projects that you’ll never finish. You need, at the very least, to develop a rough plot of your stories before you start writing them.

If you’re on board with that — and honestly, even if you’re not, you’re still in good company — then let me introduce you to the Story24 story plotter. This is a simple outlining tool that I developed for my own personal use. It's nothing fancy, but it's exactly what I needed, giving me what I wasn’t getting from other outlining tools while eliminating extra distractions.

Use the Story24 story plotter as the first step for your next screenplay or book. Its clean, uncluttered interface combined with structure guidance and story circle export make it a perfect place to develop your genius ideas.

How Does It Work?
STRUCTURE
Set up your project however you like, with your choice of word or page count targets, number of acts, and number of scenes per act — and then easily modify at any time as you develop your story.
GUIDANCE
Access brief summaries of well-known structure methods — whether you’re saving the cat, following the hero’s journey, or something else — and view them side-by-side with your own project for inspiration as you develop your plot.
VISUALIZATION
Export your project to pdf at any time to view the full outline along with a page that displays your story in graphical story circle format.
Do Most Writers Outline First?

 
 
Some writers reject the idea of outlining a project. Steven King famously believes that outlining stifles creativity. But Steven King is a highly productive freak of nature who has written so many books that his plots now pour out of his head naturally and instinctively. The rest of us don’t have the luxury of investing our time in a story that we may never find our way out of.
Go to any Hollywood writer’s room and you’ll see that breaking a story is where the creativity happens. Once you’ve broken out a detailed outline, the actual writing is the fun, easy part.
If you treat your writing as a business as much as an art — and you should if you have any aspirations to commercial success — then the productivity boost of working from an outline can't be beaten. Consider James Patterson, who sells hundreds of millions of books and releases countless titles every year. His typical method is to create a detailed outline and then hand off the rest of the work to ghostwriters.
Story24 Plotter Features

There are plenty of options out there for outlining stories. I built this one for my own use to solve a few problems that were annoying me: I wanted to easily rearrange my scenes; I didn’t want to use index cards; I wanted to fit as many scenes as I could on the page without getting overwhelmed by details; I wanted to be able to review certain structure methods without jumping back and forth in my browser tabs; and I wanted to see my ideas in a story circle. If this seems like something that might work for you, you’re welcome to give it a try.

Feature List
  • Clean, intuitive interface.
  • Drag and drop to rearrange scenes and acts.
  • Choose your option of page or word count targets, then let the plotter do the math for you.
  • Quickly switch between multiple projects.
  • Export to pdf and view your project in story circle format.
  • Your projects are protected by encrypted password — only you can see your stories.
  • Quick access to various storytelling structure summaries that can be displayed side-by-side with your project.
 
 
Frequently Asked Questions

Do I really need to create an outline for my story?

Not at all! If you’d rather pants it, more power to you. I’ve found that outlining works best for me, though, and anyone else who feels the same is welcome to give this a try.

How detailed should my outline be?

That’s entirely up to you. Some projects might benefit from being super detailed, while others are better served by loose, general directions. It really depends on you and the type of stories you’re telling.

Do I have to follow one of the structure methods?

Not at all! Every story is different, and as long as your story compels the reader to keep reading and to turn the page, then you’re doing great. But paying attention to structure can be helpful when you’re stuck and looking for ideas, or trying to figure out why things aren’t working in your story.

Can anyone else see my projects?

No, your projects and your account information are protected by your encrypted password.

Is the plotter meant for screenplays or for books?

The story plotter can be used for screenplays, books, short stories, or anything else. If you're working on a screenplay, you’ll probably want to set your target for pages; for books, setting a word count target is probably more appropriate.

Does the story plotter use the same story circle graphics that we see in the articles on Story24?

Unlike the Story24 article story circles, the circles generated by the story plotter are not interactive and do not include the additional highlighted plot points. Those additional features were all a little too complicated and more informative for analysis of existing stories than for development of new ones.

What do I do when I finish my outline?

Congratulations on finishing your outline! Now that the hard part is over, you can start writing! Click the Export Project button for a downloadable pdf of your outline that you can print or share.

Do I need to pay to use the story plotter?

Nope. The site is free to use. You’re limited to working on two projects at a time, though. If you want to develop more than two projects at once, additional project space can be purchased.