I’ve been away for a while [DRUM ROLL] writing a new novel in my Nightmare Vacations series. It’s also been an opportunity to test drive Plottr, a visual tool for story planning.
For a lazy pantser like me, outlining can be a chore that gets in the way of turning that great new idea into a story. I want to scribble down a few notes and set off for the exciting territory of writing my first draft. The truth is that without a map, it’s easy to get lost.
Not all pantsers are lazy. Some are genuine discovery writers who can wing it from idea to first draft. They don’t mind the extra editing and rewrites that come from following your imagination as words land on the page. Some pantsers are naturally good enough to create a coherent first draft on the fly. I salute you!
I’m a better when I have a strong outline, deep research and well-drawn characters to guide me. Things still change when the characters begin to interact in the magical way that makes writing a joy, but they will be more consistent and I won’t lose so much time on research and plotting tangents.
My journey in story outlining
I write in Scrivener, using the corkboard to mimic the note cards many writers use to organise their stories. When I’m developing the story, I like to create a timeline of events that shows me how the story fits together. It’s useful if you have several story arcs, or timelines that might appear out of sequence in your narrative.
When I wrote and revised Blood River, I used the mind-mapping tool Xmind to outline the story and draw a character circle that showed the relationships and how they changed. I still use Xmind for general mind-mapping, but I want a bespoke tool for outlining.
I developed In Machina, my sci-fi WIP, using two pieces of outlining software that I hadn’t tried before: Scapple and Aeon Timeline 2. Scapple is the official mind-mapping companion app to Scrivener; Aeon Timeline is a powerful timeline-mapping tool, now on its third generation.
Scapple was too basic for my needs, while Aeon Timeline is the opposite, so rich with features that the learning curve felt like it would never end. I looked at several outlining tools in Planning tools for writing novels.
I’ve tried Plottr with two new projects: a second novel in the Nightmare Vacations universe and a short story to refresh my palate. I’m also rebuilding the synopsis of In Machina as I edit, to create a clean outline for a project that threatens to outstay its creative welcome.
Hopefully, Plottr will be a happy place between general-purpose mind maps and Aeon Timeline’s feature overload.
Plottr’s visual experience
Plottr presents a simple visual timeline interface. You build multiple plot lines that scroll across the screen, each one colour-coded. Detail the main plot of your story, break it down into story arcs, or use individual plots for each character. I like to have a plot line which just shows the date or time as your story develops.
There are three zoom levels — useful for a typical novel with around 30 chapters — and fast scroll buttons for Beginning, Middle and End. You can also choose between horizontal and vertical scrolling.
Each plot line is broken into chapters, which are sub-divided into scenes and grouped together into Acts and Parts. Chapters can be renamed as Beats or named individually. When you add a scene to a plot line, you give it a title and flesh it out with a synopsis.
The snowflake story method
This is one of Plottr’s strengths: it’s designed around the Snowflake storytelling method. You begin with a one-sentence outline and build up your synopsis until you’re ready to write. With Plottr, you can write a single synopsis for each chapter, add more scenes to break it down, or detail the chapter via distinct plot lines. Or you can do all of these.
You can also view and edit your story in the text-only Outline mode, which lists your chapter titles on the left, with dots showing which plot lines are active in each chapter. Your chapter synopsis and the scenes within it scroll vertically on the right.
Each scene has a title, description, attributes and template options. The description can be as long as you want and fully formatted with pictures, links and bullet points. Attributes can be anything you want, from data points such as date and time, to plot information like character motivations or the dramatic structure of the scene.
A sidebar on the left of each scene window indicates which book it’s from, and the plotline, chapter, characters, places and tags involved. You can assign colours to the background and outline of each scene as it appears in your Timeline view. I like to show where it is in the writing process: unwritten, first draft, awaiting feedback, revised, and so on.
Intermission alert
I’ve taken a different approach with each project: Nightmare Vacations #2 is a Snowflake outline; my short story uses Lester Dent’s classic pulp outline; and In Machina is a linear process where I’m simply adding chapters as I work through the book.
The Nightmare Vacations outline would power me through a 50,000-word sprint in April, so it had to be well-organised. The short story needed less detail: Dent’s punchy outline breaks it up into sections of about 300 words. In Machina is about understanding a 110,000-word story — the first part of a trilogy — as I go through beta reader feedback.
Each project has been creatively productive so far, and they’ve shown me strengths and flaws in Plottr. It looks like a good fit for me.
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3 replies on “Plottr: simple visual story planning, part 1”
In January 2023 I set a goal of posting every week, which isn’t easy when you’re diverted as readily as I am. I managed about three posts a month and I’ll take that for a win. Nerd that I am, I thought I’d start the new year with my top five posts of 2023.
An author, deep in thought. Credit: Anthony Anastas/Flickr
Most popular posts of 2023
When it comes to winning views, my most successful post in 2023 was Planning tools for writing novels, which saw a surge of interest around Nanowrimo in November. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then, that second place went to my two-part review of Plottr, the visual storytelling tool.
I was surprised to see that Comparative sentience: what does it mean to be smart, was my third most-viewed post of 2023. Originally posted on my old Medium feed in 2017, I re-posted here after discovering that it was cited in an academic paper. Maurice Yolles at Liverpool John Moores University referred to my work in Consciousness, Sapience and Sentience—A Metacybernetic View.
Publishing my first novel in 2022 made me think about the true cost of writing a book. I posted How much does it cost to write a novel in January 2023, and it’s become the next most popular post of the year.
Book reviews have taken up a fair bit of blogging time this year, so I was relieved to see one make the top five. My review of Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief took in the book and the 2010 film, but it was timed for the launch of a new adaptation on Disney+. I’m looking forward to catching up with the TV show’s take on the ADHD demigod.
NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus cooking on the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Most read posts of 2023
I tend to write long posts, so it’s even better when my content is read as well as seen. Ranking my posts by the time visitors spent reading them, the 2023 winner is the first part of my series of space food: A Taste Of Space. Contemporary Astro Cuisine had an average engagement of 8 minutes and 56 seconds, although when I say visitors, there was just one and I thank you.
Next up came my thoughts on the hard problems facing that hoary sci-fi trope of uploading your mind to a computer. Embodied intelligence: bad news for transhumanists, great news for AIs, was read for an average of 4 minutes 41 seconds.
Book reviews also made for longer reads in 2023, with three posts filling the final slots in the top five of reader engagement. A triple-bill of The Murdstone Trilogy, The Power and Invisible Monsters captured your attention for 2 minutes and 25 seconds. Another book vs film review, for The Gunslinger/The Dark Tower by Stephen King, was close behind at 2 minutes 21 seconds. Finally, a roundup of those unlikely bookshelf-fellows The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Titus Groan and The Grapes of Wrath occupied readers for 1 minute 51 seconds.
My favourite posts of 2023
Nothing beats discovering that I’d written something smart enough to be cited by a genuine academic, even if it was something I wrote six years ago!
I enjoy all of my research-based writing — maybe too much — whether it’s animals in space or Irish mythology. A Taste Of Space became an epic undertaking but it provoked a lot of thought about the future of food for off-world communities. Research is fun but it’s only the beginning: the hard part is turning it into cultures that my characters inhabit.
It’s not always fun to review books from a writer’s perspective, especially when I wanted to like a novel and feel let down by the experience. I’ve encountered novels I might never have read and been glad that I did, and hate-read to the end on a couple of occasions. Sometimes it’s been cathartic to get those feelings into a review and rationalise my feelings, but every novel has been provocative and educational in one way or another.
And it’s been rewarding to see that Save Orangutans has been consistently among the top five pages on my entire site. I hope some of you have jumped off to one of the conservation charities to donate.
Kinnitty Pyramid will reveal its dark secrets in 2024. Credit: Alexander Lane
Post predictions for 2024
The coming months will see more reviews as I take on the books and adaptations of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. After that I’m going to look at a few of the books about writing that I’ve enjoyed, though I want to keep reviews at a monthly cadence and leave room for other topics.
The hardest part is choosing a topic from the every-lengthening list and trying to stop them running away into multi-post epics. There will be something about AI, consciousness, research into history, mythology and space travel, and notions about literature itself that all these reviews are making me think about.
As for creative writing, the second Nightmare Vacations story remains mired in edits. I’m determined to get it out by the middle of 2024 and I’ve got several research-based posts in mind to support the launch.
How do you turn a collection of story ideas into a coherent 100,000-word novel? Novel planning was one of the most daunting tasks I faced as a first-time novelist.
As a journalist, I’d got used to writing a few hundred words without an outline, or jotting down a few ideas for a thousand-word article or blog post. But I’m a bear of little brain, and a novel is a thousand times more complex.
There are pantsers who claim the words flow naturally into a three-act story, planners who painstakingly detail every scene in advance, and plantsers like me in between. Wherever you stand, you’ll need an outline because agents want a synopsis of your whole novel if your 10,000-word taster gets their attention.
As a taster, my MA in Creative Writing at St Mary’s University demanded a 3,000-word chapter-by-chapter breakdown of our WIPs to show that we could produce a full-length work. Wherever you are in the writing process, finding the right tool to produce your outline is more than a thought experiment.
Adventures in novel planning
On my way through five novels (one unfinished, one about to be self-published, one in beta, two in pre-planning), I’ve had plenty of opportunity to experiment. I’ve tried a few tools and discovered some of their strengths and weaknesses for my process. I’ve also discovered what happens without a plan (did I mention the unfinished novel?).
The range of tools available to writers has expanded enormously since I wrote the original version of this post for my 5×5 Medium blog. You could dedicate a website to reviewing writing tools, but for this rewrite I’ve decided to focus on the five I know best.
Where’s Microsoft Word? I admire anyone who attempts to produce a novel-length work in Microsoft’s jack-of-all-trades word processor. But that’s all it is, a word processor. It has an outline mode, but in my opinion it doesn’t scale to 100k works. As for Google Docs, it’s great for short works but grinds to a halt when you get above 10,000 words. YMMV.
Scrivener
Scrivener was one of the first dedicated long form writing environments, and is now available for Windows and iOS as well as the original Mac edition. It’s gained a loyal following amongst professional and amateur writers, and even has a podcast, Write Now with Scrivener, as well as active Facebook and Reddit communities.
There are three key features for planning a novel in Scrivener: the binder, the corkboard and the outliner.
The binder sidebar allows you to view and alter the structure of your novel in parts, chapters and scenes. You can colour-code to show their status, narrator or location, or add logos to indicate other properties. Moving scenes around is a simple drag-and-drop process, and there are dedicated sections for research, character profiles and location notes.
Each part, chapter and scene has a synopsis card, and you can view all of these as virtual index cards on the corkboard. These synopsis cards can hold as much detail as you want, and you can drag them around the corkboard until your story has the shape you prefer. Once you start writing, the synopsis card for your current chapter is visible on the right of your screen.
The outliner gives a different overview, showing the synopsis information (or a shortened version) along with things like word counts, status indicators, when you wrote the section and progress bars if you’ve set yourself targets.
Scrivener is both ridiculously feature-rich (I’m still finding new ways to use it) and absurdly cheap. The current price is £47/€53, with a big discount if you take part in Nanowrimo or you’re a student, and the 30-day free trial offers a genuine 30 days of non-consecutive use. Once you buy it, it’s yours with all the minor updates that come along until the next major overhaul. (In six years, the only major update has been to make the Windows edition identical to the Mac version.)
While the learning curve can be steep if you’re coming over from Word or Google Docs, I can honestly find very little to say against Scrivener. It even lets you export to Word, PDF and many other formats including ebooks.
Scrivener doesn’t include a cloud function for sharing, but works reliably through Dropbox. I consider that a bonus, because Dropbox know how to make a reliable cloud storage system, and Literature & Latte know how to make Scrivener.
Scapple
My MA novel outline in Scapple
Literature & Latte produced Scapple as a companion to Scrivener. It’s a simple mind-mapping tool which imports your notes into Scrivener’s binder structure. You can even drag and drop from Scapple into Scrivener, and vice-versa.
If you don’t have a mind-mapping tool already and you like to lay out your ideas with the freedom of a mind map before you start writing, it’s an ideal companion to Scrivener. The learning curve is very shallow, but you can import images and create simple, elegant maps while your ideas are fresh.
My MA project, now The Awakening of William 47, began life as a Scapple outline that I imported in Scrivener.
Personally, I found the mind-mapping features too basic after using other packages. I like to have a hard-copy of my outline on the wall while I’m writing, and I found it hard to turn my mind-map into something I could print easily.
On the other hand, it’s £17/€19 after the 30-day trial (again, not just 30 calendar days), with L&L’s usual student discount.
Xmind
A character map in Xmind 8
This is my go-to mind-mapping software, a powerful package that allows me to do everything from free-form thinking to timelines and organisational charts. There are a lot of mind-mapping packages, but for reasons lost to the mists of time, I chose Xmind.
I’ve been using Xmind for more than 10 years, so it was my first choice for planning a novel. I used it to plan all of Blood River, from the outline/timeline to character relationship diagrams. It’s taken me through numerous revisions, from Nanowrimo novella to full-length novel and back to its published novella format.
I’ve also used it for many other projects. I like the ability to zoom in and out at different levels of detail, apply a wide range of formatting and create linked mind-maps for complex projects. You can also import images, embed web links and print at useful scales.
There are two desktop flavours for MacOS, both available in a highly-functional free edition and a fully-featured Pro version. The Pro edition adds things like Gannt charts and exports to Word/Excel/OPML. (OPML can be ingested by Scrivener as a binder structure.) There’s also a mobile version for iOS/Android and a web version which integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive and One Drive so that you can edit through a browser.
Xmind 8 is a standalone package for which the Pro edition costs US$129. It’s my preferred format, because I don’t like subscription software.
The subscription Xmind has a new engine and is probably better, but maps converted to its new format cannot return to Xmind 8. The subscription costs US$60/year and comes with the full mobile version for iOS/Android as well as the web edition. Students/teachers can get around 50% discount.
Aeon Timeline
Aeon Timeline is a powerful but unwelcoming novel planning tool
Simple outlining tools like Scrivener’s corkboard and mind maps like Scapple or Xmind show their limits when you try writing something with an epic or historical scale. It can be hard to keep track of who’s doing what to whom, when and where.
Aeon Timeline lets you create a a story outline, complete characters, locations and story arcs. You place them on a timeline view that lets you zoom in and out, at any scale from seconds to millennia. It defaults to conventional Western calendars, but you can use alternative human timescales or create your own calendar for the Munchkin kingdom on the planet Zarg.
Aeon Timeline is popular among Scrivener’s planner-writers because your calendar can sync to Scrivener. Imported timelines become events that you can organise as chapters and scenes, with dates and times visible in Scrivener’s metadata.
It’s also fairly complex, and doesn’t welcome you with easy-setup wizards. The example project — an intriguing breakdown of Wuthering Heights — is impressive but made it no less welcoming.
I tried it out with a short story that gave me some confidence. For my MA project, I outlined in Scapple and Scrivener, then imported the outline into AT. The timing of events, character’s ages and back story became more precise. It helped me to make sense of events, but reintegrating the outline into Scrivener was a tense process.
Aeon Timeline has moved from version two to version three since I wrote the first version of this guide, and I will admit that I haven’t tried it yet. I found the learning curve for AT2 too steep and — unlike Scrivener — I didn’t find the results sufficiently rewarding when I reached the top.
I understand that Aeon Timeline 3 has many dedicated features for novel writing which enable non-linear narratives, multi-novel timelines and much more. I’d like to try it again, even if some of them feel like duplications of features Scrivener already provides, but the thought of a week or more trying things I might not use is not inviting. It also syncs with the web-based Ulysses writing platform.
The £55/€58 standalone cost is very reasonable, but updates are £30/€32 annually after the first year.
Trello
Trello’s great for task management
Some writers use Trello for everything for fundamentals like story outlining and character planning — and there’s no reason why not. The card-based interface is like Scrivener’s cork-board on steroids. It’s also a highly collaborative environment that would work well for co-producing a novel.
I prefer to use Trello for the processes around my novels. During my MA, it helped me to keep track of research tasks, workshop deadlines, reading lists, course submissions and appointments to make.
Since then, I’ve used it to shortlist agents and create pitches for Blood River’s novel-length incarnation; now I’m using it to keep track of my author website and the self-publishing process for Blood River’s novella version.
Trello’s flexible like that, plus you can use it across devices through dedicated apps and the web interface. Most importantly, it’s free unless you’re working in large groups or you want extra bells and whistles.
However, it’s now owned by Atlassian, one of those nebulous productivity companies whose business model is stripping down popular free online services and reselling their features as upgrades. The other downside is that you might already suffer Trello as a micro-management tool in your day job, which may put you off using it for the thing you love.
If that’s the case, there are other kanban-style organisation tools, and they’re very similar to Trello. Go for one of those.
Plottr
Plottr is a fairly new entrant to the visual story planning world. I gave Plottr an in-depth test-drive and its combination of simplicity and features impressed me. I particularly liked the range of detailed templates and the resources its team offer for helping writers to make the most of their package.
Plottr is my latest bid to find a story outlining tool that will tame my excesses as a discovery writer and help me to work faster. I’ve looked at how I hoped to use it with three different projects, now it’s time for a deep dive into the experience.
Tags enable Plottr to connect scenes, places and people with metadata.
Navigating the Plottr interface
When you open a timeline, the main menu bar has tabs for Project, Notes, Characters, Places and Tags. Notes, Characters and Places are self-explanatory, and all include a name or title, short description which will appear in drop-down menus, a category, an image, and notes. There’s a side-bar displaying books and tags for each entry, while Characters also lets you add attributes and templates.
Tags are items of meta-data which can apply to any object in your story. For example, my new project has three time periods: Ancient, 19th century and 21st century. I used tags to indicate which scenes, characters and places are relevant to each time period. As the story developed, I created more tags to indicate themes or parts of my story structure.
Projects takes your Notes, Characters, Places and Tags further, for writers who are working on book series. The project view displays all of the books in a series, and when you add a new book, the characters, places and tags will already be populated with information that you can pick up and adapt to the new story.
My three timelines will interweave in the final story, but I had to understand them before I could start writing. In Plottr’s Project view, I created a book titled “Chronology”, which has a plot line for each period. Once I had established these timelines, I created a new book in the series, called “Novel”, which follows the present-day story. Plottr populated this with the characters and places from the chronology, and I copied my timelines into the new book. Then I chopped them up into revelations which unfold in the present day through dreams, flashbacks, and historic records.
A Plottr character created with the Snowflake Method template
Plottr’s template wonderland
Templates are a game-changing feature of Plottr that continue to grow with the platform. I’ve already mentioned the Snowflake method, but there are dozens of other storytelling methods.
Plottr has created more than 30 templates, from the classic Hero’s Journey to modern formulas like Take Off Your Pants and genre recipes such as Romancing The Beat. They include notes explaining how to use them, and you can mix and match as many as you need, combining a classic five-act structure with a dedicated crime novel format, crossed with a romance if that helps you.
You’ll also find templates for individual scenes like Goal, Motivation, Conflict, and character templates such as the infamous Proust questionnaire or a classic Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Again, you can use several templates for each scene or character, and delete the ones you don’t want to use. If you can’t find the template you want, create your own and share them with other users online.
Plottr offers numerous templates for stories and scenes
Plottr tutorials
The Plottr team puts a lot of effort into online assistance. Their YouTube channel hosts an extensive library of bite-sized tutorials for beginners that explain the ins and outs (although the narrator’s accent grated on me).
They also host regular webinars about different aspects of the app. Each release of new features is accompanied by a video and a webinar.
Using Plottr with Scrivener and other software
This is a weakness, but one that I expect to be resolved. You can import and export from Plottr into Word or Scrivener, and vice-versa. As yet, it only supports Scrivener 2, so if you’re on the latest version of Scrivener, you’ll have to convert the exported files as you open them.
Unlike Aeon Timeline, there’s no two-way sync between Plottr and Scrivener. It would also have been nice to get an export into the open standard mind-mapping format, OPML.
Syncing between devices
There are currently Windows, Mac, iOS and Android versions of Plottr, although the tablet version has some differences that I’ve yet to get to grips with. There’s no Linux version, but command-line fundamentalists are liable to look at Plottr’s visual interface with disdain, anyway.
The standard version of Plottr uses local storage and syncs via third party services like Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud and so on. Plottr Pro proprietary cloud storage which automatically syncs between your different devices.
Split screen Plottr, please
I love the split-screen view in Scrivener that enables you to call up character profiles, location details and other research while you’re writing.
At first, the basic story in my new Nightmare Vacations novel was populated with characters called “the king”, “the father” and “the daughter” in basic locations. Eventually, I had to name these folks and develop their personalities, usually at the same time as their stories became more complex. I found myself switching frequently between the Timeline, Place and Character tabs to keep everything consistent and copy-paste the correct spellings. A split-screen view would have made this a lot easier.
I had also compiled a lot of research in Scrivener before I began to create the story. I kept this open on my right-hand monitor as I worked in Plottr on my left screen. Scrivener’s layout is better for organising a lot of notes, but this wouldn’t work if you were working on a single screen.
The wealth of templates is a powerful resource, but it’s frustrating to go through the selection process for each scene you add. I’d prefer Plottr to either add the templates from your previous scene, or allow you to choose certain templates as a default for each project.
Fortunately, the development team are very responsive and open to user input. The development timeline is available online and it’s updated regularly — new features arrived this week that I’ve yet to investigate.
Plottr is a keeper
Plottr is a useful tool if you’re a discovery writer like me, who wants to rein in their worst pantser impulses and make their writing more efficient.
Natural planners will also find it a useful resource and the detailed templates open a valuable library of storytelling methods, and it makes an excellent companion to Scrivener’s strengths in writing and research. Scrivener’s devs are friendly and responsive, but they could probably learn from Plottr’s approach. I’m personally very glad there’s an Android app as well as Mac, Windows and iOS.
Pricing is reasonable and the standard package contains all of the features I’ve discussed, except for online storage and auto-syncing (but it works with Dropbox, OneDrive, etc). I’ll continue to use Plottr and I look forward to watching it develop.