Story Arcs

Story Arcs is a project view that visualises the narrative structure of your series as a swimlane timeline. It shows which story threads span which episodes, and lets you plan and adjust arcs across the whole series.

Layout

• X-axis -- episodes (columns). Each column can be bound to an episode.
• Y-axis -- swimlanes (rows). Each swimlane is a story category or track (e.g. "Main Plot", "Character A arc", "World-building thread").

Swimlanes

Swimlanes organise arcs into groups. You can:

• Create swimlanes above or below existing ones
• Rename and delete swimlanes
• Resize swimlane height by dragging the bottom edge
• Reorder swimlanes by dragging their headers

A new project starts with no swimlanes -- an empty timeline is a valid state, and none are created for you. There are three ways to add the first one: click the small + on the left edge of the timeline, answer Yes when the guide bar asks whether you want to plan for multiple seasons, or ask the assistant in chat. Each swimlane takes a colour, which its arcs inherit. You can delete every swimlane and go back to an empty timeline.

Drawing an arc

There is no "new arc" button. You create an arc by dragging: press inside a swimlane at the episode where the storyline should start, drag sideways to where it should end, and release. A dialog then asks for the arc's name and an optional description.

Once drawn, an arc can be moved, and its start and end dragged, to change which episodes it spans.

Episode columns

Columns are bound to episodes in your episode list (or left as empty slots). Click a column header to assign or clear an episode. The column shows the episode title (truncated with tooltip if long).

Use the + buttons to insert or delete columns and to reorder them.

Creating arcs

Drag across columns within a swimlane to create an arc. On release, a dialog opens to set the arc name and description.

An arc's start and end are expressed as episode positions with percentages (e.g. starts at 30% into episode 2, ends at 70% into episode 5). This allows arcs to begin and end mid-episode rather than at episode boundaries.

Editing arcs

• Resize -- drag the handles at either end of an arc to extend or shorten it
• Move -- drag the middle of the arc to shift it (the width is preserved)
• Edit -- click (press and release without dragging) to open the ArcCard dialog for name and description changes

Zoom

A column-width slider controls the zoom level so you can work comfortably with large episode counts.