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.

Do you need arcs?

Not every show does, and being walked through timeline steps you have no use for is a waste of your time. Your project settings carry a single two-way answer, Timeline arcs, on the Story card -- the pipeline asks for it early, alongside your series format.

Choose Use when your episodes have an order, when characters change across them, or when you plant something now that pays off later. A serial drama, a season-long mystery, anything where watching out of order would spoil something.

Choose Don't use when every episode stands alone -- two characters doing a series of skits, a how-to show, a sketch or anthology series. Nothing carries over, so there is nothing to lay on a timeline.

Don't use removes every arc and swimlane step from your production pipeline: seasons, world-building events, character arc beats, location and prop state changes, relationship tracks, and placing each episode on the timeline. They stop appearing in your plan, the guide stops raising them, and they no longer count against your progress. This page stays exactly where it is if you want to use it anyway, and switching back to Use brings every step back with whatever progress you had already made on it.

That answer is about the whole show. Each individual step also has its own Don't create button, for when you use arcs generally but not that particular track.

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
• Collapse a swimlane to a single row with the chevron on its header, when you want it out of the way without deleting it

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, click Create when the guide bar offers to make one for you, 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.

Every step that asks for a swimlane offers the same pair of answers -- Create, or Don't create. Declining is a real answer, recorded as a deliberate skip rather than as work left undone, and it ends that step: you are not asked again for the arcs that swimlane would have held.

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 arc's dialog, where you can change its name and description or delete it. The same click selects the arc in the Arc Details panel to the right of the timeline, which reads back its name, description, and the episode and percentage its start and end land on.

The Arc Details panel is read-only; the divider between it and the timeline can be dragged to give either side more room.

Zoom

A zoom slider at the foot of the timeline, with a zoom-out and a zoom-in button either side of it, controls how many episode columns are in view, so you can work comfortably with large episode counts. The mouse wheel zooms as well, keeping the episode under the cursor where it is.