How It Works

Overview

Drivers are the Characters, Arcs, Themes, Setting, and Events of your story. They are not passive element that just show up in the story. They proactively drive the stories structure through Beats and Relationships.

Beats are actions that move the story forward. Focus on what critical information is revealed instead of simply describing what happened. And add Drivers to Beats to specify who is driving the action.

Relationships capture the relationships between Story Elements that are consistent throughout the story. Describe familial relationships, how the setting influences a character's mental state, or even how a motif feeds into a theme.

Drivers

In the Visualization, you can see the overall structure of the story. The size of the nodes is based on the number of Beats it drives.

Click on the element to quickly access the element card. Select an element to connect it to, then describe the relationship.

From one writer to another

Outlining Tip #1

Connecting Characters to Events or TSMs with Drivers is the quickest way to add depth to their personality. Be mindful of the key aspects of society that shaped the environment the characters grew up in. It may be details about how social status is structured, what growing up in a rural town was like, or how magic made life easy for them. The trick is to capture how these different elements affect the character, and dive deeper into their opinions on it. A character will be in harmony with certain things and in direct contrast to others. These nuances will make them come alive on the page.

Beats

Define an elements’s development by creating Beats, dragging them into the Chapters where they take place. Reorder the Beats to explore new ways to approach your element's development.

Add Drivers to Beats

Specify which other elements drive each Beat. Remember that your protagonist should be driving most of your Beats.

Chapter Planner

The chapter planner is where you plan your Chapters by adding Beats to them. Reorganize chapters or move Beats to different Chapters to test out a different flow of your story.

Click the name of your Chapter to get to the Text Editor.

Story Elements

Arcs

Move a situation forward in a specific order. Often a question is posed such as, "Will the main character achieve their goal despite a particular challenge?" Or a problem is presented and the implied question is, "Will the Main Character resolve the problem despite a particular challenge?"

Characters

The force that drives the story, and why the reader is emotionally engaged. Main characters also have an internal growth arc that progresses forward in a specific order. It's important to remember that characters grow by living through and making decisions along arcs. If you don't know how characters will react to the events of your story, then it is difficult to know how they will grow and change.

Events

Events are best used for capturing larger moments that take place in the story. For example, it could be a festival, tournament, wedding, an important backstory event, or the idea of a scene that you want to capture before you know how it fits into the overall story.

TS&M

Themes, settings, motifs

These are concepts that are consistent throughout the story, whether it is the world bible, a theme of "love conquers all", or symbolic imagery that repeats throughout the story.

Chapter

Chapters are where the story takes place, and the way that the story is divided or organized.

Create as many of these elements as you need. They don't need to be fully fleshed out when you just starting to outline. We recommend starting with the elements you are the most excited about, the reason you are writing this story.

From one writer to another

Outlining Tip #2

As you think about your story, you have to decide where to begin the outlining process. Start with the Story Element that is most prominent in your mind's eye or the big question of your story. Outlining this one thing first will give your story a backbone for the other Story Elements to follow. Then repeat the outlining process for all the elements you have created. If you haven't already, combine the different actions that happen in each arc into the summary for each chapter. As you move from chapter to chapter focus on how the Beats fit together vs just listing the different plot points. You should be able to read the summary as a cohesive snippet. Keep in mind that these summaries do not need to be perfect as they will likely change as you iterate over the story, but they will set a strong foundation for the narrative.

Notes

The Notes tab is in the right panel, you will find all the Notes you have created. If you enter a single Story Element, you will only see the Notes that are linked to that Story Element.

You can also create a new Note inside any Story Element’s visualization, and it'll be automatically linked to it. You can also link the new Note to another element.

Learn More

Check out Learn With Lynit for more resources on how to improve your craft and outline skills.

Writing is a process. It is iterative by nature. Remember to have patience with yourself as you write, rewrite, learn, and adapt. We’ve all been through it, but now Lynit is here to be a companion along the way.