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Outline and beats

A beat sheet in Scenaloom is a board of your story's key turns, each placed at the page where it should land; the outline is a rich-text document for treatments and act breakdowns. Both open from Outline in an episode's writing views.

Story, episode and the Episode Board

  • Episode Board (series only): every episode as a card, so you can see the run of a season and open any episode's outline.
  • Story: one outline for the whole project — the place for a treatment or a series overview.
  • This episode: the outline for the episode you are in. In a series, step through episodes with the arrows or type an episode number.
  • Beats: the beat board, shared across the project.

Writing the outline

The outline editor has Body, Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3 styles, bulleted and numbered lists, quotes, bold, italic and a horizontal rule. Switch between Write and Read to see how it reads. It saves after a pause, and if a collaborator changed the same outline, Scenaloom asks you to load their version first so neither of you overwrites the other.

Add beats from a story structure

  1. Open Outline and choose Beats.
  2. Set Target length in pages; it starts at 110.
  3. Open Start from a structure, choose Three-act structure, Fifteen-beat sheet or Hero's journey, and confirm with Use structure.
  4. Rename or delete beats, or add your own with Add. Each beat has a target page you can change.

Each structure places its beats at their usual share of the target length. The three-act structure has seven beats, from Opening image through Inciting incident, End of act one, Midpoint, Crisis and Climax to Resolution; at 110 pages the midpoint lands on page 55. The fifteen-beat sheet runs from Opening image and Theme stated to Finale and Final image. The hero's journey has twelve stages, from Ordinary world to Return with the elixir. If the board already has beats, Scenaloom asks before replacing them.

The story map above the script

Beats with a target page appear on the story map, the strip above the script. It shows where you are, where each beat should land and your target length; pages written past the target show in red, and a beat beyond the end of the draft is marked as ahead. Click a beat to jump to its page. Focus mode hides the map while you write.

Arrangement and Beats views

Arrangement lays the beats out as numbered cards against a page ruler, and Beats lists them in order. Both edit the same beats. Viewers can read the board but can't change it.

Export outlines and beat sheets

The download icon on the outline exports this episode's outline, every episode's or the story outline, as PDF, Word, plain text or Markdown. Choose Beat Sheet as the export target to export the beats the same way.