This page covers planning a book: the Manuscript's three views, plans for the book, its chapters and its scenes, moving things around, the rounds of work a book goes through, goals, the Timeline, point of view, ideas, and writing several books in one world. None of it imposes a story shape: what to plan, and how much, is yours.
The Manuscript: Outline, Plot and Cards
Choose Manuscript in the menu. It shows the open book three ways, switched at the top:
- Outline: every chapter and scene in reading order, each with its plan.
- Plot: the same book left to right, with how long each scene is, how intense you say it is, and which threads it carries.
- Cards: every scene as an index card, to decide what to work on.
The column on the left lists the book's contents. Its first row, Book, opens the book's own page: its title, author name, plan, store details and cover. Under the chapters, In no chapter yet holds scenes set aside: they stay in Write mode but are left out of exports and shared copies.
All three views add, move and remove scenes the same way, and click a scene's title to open its page.
Plan the book, its chapters and its scenes
A plan is a note to yourself: what should happen, and what it is for. Plans are never exported and never shown to readers.
- A scene's plan is the box under its title on the Outline, the Plot and its own page. In Write mode it sits beside the text (see Writing).
- A chapter's plan is the box under the chapter's title.
- The book's plan is "What this book is" on the Book page: the premise, where it sits in a series, what it is for.
Plans save as you type. A name typed in a plan stays plain words; MechaSquid notes which pages a plan names, so they show as related, without rewriting your plan.
Chapters and books hold no text of their own: the book's text is its scenes. A chapter's page lists its scenes instead, written or planned, with their plans and lengths.
Add planned scenes
Plotting is adding scenes that are not written yet. Choose + Scene, or + scene here between two scenes, and a card opens with "Scene title (optional)" and "What happens, and what is it for?". Type a title, a plan or both. Enter saves it and opens the next card, so you can plot a run of scenes in one go; Esc stops. A scene with only a plan gets a working title from it.
+ Chapter adds a chapter, typed in place.
A scene with no text is a planned scene. It is drawn hollow everywhere, and filled once it has words. In Write mode a planned scene shows its plan where its text will go.
Move scenes and chapters
Drag a scene to another place, into another chapter, onto "new chapter", or down to In no chapter yet to set it aside. Drag a chapter's title to reorder chapters. Dragging works on the Outline, the Plot, the Cards and Write mode's Contents.
Without dragging, which suits a keyboard or a touch screen, choose Move beside a scene or chapter: Up one and Down one move it a place (over a chapter's edge if needed), and a scene can go to the end of any chapter or into no chapter yet.
Rename and Remove appear when you point at a scene or a chapter. Something empty goes to the trash at once, with Undo in the message that follows. Anything else asks first, and the default loses nothing: a scene leaves its chapter, a chapter goes and its scenes stay. A tick moves it to the trash instead, a chapter with its scenes together, where it waits 30 days (The story bible).
The Plot view: intensity, beats and threads
Plot lays the book out as the reader meets it, one column per scene. Under each scene:
- Its plan, and its length in words.
- Its intensity: click one of the five bars to say how intense the scene is, in whatever sense you mean. Click the same bar again to clear it. MechaSquid does not judge it: a run of calm scenes may be exactly right.
- Its beat: a turning point in your own words, typed in the box under the title ("Midpoint", "First snow").
- Its point of view, with a mark where it changes.
Under that is one row per plot thread. A plot thread is a wiki page of the kind "plot thread"; + Thread makes one. A scene that links to a thread fills its box by itself; click any box to say in a few words what happens to the thread there. Characters as rows shows characters instead.
Cards: decide what to work on
Cards shows every scene as an index card, a row per chapter: what it is for (its plan, else its summary), whose point of view, how long, where it stands in this round, how you feel about it, and badges for readers' comments, flags and ideas.
The filters dim everything else, so the shape of the book stays in view: Not accepted yet, Angry or meh, No face yet, Reader comments.
Select a card by clicking it, or move between cards with the arrow keys. Then press A to accept it in this round (again takes it back), or 1 to 5 for how you feel about it, angry to happy (the same number again clears).
To work on several at once, ⌘-click on a Mac (Ctrl-click on Windows and Linux) to add a card to the selection, or Shift-click to select a run; on a touch screen, choose Select first, then tap. A bar at the bottom then offers what applies to all of them: add or remove a label, Move to chapter…, Accept, the five faces, and Move to the trash…. A and 1 to 5 act on all the selected cards. Esc clears the selection. The Outline's scenes select the same way.
Rounds and accepting scenes
A book is worked on in rounds: the first draft, a revision, a pass after beta readers. The Overview's Where the book is names the round you are in and how many scenes you have accepted in it.
Accepting a scene means "done for this round". Accept the scene you are in from Write mode's header or its page, a card with A, or press ⌥⌘A on a Mac (Ctrl+Alt+A on Windows and Linux). If you change an accepted scene afterwards, it shows as "changed since accepted", so you know to look at it again.
Click the round's name to rename it. When you begin another pass, choose Start with the next round's name (for example Start Revision 1): every scene then waits to be accepted again, and nothing in the text changes. When the book is finished, Publish this book → leads to the Publish page; publishing locks the book's chapters and scenes (comments still work), and Start a new edition unlocks it. Publishing is explained in the publishing guide.
How you feel about a scene
Five faces, from angry to happy, say how you feel about a scene: a feeling, never a decision. A face does not accept a scene, and accepting does not need one. Choose one beside the scene's name in Write mode, on its page or its card, or press ⌥⌘1 to ⌥⌘5 on a Mac (Ctrl+Alt+1 to Ctrl+Alt+5 on Windows and Linux); the same key again clears it. The Overview counts the scenes you are angry or meh about, and the Cards filter finds them.
Goals and milestones
Goals are a date for the finished book and milestones before it, not a streak to keep. On the Overview, choose Set a goal, then the date the book should be finished by, your writing days, and the milestones:
- Plot: a number of scenes with a plan.
- Draft: the book's words.
- Revise: every scene accepted in this round.
- Custom: anything you tick yourself ("Send to beta readers").
The current milestone is the first one not done; reaching its number marks it done by itself, and Mark done marks any of them. Today's share is what is left of the milestone spread over the writing days left, so a missed day is spread out, never owed. In Write mode, the line under the header fills with today's words against today's share of a draft milestone.
Only words you type count towards a draft milestone; pasted text and text your AI assistant writes do not (see Writing).
Pause hides the daily number while you take a break. Resume moves every open milestone by the days paused; the final date stays, and the Overview says so when the milestones no longer fit before it.
The Timeline
Timeline, in the World part of the menu, shows scenes and events in the order they happen in the story, which may differ from the order the book tells them. Rows at the same moment happen at the same time.
- Drag a row onto a moment to make it happen then, or into the gap between two moments to open a new one.
- Without dragging, Move on a row has Earlier, Later and "at the same moment as" another. A row with no place yet has Place.
- To say when something happens in words ("Three years later", "The night of the fire"), click its label, or + when, and type. The same label can be edited on the Outline, the Plot, the Cards and in Write mode's header. There is no calendar: the words are yours, and the order comes from where you put the row.
- A scene you have not placed is shown where the book reads it, marked "as read", so an undated book has a timeline at once. Scenes in no chapter wait in the list beside it.
- An event is something that happens in the world rather than in a scene: backstory, the war around the story. + Event adds one. Events are drawn as diamonds, scenes as dots.
- A scene the book tells after one it happens before, a flashback, is marked ↶ wherever its "when" shows.
The filters show one book or follow one page.
Point of view
Under a scene's or chapter's title, its point of view says how it is told: first person, third person limited, third person omniscient or second person, and for first person and limited, through whose eyes. Click it to choose. A scene with nothing set follows its chapter, then the book; the book's own is set on the Book page. The Plot view shows where the point of view changes. MechaSquid shows it and never judges it.
Ideas
An idea is a thought caught before it goes, kept as a page of its own. Ideas, in the World part of the menu, lists them: open ones first, used ones and ones you are not using folded underneath.
An idea is about whatever it links to. Link names in it as in any text, and the idea then comes to you where it applies: on those pages' right panel under Ideas, in Write mode's Look up for the scene you are writing, and as a badge on Cards and Outline rows.
To take an idea somewhere, open it:
- Plan a scene makes a new planned scene, with the idea as its plan, at the end of a chapter you choose or in no chapter yet.
- Add to a plan adds it to a chapter's or a scene's plan.
- Make it a page turns it into a character, place, group, thing, event, lore or plot thread.
- Done and Not using it close it. Open it again reopens one. Nothing is deleted, and a used idea remembers where it went.
Capture an idea from anywhere
Press ⌥⌘N on a Mac (Ctrl+Alt+N on Windows and Linux) on any page of the book, or choose "Capture an idea" in Go to, or + Idea in a page's right panel. A box opens over the page. Words you had selected go in quoted, with a link back to where they came from. The first line becomes the title. Choose Save idea, or press ⌘↩ (Ctrl+Enter).
Several books in one world
A world can hold several books: a series, a prequel, a spin-off. They share one wiki, one Atlas and one Timeline, while each has its own chapters, scenes, goals and rounds.
To start another book, choose + book beside "Book" in the menu and type its title. What you have written so far becomes the first book, named after the world. To bring in a draft you already have as another book, choose import beside it.
With two books or more, a switcher under "Book" chooses the open book. Write mode, the Manuscript, goals and export work on the open book; the Wiki, the Graph, the Timeline (which can filter by book) and Ideas cover the whole world. A published book is marked in the switcher and its chapters and scenes are locked.