The plan section is a plotter’s dream come true.

If you have imported a novel, the interface will be full of your chapters, however if you have started a new novel, it will be blank.

The plan section in Novelcrafter is a plotter’s dream come true. It allows you to organise your novel by adding acts and chapters. You can either create acts manually or choose from a preset outline, giving you endless options to structure your story.

Once your acts and chapters are in place, you can start adding scene synopses. If you have multiple scenes within a chapter, simply click the “new scene” button to add them. However, if you have only one scene, you can leave it as it is. Novelcrafter offers great flexibility in rearranging acts, chapters, and scenes, allowing you to fine-tune the flow of your story.

The default view when you start a story. You can view your story in sections, move around the chapters, and see additional tags that you have made. You can also see codex entries that are in each chapter, as the software recognises when a codex entry (or its aliases) is mentioned.

If you like to track every change in your novel, and monitor the progression of characters, then this is for you. In the matrix view you can sort by your codex entries, enabling you to see scenes a character or location is in, where subplots play a part, where codex additions appear in relation to other big moments, and pick custom entries.

You can swap the layout of these entries, and change them in the same way that you can in the grid view.

Additionally, if you want to track subplots, this can be done here.

You can find out more about the matrix here.

The outline view is perfect for those who want a clean, no-fuss interface that shows the story in a clear interface, focusing on the scene summaries.

From the grid and outline modes (in the plan interface) you can access the create from outline feature. Any plans that you do here are appended to the end of the novel.

This feature can be found at the bottom of the page.

Templates included (as of April 2024):

You are not limited to these templates, and can use your preferred plot template, provided you format it as shown in the example below.

This helpful tool will help you ensure that you have formatted your plot correctly. As you can see in the image below, this view is reminiscent of the import view, with larger headings for acts, smaller headings for chapters, and text for the summaries.

To further customize your outline, Novelcrafter provides an action menu. This menu enables you to enable or disable numeration, export or delete items, merge chapters, or split up acts. It’s all about giving you the freedom to mould your story exactly the way you envision it.

But that’s not all! Novelcrafter also allows you to set custom points of view for scenes, which is particularly useful if your story has multiple perspectives. You can even exclude scenes from being included in the AI, making it easy to include non-story related items such as appendices or forwards. To enhance the reading experience, Novelcrafter offers subtitles that can indicate the point of view, time skips, or any other relevant information you want to convey to your readers.

For the pantsers out there, Novelcrafter has got you covered too. You can use the AI to generate summaries for your chapters after you’ve written them. The AI can also review your chapters and detect any characters mentioned in them, making it a valuable tool for keeping track of your story’s elements.

You can now chat with your scene (as in, have the prose of a scene as the context for your chat). Clicking this will take you to the chat interface.

If a scene has content you’re worried about moderated models not liking, you can toggle the inclusion of the scene from the AI context here.

Here you can look at prior versions of the scene contents and scene summary. This feature ensures that you never lose any valuable content or regret any modifications made along the way.

You can recover an archived scene at the bottom of each chapter in the plan view, in the little folder icon.

Here, you can export the prose as a file, copy the scene prose (i.e. only the text, and not any beats), or archive the scene in order to replace or delete the chapter.

The view menu is where you can change the appearance of your novel in each of the three plan views. You can change the axis of the grid, the card width/height for visibility, and you can select if you want to see the auto-detected references or not.