Step 2: Plan your book
Four ways to get your story's structure down before you draft
A standalone Mac app — no other software required. A shared, selection-driven timeline shows which characters are active where, how relationships shift across the book, and how parallel subplots weave together — the kind of thing authors normally hold in their head or track in a separate spreadsheet. When you're done, export your chapter and scene synopses to a plain text file, or straight into Scrivener's own format if that's what you write in — nothing to retype.
Coming soon to the Mac App Store — not available to download yet.
A simple flowchart of your story's main beats (setup, inciting incident, rising action, midpoint, climax, resolution) gives you a structure to write toward.
Open the sample plot flowchart →A Gantt chart of drafting, revising, and publishing milestones turns "I should finish this someday" into an actual plan with dates.
Open the sample writing timeline →A Gantt chart isn't just for your writing schedule — it also works for tracking events inside the story itself: who knows what and when, how long a journey takes, which subplots are ticking along in parallel. Handy for spotting timeline contradictions before an editor (or a reader) does.
Open the sample story timeline →All three Roughout samples open fully editable — type over them with your own beats, dates, or events, then bookmark the page or use Roughout's Export/Print options to save a copy.
Once your plan is in place, move on to Step 3: Write your document.