Arcs & beats
The structure beneath the chapters. Plan the shape of the story, loosely or in detail.
Some writers outline to the scene; others keep a loose sense of shape and discover the rest. The Plan view supports both by letting you sketch the story as arcs and beats, as much or as little structure as you want.
The Plan view
Plan sits alongside the manuscript rather than inside it, so structure and prose stay separate but a click apart. Nothing here forces a method on you; it is a place to think about shape.
Arcs
An arc is a thread that runs across the story: a character’s journey, a mystery, a romance, a war. Arcs give you the big movements of the book to hang everything else on.
Beats
A beat is a single planned moment within an arc: the inciting incident, the betrayal, the reunion. Beats break an arc into the events that carry it, so you can see whether the shape holds before you have written a word of it.
Linking beats to the story
Beats connect to the rest of the workspace: tie a beat to the Atlas entities it involves, and use it as a target when you draft with AI, so a drafted passage aims at the moment you actually planned.