Outline

The Outline is where you tell Story Bible about the structure of your story.

You can have Story Bible generate an outline for you based on your synopsis, genre, and characters, or you can bring your own outline entirely.

There are two ways to approach creating your Story Bible’s Outline: generating it all at once, or chapter-by-chapter.

To tell Story Bible to create a complete Outline, just click the Generate Outline button.

Alternatively, you can click the + Add button to add a single chapter to your outline at a time. Once you’ve done so, you can fill that chapter summary in manually or using the Fill This In… button. If you choose Fill This In… you’ll be presented with a Custom Instructions box, where you can optionally tell Sudowrite how you’d like that chapter to go. If you opt not to give any specific instructions, it will do its best based on the context available.

If the Outline that Sudowrite generated for you doesn’t match your vision, you can fix it by adding your notes to the Rewrite Outline box that appears. Click Go and Sudowrite will take another pass, rewriting the entire outline while incorporating your feedback. (You can get pretty specific with your feedback here!)

Meanwhile, if a specific chapter in your generated outline is almost there but still needs work, you can Rewrite a chapter by clicking into the text field containing the summary and selecting Rewrite. Just as with the full outline rewrite, you’ll be able to give specific instructions as to what needs to change (ex. “End in a cliffhanger”)

If your Outline looks great, or just needs a few manual edits, you can simply dismiss the Rewrite Outline box using the X in the upper righthand corner. The Rewrite Outline option will always remain available to you under the Outline section’s (•••) menu.

The (•••) menu also includes the Delete Outline option, in case you ever need to start over entirely.

Once you have a generated outline that you’re happy with, make sure the details match your vision for the story. Just as with every other section of the Story Bible, the more specific you are, the better yours results.

At any point in the Outlining process, you can also Add or generate individual chapter summaries. This can be helpful if you want to rework certain acts or extend your Outline. Click the + Add button and select Chapter to create a new blank summary field. You can also use the dropdown menu beneath the + Add button to choose where that will be created—it will default to “at the beginning,” and even if you don’t change that you can always rearrange chapter by clicking and dragging them into place.

Your chapters can be named anything you’d like—“Chapter 1, Epilogue, Scene” etc.

You’ll also notice that Acts are created when generating an outline, and an option also available under the + Add menu. Acts are like dividers that can be dragged to any point in the Outline to help you organize your outline and visualize the story at a high level. The can be named anything—“Part, Book, Episode, Section” etc.—whatever fits your process, and you don’t need them at all for the Outline to work.

You can delete Chapters or Acts using their respective (•••) menu. If you delete a chapter and want to get it back, you can do that through the History menu (the little Clock icon) in the Outline section header (next to + Add).

When you’re ready to start writing a chapter, click into that chapter’s (•••) menu and select Create [chapter name]. This will create a document that is linked to this chapter summary portion of your Outline, which allows Write, Chapter Generator, and other features know what to write. You’ll see a list of all the documents which are linked to this part of the outline in this (•••) menu as you write.

As you write your book, you’ll probably make changes to your chapters that stray from the original Outline you’d written or generated. You can easily update the linked portion of your Outline with one click by selecting “Update” from the (•••) menu in that chapter’s summary card.