Rolling story planning
How the compass, volumes, arcs and chapter plans fit together — and what happens when you apply one.
The three horizons
Open a project in Plan mode and you get a compass at the top: the endgame direction, the active long lines, and a target chapter count. This is the part you set once and revisit rarely.
Below it sit volumes — large movements of the story — each holding arcs. An arc has a goal, an estimated chapter count, and eventually a chapter plan.
Generating a plan
Pick an arc and generate. The model sees the compass, the arcs already written, the codex entries relevant to this stretch, and whatever framework you selected. What comes back is a candidate, not a change: chapters with titles, summaries and beats, sitting in the panel waiting for you.
You can draw alternatives for a single chapter, revise a candidate with an instruction, or discard the lot. None of this touches your manuscript — the frozen rule is that only apply writes.
Applying
Applying a chapter plan appends chapters to the target book. It is append-only, which is why an empty placeholder chapter would sort ahead of everything the AI produced — new projects are seeded with a book but no chapters for exactly this reason.
When applying, you choose a state sync mode:
- Confirmed — state changes implied by the plan (a character loses something, a city falls) are written as codex state notes anchored to the new scene.
- Skip — nothing is written to the codex.
Confirmed is the right default while drafting forward. Skip is for replanning a stretch you have already written, where the state notes already exist.
When readers push back
Rewrite the arc, not the outline. The compass usually survives; the chapter plan for the next stretch is cheap to regenerate. That asymmetry is the whole point of keeping them separate.