Outline
The Outline view is where your story takes shape. Before any prose is written, you define the hierarchical structure of your novel: Acts → Chapters → Scenes. Each scene gets a "beat" — a plain-language description of what needs to happen — which guides both you and the AI.
Why Outline First?
Beats are the foundation of everything Proseweave does. When you Generate a scene, the AI reads the beat as its primary instruction. A strong outline means better AI output, fewer rewrites, and a story that holds together structurally. The time you invest in beats pays off many times over during drafting.
Story Structure
Every Proseweave project follows the same hierarchy:
Project
└── Act 1
└── Chapter 1
├── Scene 1 (beat: "...")
└── Scene 2 (beat: "...")
└── Act 2
└── ...
Use the + buttons at each level to add acts, chapters, and scenes. Items can be reordered by dragging the handle on the left edge of each row.
Scene Beats
A beat is the most important field in a scene. Write it before you write any prose:
"Elena discovers the locked journal in the lighthouse attic. She recognizes her mother's handwriting on the cover and feels a surge of grief and curiosity."
A good beat answers: What happens, and why does it matter? Beats are used by the AI as the primary instruction when generating or continuing scene prose.
"Something happens at the lighthouse" will produce generic prose. "Elena discovers the journal, reads the first entry, and finds a date that makes no sense — 1987, the year her mother died" will produce a focused, emotionally grounded scene. The more specific your beat, the better your generated prose. See Improving AI Output for more guidance.
Act summaries, chapter summaries, and scene beats all support rich text editing — bold, italic, bullet lists, and numbered lists. Use the formatting toolbar to structure multi-part beats or layered summaries. Formatted content appears in the outline read-only view; HTML tags are stripped before being sent to the AI.
Scene Status
Every scene has a status that tracks its progress through your writing process:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Outline | Beat defined, no prose written yet |
| Draft | First pass of prose exists |
| Revision | Being refined and polished |
| Final | Complete, ready for export |
Click the status badge on any scene to cycle it forward. Use the status filter in Export to include only scenes at a given stage. For a full revision workflow using these statuses, see Revising Your Draft.
Drag & Drop Reordering
Grab the drag handle (⠿) on the left side of any act, chapter, or scene row and drop it into the desired position. Scenes can be moved between chapters, and chapters between acts. Order updates are saved automatically.
AI Outline Features
The Outline view has several AI-powered planning tools to help you build your structure faster. Each tool deducts credits based on your selected AI model.
Expand Outline
Select an act and click Expand Outline. The AI reads the act's summary and generates detailed scene beats for each chapter — turning a high-level plan into a scene-by-scene roadmap.
When to use it: You've written act and chapter summaries and want the AI to propose scene-level beats. This is the fastest way to go from a rough structure to a detailed outline.
Suggest Act Summary
For an act with chapters and scenes already defined, click Suggest Summary. The AI reads the existing content and writes a concise act summary.
When to use it: You've built your scenes bottom-up and want the AI to synthesize an act summary from what's already there.
Suggest Scene Beats
Select a chapter and click Suggest Beats. The AI proposes beat descriptions for scenes in that chapter based on the chapter summary and surrounding context.
When to use it: You know what a chapter needs to accomplish but haven't broken it into individual scenes yet.
Batch Operations
Select multiple scenes using the checkboxes on the left, then use the batch action bar that appears at the bottom of the screen:
- Update Status — Move all selected scenes to a new status at once.
- Batch Rewrite — Trigger an AI rewrite across all selected scenes with a shared instruction.
Use batch status updates when you've finished a sprint of writing and want to advance several scenes from "draft" to "revision" in one action.
Text Size
Use the text size toggle (Aa icon) in the Outline header to cycle between three sizes: Small, Medium (default), and Large. Your preference is saved automatically.
Next Steps
- Chapters & Scenes — target word counts, scene limits, and navigation
- Manuscript — start writing prose for your outlined scenes
- Story Bible — add characters, settings, and themes before generating
- Guided Buildout — let AI help you build an outline from scratch through conversation