Outlines

The Outline is the backbone of your manuscript. It's a tree of nodes (Books, Parts, Chapters, Sections, and Scenes) that both organizes your structure and holds the prose you write for each piece.

A project can have more than one outline (for example, a main manuscript plus a separate outline for notes or appendices).

Node types

Nodes carry a type that describes their role in the manuscript. Types guide both the visual tree and how content is treated when you publish:

• Book: the top-level division of a large work (used by the Trilogy template)
• Part: a grouping above chapters
• Section: a grouping used especially in non-fiction
• Chapter: the common mid-level division
• Scene: the leaf where prose usually lives

You aren't locked into a rigid hierarchy; you can nest nodes however your work needs.

Building and editing the tree

The outline tree editor lets you:

• Add child or sibling nodes
• Rename any node inline
• Reorder nodes to change their sequence
• Move / re-nest nodes to restructure
• Delete nodes you no longer need

Selecting a node opens its prose in The Editor. Right-clicking a node opens a context menu with quick actions, including jumping to Review Mode or Readability Analysis for that node and its children.

Status

Any outline or node can carry a status: To Do, In Progress, First Draft, Revised Draft, or Done. Click the status pill on a node in the tree, or in the Editor/Review Mode breadcrumb bar, to set or change it from a menu (including a "None" option to clear it). Status colors are shared across all your projects and can be customized in Settings.

Status is purely organizational: it doesn't affect publishing or word-count goals, it's just a way to see at a glance which parts of your manuscript are still drafts and which are done.

Word-count goals and progress

Any node, most usefully a Scene or Section, can carry a word-count goal. As you write, the outline shows your progress toward that goal so you can see at a glance where you're on target and where you're behind.

Goals roll up: a chapter's total reflects the words written across all of its scenes, making it easy to gauge pacing across the whole book. For a manuscript-wide picture, see Outline Analysis.

Outline metadata

Beyond its title, an outline can hold publishing metadata that flows into your exports:

• Subtitle
• Series and Volume
• Genre
• Tagline
• Summary and Description

Structure templates

When you create a project (or a new outline) you can start from a scaffold template: Novel, Novella, Short Story, Trilogy, or an empty fiction/non-fiction outline. See Getting Started for the full list. Every template's counts and word goals are editable before and after generation.

Plot / structure templates

Writers Notebook also includes pre-built story-structure templates you can use to lay out your narrative beats as a node tree:

Template	Structure
Snowflake	The 10-step Snowflake Method.
Three-Act	Setup / Confrontation / Resolution.
Hero's Journey	Campbell's 12 stages.
Save the Cat	Blake Snyder's 15 beats.
Custom	A blank slate you define yourself.

Each is fully editable; treat it as a starting point and shape it to your story.

How outlines are stored

Each outline's structure is one YAML file, and every node's prose is a separate Markdown file:

outlines/
  <outline-id>.yaml        # the node tree + metadata
  <outline-id>/
    <node-id>.md           # the prose for one node