Pictured: plot arcs. Each blue dot is a story beat,
and the gray links show the chain of events.

PlotSimmer

Mind-mapping tools for storytellers

Overview

PlotSimmer is a web app that helps writers tackle big, complex stories. It does so by transforming a manuscript from a wall of text into a landscape of ideas, full of cliffhangers, character arcs, and hairpin plot twists.

Here's the blueprint:

Workflow

Prototypes

Tracking Beatsheet Newsfeed

If you annotate dialogue and story beats, you can track the story's evolution visually, while hierarchically organizing the narrative lets you understand what's taking up the most focus.

*Still in early development, excuse the programmer art.

ORIGIN STORY

The map is not the territory.

Writers are suspicious of tools, because writing is hard. So unavoidably hard, in fact, that tools cannot exist. If they did, it wouldn't be so unavoidable any more. (And we may secretly like it better this way.)

So in the 1990s, when a digital genie came in the form of the desktop computer to grant us all three wishes, we writers put up our hands to request: soft copies and spell-check, please, and maybe some rich text if you're feeling generous.

Then we went back to telling ourselves that the only thing that counts is getting words on the page.

But the story is the thing, and the words on the page are not that. A first draft is just a map, describing (in agonizing detail) one path through the story's possibility space. Borges wrote about a map so vast it blanketed an empire at 1:1 scale. Imagine how useless that would be: at that resolution, plotting a journey and taking it would require the same amount of legwork.

Drafting as bushwhacking: write until you find the end.

Surveying the story: don't pull one thread, cover ground.

The map is not the map.

I properly planned out my last novel in advance, of course, using state of the art technology: I took a stack of 3x5 notecards and filled them up. I remember how excessive it felt at the time. All those cards in my hand had real heft. I had this thing wired.

The other day, I sat down and laid them all out. My coffee table could just barely fit them, and even years later, knowing the outcome... it still looked plausible. But I wanted to test it.

Test #1

I took away everything but the scenes that made the final draft.

Test #2

I figured out which parts of the story these scenes covered.

After seeing that, I decided to try and build something better.

Follow along

Read the devlog