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How to Outline in Bookshaper

Build your outline in Cards; let the AI read it back as a Narrative Outline

Outlining is free — start in Cards

There are two outline-related surfaces in Bookshaper, and it's worth knowing which is which up front: you build your outline in the Cards view, and the AI reads it back to you as the Narrative Outline. Cards is available on every plan — outlining your manuscript never requires a subscription.

Open Cards from the Structure section of the sidebar. It's a visual board of your manuscript where you create parts, chapters, and scenes and drag them into the order you want. Whether you outline top-down before drafting or capture scenes as they come and arrange them afterward, Cards is where the structure lives and where you change it.

  • Add parts, chapters, and scenes, and give each a synopsis
  • Drag to reorder and to move chapters and scenes between parents
  • Split, merge, and delete — with snapshots so nothing is lost

Let the AI read your outline back: the Narrative Outline

Once you've run analysis, the Narrative Outline (in the Insights section) gives you a top-down, AI-derived read of the manuscript you built. It's a Pro feature, and it's read-only by design — it reports the shape your writing takes rather than being a place to edit structure.

For each chapter it pulls together an AI summary, the chapter's pacing, the narrative beats detected across its scenes, and peak tension — then flags manuscript-level structural gaps, such as a missing turning point or climax. Re-run analysis after revising and the outline refreshes to match.

Build and rearrange in Cards (every plan); use the Narrative Outline (Pro) to see what your structure actually delivers. To change anything the Narrative Outline surfaces, head back to Cards.

Which one should I use?

  • Planning or reshaping your story → Cards. It's the only place that edits structure, and it's free.
  • Checking whether your structure holds up after a draft or revision → Narrative Outline, alongside the dashboards.
  • If you think in terms of "outlining," that's Cards — the Narrative Outline is the AI's reading of it, not the only way to outline.

Related guides

Reading Your Dashboards

Making sense of your manuscript analytics

The Revision Workflow

A complete start-to-finish revision process

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