Tabularia compared with Plottr

The second application

Plottr is a plotting application built around a visual timeline. It keeps a series bible for a long project as well, and its catalog of templates gives a writer who does not yet know the shape of their story somewhere to start.

What it does not do is hold the prose. You plot in Plottr, then draft in Scrivener or Word or wherever else, and the two stay in step because you keep them in step.

In Tabularia the timeline and the manuscript are one application. Timelines hold as many strands as your project needs, one for the plot and another for each character worth following, and every marker on them is anchored to a passage in the prose. Clicking a beat scrolls the manuscript to the paragraph that carries it. Each anchor carries its own note, sitting on the moment it marks, so the reason a beat matters is written where you will be reading when it becomes relevant.

What happens after the outline

An outline is most useful during revision, when you are trying to work out why the middle sags or where a promise went unpaid — and that is exactly when a plan and a manuscript kept in separate applications have drifted furthest apart.

Because each Tabularia marker is fastened to a specific passage rather than stored as a card about it, the timeline stays accurate through a rewrite without maintenance. Reading one strand on its own shows you what that thread does in the draft as it currently stands.

Laying the plan down is quicker than it sounds, and there are three ways in. A story shape seeds Acts, Chapters, and beats in one step. The Outline builds structure a row at a time and reorders it by dragging, with the prose following. And the plus on a timeline-drawer lane asks how many Chapters or beats you want and puts them all down at once — Plottr's grid, roughly, except that every card it makes is already a place in the book.

A thread can also become the workspace. Pin a timeline as your Working Scope — or pin the outline as your filters have left it — and the canvas, the search and the word counts all narrow to the passages on it. What you are left with is every scene that pays off one promise, or carries one character, and the rest of the book stays out of the way until you widen again. That is a plotting board you can write in.

Why to switch

Plottr plans in detail before a word is written, in a separate application, with a larger catalog of outlining templates. That separation is the design: a Plottr card is a plan for a scene rather than the scene, so moving one changes the plan and nothing else, where moving an anchor in Tabularia moves the passage it marks. Plottr sells the desktop application outright; Tabularia's plotting is part of the writing application, on the same page as the prose.

Switch if you would rather not run two applications, or if your plotting matters most during revision, when you need to get from the plan to the page and back without hunting. A beat selected in the drawer takes the page to its sentence, and the arrows beside it step along that strand to the next one. The Sheets that stand in for a series bible open beside the page, and the whole series can live in one manuscript or each book in a project of its own. The page stays quick however long the series runs. Tabularia ships twenty story shapes for books, from the Three-Act and the Hero's Journey to outlines for memoir and a book proposal, and puts them somewhere different: the Acts and Chapters arrive in the manuscript you are about to write, each named for the beat it opens on, and the beats land as anchors spread through the prose. The application you would otherwise be drafting in is already here, and it typesets the page as a book while you write.

From a Plottr outline to a manuscript

Plottr's Export button, on the Timeline or the Outline, writes a Word file. It holds the outline and, after it, sections for your notes, characters, and places.

Import that file and the outline's headings become the manuscript's structure, ready to be written into. The character and place sections are better as reference than as prose: copy them into Sheets and delete them from the page. If you draft in Scrivener from Plottr today, import the .scriv instead and you keep the prose too.